
Buses for Tech Workers in San Francisco Will Pay Fee - brnstz
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/22/technology/buses-for-tech-workers-in-san-francisco-will-pay-fee.html
======
girvo
As someone in an entirely different country (and lives in a state where
they've decided a 30% increase in public transport prices every year is
acceptable and not idiotic...) can someone explain to me _why_ there is such a
fuss around companies making their employees lives easier by taking care of
transport for them?

Heck in some industries, they give you a car, and yet I've never seen anything
like this before. I've read a whole stack about this issue but still can't
seem to make it click.

~~~
thaumasiotes
[http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/09/gray-
def...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/09/gray-defeats-
fenty-what-does-it-mean-for-the-city/63042/)

There's not a fuss around companies providing transport to their employees.
There's a fuss around the employees, who are hated by "locals", living nearby.
As described in the linked article, gentrification battles are phrased in
other terms, because you lose PR points for saying "get out because, um, we
hate you".

Threads about the buses on HN in the past have seen a lot of self-righteous
grandstanding about "but the buses are _breaking traffic laws!_ " \--
completely disregarding the fact that everyone posting in the thread, San
Francisco residents or not, breaks traffic laws every day.

~~~
x0054
This is an honest question, that maybe someone in SF could answer for me. I
have been in SF several times, and I didn't like the city all that much, but
that's just a personal preference. But in that area their are so many nice
cities to live in. My personal favorite is Santa Cruise, but there a ton of
other great cities around the bay. If San Fransisco natives hate the tech
workers so much, why stay?

I live in San Diego, so it might be just a clash of cultures. But I honesty
would like to know, why does the tech community find SF so appealing. Is it
just a function of that's were all the VC money is? Or am I missing something?

~~~
potatolicious
San Francisco is the only thing resembling a dense urban core in the area.
There are many other nice places in the Bay Area, but very few of which will
afford you the archetypical car-less transit-centric lifestyle that many
people desire, while maintaining commutability to suburban offices. Many
places are anti-urban by choice.

At the risk of being a bit flippant, it's not that people find SF so
appealing, but that they find everywhere closer to work unbearable. By any
measure I can think of SF is a deeply dysfunctional city with incredible
failures in basic quality of life - but it is the _only_ city around that even
begins to offer a lifestyle that many people want.

~~~
colin_mccabe
I'm sorry, but you are mistaken. There are many other places in the Bay area
that offer dense urban areas. Palo Alto, San Mateo, Berkeley, and Santa Cruz
come to mind. I know someone who lives in the south bay and does not have a
car. There are places which are very hard to live in without a car (Sunnyvale
comes to mind), but different places in the south and east bay are...
different.

And frankly, there are parts of SF that I personally would find difficult to
live in without a car (or at least bicycle), because they're far from
effective public transit or commercial areas. BART and CalTrain don't serve
the western part of SF at all, and muni is often slower than walking.

The south and east bay may not have the same density as San Francisco, but
then again, it's far from clear that super-high density is a good idea in a
seismically active zone. A lot of people seem to treat the choice as being
between super-low density and super-high density. The alternative, medium
density, never seems to get much P.R., but it seems like by far the best
choice.

~~~
tptacek
Are you seriously suggesting that San Mateo and Palo Alto are "urban", in the
sense 'potatolicious means, of "offering a lifestyle comparable to that of
Seattle, Boston, or Milwaukee"? San Mateo and Palo Alto are suburbs, each with
essentially a single suburban main drag†, neither with any significant transit
to get from point A to point A' (neither being large enough, as large as, say,
Ann Arbor, to host a legitimate point B).

I think a reasonable case could be made that Champaign Illinois (which hosts
UIUC) is more of an urban area than those two cities. At the very least, I
think it's better than San Mateo.

I agree that San Francisco sucks (and I lived in SOMA and in Noe Valley, both
of which have relatively good [for the area] transit), but it is at least an
actual city.

The obvious elephant in the room here is San Jose, and it's telling that you
didn't mention it, opting instead to pretend that San Mateo was a "dense urban
area". San Jose is an urban center. But it's miserable; nobody talks about
moving there. The fact is that San Mateo sounds plausible because of its
proximity to San Francisco.

† _For Palo Alto, I mean University; you don 't need to point out that El
Camino runs through it, I know where to go to find the strip malls. :)_

~~~
dragonwriter
> The obvious elephant in the room here is San Jose, and it's telling that you
> didn't mention it, opting instead to pretend that San Mateo was a "dense
> urban area". San Jose is an urban center.

