Cambridge UK is an excellent example on this. Compare public transport between Cambridge and Oxford and you quickly know how to / not to do public transport.
Addenbrooks is a huge new Bio-Medical Centre adjacent to Cambridge, probably comparable to Silicon Valley companies in the kind of employees it attracts. It was developed with public infrastructure in mind and I promise rich people travel on that infrastructure unless they use to adjacent, safe cycling route!
I know the score! But have had lovely encounters (and also less so lovely) on London Buses!
Am in Berlin atm and let me tell you London travel is an outright carnival in comparison!
Is there a reason the company and the transit authority can not cooperate and create an express route at specific times of day? Same deal you mention: Key stops, straight to workplace. Corporation agrees that any paying passenger is allowed to board, not just employees. Employees don’t pay, everyone else pays the regular rate. Corporation pays the difference between paying passengers and full occupancy of the bus on every run.
When I lived in a (non-Silicon Valley) tech hub, the local transit authority would test proposed routes with a “Bus Plus”. It would create a temporary route and, if the demand was there, make the route permanent. I’ve also ridden plenty of express busses that were serving as rapid links between major destinations: Multiple points along the Toronto subway line and the airport, for example. The latter was good enough to compete with Uber or city taxi transport times, for a tenth of the price. I’ve also seen plenty of “rush hour only” bus service schedules. What reason am I missing for something similar not being possible in San Fran?
One thing that most of the cost-of-housing complaints here have in common is the assumption that there are only a half-dozen cities in the United States worth living in, so if living in those cities is unaffordable, it means that Life Itself is unaffordable.
These people have no intention of living in Houston, let alone someplace like Tulsa, no matter how good the job market is and how low the cost of living is in those places. Better to be a barista on the Bay than a management trainee in Tulsa.
Exactly who is the “ridership” you’re taking about here, and why would they necssariliy destroy nice buses??
Better to serve in Heaven than rule in Hell? 
…and the fact that another boingboing writer has already posted the same article 
I think the complaining is part of ‘living comfortably’ for those people. 
I think you mean public transit is crumbing everwhere in the USA. The EU and China seem to be making significant investments
Public buses doing an express route to the Google campus when many other parts of the city are under-served by transit.
I suspect that would be even more controversial than private buses.
Any rider who isn’t an employee of the company who owns the bus and who will hold them personally accountable for damage and poor behaviour. In the rest of the quote (that you cut off) I tried to be very clear about that. It’s not about class, it’s about that particular relationship.
/puts in earphones, shuffles to opposite end of bus stop seat.
Maybe not, if the profits from this private-public partnership are used to support other, less profitable (but no less essential) routes. I mean, that’s the ideal of a public-private partnership, after all.
Most co-work spaces have a “hot-seat” common area, where you pay by the day or hour. You can also rent out a desk or office on a monthly basis that gives more privacy.
In addition to that they have conference rooms and telephone booths where you can video chat with privacy. It’d be annoying if everyone was taking calls in the common area. Even if we did hear, honestly most wouldn’t care. Folks hear boring shop talk all the time when they don’t want to, for example waiting in line for coffee in SF or riding the BART back home and no one really has interest in it.
How does that work? Are there people working for bigger firms or it is all small/independents for whom company gossip leaking out isn’t such a concern?
It depends. Some small companies may rent out semi-permanent space, since leasing is very difficult to do correctly for a growing company. By the time they find a place, they’ve usually already outgrown it. I imagine there are some freelancers. The one in my area also caters to artists, so it’s not just tech folks.
Because the IT folk where I used to work didn’t have enough office space kept getting moved out by engineers who needed our current spots and via re-orgs we didn’t sit next to each other or even in the same site we all were eventually told to telecommute full time. Group chats work wonders and we still had a weekly face to face staff. Then after going to the outsource company my coworkers were all over North America. It still worked fine just IM and cell phone also being able to start the day with a cup of joe and firing up the VPN in my jammies was quite nice.
But then they couldn’t avoid building and maintaining a lot of boring infrastructure!
Oh, yeah, how right you are. It would almost be like paying tax.
Every white trash dumbfuck in my midwestern town: “What do you mean you don’t want to be surrounded by a bunch of bigots, religious nutters, rightwing shitheads, and other assorted assholes whose idea of culture is going to a football game, and also have no jobs available except industries you have a huge moral aversion to participating in or Walmart? Heh, guess you just want to have a high rent. I pay six farthings and a nickle for six bedroom house. Sure the meth lab next door burnt down the garage, but it’s still a steal! I even got a great job at the local warehouse, it pays almost $12 an hour! And I get all the overtime I want! Well, it’s mandatory, but still I want the extra money so it’s cool.”
Come on now, why are you bashing on Real Americans™ instead of the atheist lefty urban commies who are bent on destroying the country’s bootstrapping capitalist spirit with their (((alien))) ideas?
According to one of the Infernal Managers I know, one of the worst things about Hell is how so many of its inmates go on and on about how much better and more authentic and “real” it is than Heaven. They bring up the low cost of the local housing a lot and strenuously avoid thinking about the reasons that demand might be so much higher than supply in Heaven.
Not a bro. But I do work for one of these companies, and this does really suck. I could hop in my car and drive down 280 and add to that traffic but the point of the buses is to take cars off the road. BTW, you don’t have to work while you’re on the bus - we’re not chained to the oars, people. But most folks do work on the bus, at least on the way to work, and in my group at least, that is something your team usually recognizes so it’s not on top of your regular work. I should remind the thread: we’re salaried and not hourly, so if you have to work, work. If you don’t, don’t: watch American Vandal on your phone or take a nap or read a book or just look out the window.
Also, please note that there isn’t a lot of housing in the Peninsula so for many of us, and for reasons outside our control (and even our companies’ control as shocking at that is (NIMBY’ism is a hell of a drug)), it’s cheaper to live in SF and commute down. Not sure why this hate is directed at us employees who are the ones suffering a crazy-long commute these days. Whoever is doing this is going after literally the folks with the least amount of power over whatever issue they’re grappling with. Good job.
As I mentioned elsewhere on this thread, I ride one of these buses. Also, not a bro. While majority of riders are men, women are never less than 1/3. Also, not sure why you want to encourage people driving their cars and clogging up freeways and using up gas. And it’s not another “free” 45 minutes of work. We’re not hourly. We’re salaried. If we’re done working for the day, we’re done working for the day but are now stuck on a bus.