San Mateo, at around 8K/sq.mi., is far more of a "dense urban area" than San
Jose, at around 5K/sq.mi.

So who is pretending?

~~~
tptacek
Easy: you are. Lots of people live in San Mateo. It's still a suburb. Evanston
and Oak Park are suburbs of Chicago that are denser than San Mateo. So is, for
god's sake, Berwyn.

To see how silly population density is as a metric for what 'potatolicious is
talking about, consider that your metric says that Berwyn and San Mateo are
more like cities than Bellevue Washington, which is so independently urbanized
that it stretches the definition of "suburb" but has a density of only 3k/sqm.
Look at downtown Bellevue in street view on Google Maps. Now go look at
Delaware and 3rd in San Mateo.

The idea that you might think San Mateo is more of an urban area than San Jose
--- I mean this without annoying snippiness in my heart though I know it is,
characteristically, going to sound that way --- suggests to me that you
haven't been to one of those two cities before. San Jose is self-evidently a
real city. (I look forward to you embarrassing me by informing me that you've
lived in both).

~~~
dragonwriter
> Easy: you are. Lots of people live in San Mateo. It's still a suburb.

The issue was what is a "dense urban area". A city that is a suburb because of
its relation to a another city can still be a dense urban area, and a sparsely
populated municipality that is not a suburb can _fail_ to be a dense urban
area. San Jose is _not_ a dense urban area, by any remotely reasonable
standard.

> consider that your metric says that Berwyn and San Mateo are more like
> cities than Bellevue Washington,

All of those _are_ cities, none of them are "more like cities". The issue was
"dense urban areas", and certainly some of them are more "dense urban areas"
than others, and that is easily and objectively verifiable.

> The idea that you might think San Mateo is more of an urban area than San
> Jose

You keep leaving out the key word "dense".

San Mateo is, objectively, more of a "dense urban area" than San Jose. Whether
its more of an "urban area", density aside, isn't a entirely a well-defined
question, but given that San Jose is basically a giant mass of the type of
development referred to as "suburban sprawl" that just happens to be within a
single legal jurisdiction that isn't a satellite of a larger municipality, I'd
say by most reasonable standards its probably not more an urban area than most
Peninsula cities, even if the latter happen to suburbs of San Francisco.)

Though, of colin_mccabe's examples, I'll agree that San Mateo isn't the _best_
(Berkeley probably is).

~~~
tptacek
I think the reason you & I are talking past each other is that I wrote my
comment because I found Colin's "dense urban area" appellation misleading.
Your comment forced me to do the research to check whether population density
meant anything like what 'potatolicious was talking about; had I done that
before writing my original comment, I think my response would have been more
convincing.

Oak Park is a village, not a city, and is denser than San Mateo. The city/town
designation is arbitrary.

San Jose has a very large downtown area, much better transit, and more diverse
retail businesses and restaurants than San Mateo does. It _also_ has a
gigantic residential sprawl. So does Houston. Nobody would mistake San Mateo
for a urban area of the likes of Houston.

I agree with you about Berkeley, but that's telling too, isn't it? Berkeley
is, like San Francisco, a hotbed of anti-Google protests.

The subtext of this thread is 'potatolicious' claim that no place other than
San Francisco (and, admittedly, Berkeley and Oakland) offer a "dense urban
core" with a "transit-centric" lifestyle that is "commutable" to jobs on the
Peninsula. He is right. San Mateo does not in fact offer that. To argue the
contrary, you'd need to find a way in which San Mateo offers that lifestyle
that, say, Mountain View or Santa Clara or Pleasonton don't; otherwise, you're
arguing that the whole Peninsula is urban, and the term doesn't mean anything.
Obviously, if you find a job in downtown Pleasanton and are happy to eat out
only at the Cheesecake Factory, Pleasanton is livable too.

~~~
colin_mccabe
Berkeley has been a hotbed of political protest for a long, long time. While I
lived there, the Oak Grove protests, (protesting the cutting down of some
trees to build a stadium) were going on. Most of the fellow Berkeley residents
I talked to were not in favor of the tree protesters, simply because the
university was planting more trees in other places, so that there would
actually be a net gain of trees due to the construction. Prior to Oak Grove,
there were the protests surrounding the army recruitment offices. And prior to
that, I'm sure there was another cause, all the way back to Vietnam, where
Berkeley was also a famous center of protest.

The protests in San Francisco are very different from the ones in Berkeley.
The San Francisco ones are basically concerned about the effect the Google
buses are having on the composition of the neighborhood. The idea is that SF
is perfect as-is and must not change. There were similar worries when gays
started moving into SF in the 70s and 80s.

I think the reason why you're "talking past" me and the other people here is
that you haven't really visited most of the neighborhoods outside SF, and you
think they're all the same. Hence the apparent non-sequiturs like bringing up
Oak Brook, Illinois, or trying to decide whether something is a "city" or a
"town." The reality is that different places are different. Berkeley is not
SF. San Mateo is not downtown San Jose. And downtown San Jose is not east San
Jose.

An "us versus them" mentality, coupled with lack of knowledge of "them," lies
behind a lot of ugly things in human nature. Do we really need to have more of
it here? Maybe there are places outside of SF that are (gasp) as good as parts
of SF. Maybe there are places in SF that kind of suck. Is it possible?

------
sprizzle
$1 per stop is chump change for a company like Google. I don't see how this
fee will create any difference for what the protestors are demanding.

And this type of fee reminds me of a Freakonomics article that talked about
how a daycare started charging parents a late fee of $3 and it had an
unintended effect of increasing the frequency of late parents, because it rid
the parents of moral guilt for being late. In a similar way, despite the fee,
the big tech companies are going to continue doing what they're doing, but now
they won't feel as bad for it. I don't see how this solves anything.

Freakonomics article:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/chapters/0515-1st-
le...](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/chapters/0515-1st-levitt.html)

~~~
yetanotherphd
The purpose is to deal with the issues arising from the physical presence of
the buses, and $1 a stop might be enough for that.

The purpose is not to discourage the buses. If a person wishes to live in San
Francisco, and work at Google, that is their _right_ (assuming they can pay
the rent). No one has any moral basis for trying to stop them from exercising
that right, any more than I have a right to stop people from paying high
prices for caviar so, that I can afford it.

------
mphillips2357
People in the comments below have already started complaining that the 1$ fee
isn't enough. What would be enough anyway? What do you feel charging a fee is
going to accomplish?

The controversy surrounding these buses is just a symptom of the much larger
problem, affordable housing development. If you want this issue to go
anywhere, stop worrying so much about these buses full of people headed to
work. Getting rid of the buses isn't going to solve the real problem. It's
just something that people have latched on to.

------
blackjack48
Putting aside the tangential issues of housing and gentrification, the real
problem that needs to be addressed is street space. The Mission (where most of
these buses are stopping) is a densely-populated urban environment, and yet
residents often expect available on-street parking so they can use their
basements as storage. Making bus stops and loading zones longer would go a
long way towards reducing traffic problems in the area.

------
prostoalex
Sure hope the same standards are applied to charter tourist buses and those
double-deckers that carry tourists back and forth.

------
cbgb
"In a small, cramped city, ...". San Francisco certainly may be small, but
I've never known it to be cramped. I feel like its not being cramped is
precisely the root of the problem for which "Google" buses erroneously take
the blame.

------
spikels
This is so stupid. The fee is equal to the cost of the program. Flushing $1.5
million a year down the toilet. Bizarrely this is a victory as the activists
wanted the buses outlawed completely.

SF will always be a second best city until it can face it's true demons:
decisions made by ideology, that is, without regard to reality or even common
sense. I want the tolerant SF of the late 1960s back - a bunch of dockworkers,
businessmen, soldiers, factory workers who were cool enough to let freaks and
weirdos take over their city. Now the cultural descendants of those freaks
complain if you don't look, talk or get to work like them. This needs to stop.

------
w1ntermute
Read this book to understand the real problem and how to solve it:
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0078XGJXO](http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0078XGJXO)

------
eob
Meta-comment: did this post just get kickbanned [1] from the front page?

I've heard it happens on HN but (as only an occasional commenter) I've never
noticed it. It just went from #5 to nonexistent.

[1] excuse the IRC lingo

~~~
supersystem
"The controversy penalty can have a sudden and catastrophic effect on an
article's ranking, causing an article to be ranked highly one minute and
vanish when it hits 40 comments. If you've wondered why a popular article
suddenly vanishes from the front page, controversy is a likely cause. "

[http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-
really...](http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really-
works.html)

------
manifesto
“You allow these companies to illegally use public spaces.” The fix is either
stop them from doing so, or make such action not illegal.

~~~
ojbyrne
Or make them pay something towards the cost of those public spaces. Which is
what the city is doing. I don't think $1 per bus per day is enough though
really - it seems so obviously a token amount that I'm sure its going to go
up.

~~~
jack-r-abbit
It is $1 per bus per stop. Basically, every time a bus pulls into a public bus
stop, they pay $1. So at a minimum that will be $2 a day (pick up in the
morning, drop off in evening). But I believe buses make multiple stops.

