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New Tech Money, Same Old Problems
An anonymous reader writes "Following the publication in May of George Packer's alarming article in the New Yorker revealing the state of the communities surrounding California's tech boom, the LA Times reports that despite the wake-up call, things are getting even worse in the Bay Area as tech companies seek to completely insulate their employees from ever having to interact with the real world. Quoting: 'Every weekday starting at dawn and continuing late into the evening, a shiny fleet of unmarked buses rolls through the streets of San Francisco, picking up thousands of young technology workers at dozens of stops and depositing them an hour's drive south. It's an exclusive perk offered by Apple, Facebook, Google and other major Silicon Valley companies: luxury coaches equipped with air conditioning, plush seats and wireless Internet access that ease the stress of navigating congested Bay Area roadways. The private mass transit system has become the most visible symbol of the digital gold rush sweeping this city, and of the sharpening division between those who are riding the high-tech industry's good fortunes and those who are not.'"
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I've been waiting for the cyberpunk scenario of mega corporation enclaves ruling the world and it's finally here! Rejoice! Time to bust out the baggy trenchcoat that makes me look bigger than I am and night time sunglasses (Don't worry, my vision has been augmented).
Every weekday starting at dawn and continuing late into the evening, a shiny fleet of unmarked buses rolls through the streets of San Francisco, picking up thousands of young technology workers at dozens of stops and depositing them an hour's drive south
Huh.
OK, maybe it's because I'm an old-school Missouri farm boy, but... that sounds an awful lot like cows at a stockyard.
They're just one beat off from installing cattle chutes.
MooooooooHeyisthataStarbucksooooooooo.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Wouldn't they complain if the busses stopped and there was a lot more congestion on the road? Don't they have to make the busses really nice in order to prevent people hopping onto those busses?
How DARE you refer to us as "cattle". We ARE NOT "cattle". We are RUBYISTS.
Ruby on Rails is my life. It is who I am. It is what I am. Ruby is what makes me A GOD among mere mortals.
We Rubyists are the ones who make the world go round. It is our code that powers all that is truly important in this world.
Because we are so critical to modern life, we deserve to be treated better than anyone else. We deserve to be driven around by those who require our services.
We are not merely humans. We are RUBYISTS. We are superior, and we must be treated well because we are the best there is, the best there has ever been, and the best that there ever will be. WE ARE RUBYISTS!
Driving in the Bay area is horrid. Getting bus service to and from work would be great. Could get some extra sleep too.
The buses are better for the environment and road congestion than if each person had to drive individually. And they don't cost taxpayers extra money. This sounds like a win-win to me.
I love how they harp on the fact that "the bus schedules are withheld from the public" like it's some sort of conspiracy theory. Unless your destination is their company, you've got no business sitting on that bus. I suppose they'd prefer the alternative, that employees drive themselves to work in private automobiles? Just more proof (if any was needed) that journalists ignore progress and immediately spring to interpret the next new events in whatever negative manner they can think of.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
So we're angry at rich large businesses for doing what poor public schools do? I'm confused -- why is this news?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
These companies are operating in a free market economy and are paying for these perks themselves. Anyone with the talent and IQ is free to join these organizations and enjoy the benefits outlined in the article. Compare that to the corrupt distribution of wealth and benefits offered by Government, such as unaffordable pensions "collectively" negotiated in backrooms between unions and politicians, where the winners are selected based on established power and influence rather than merit and achievement, and where the rest of society has to pay for this corruption via taxes and/or reduced services. These tech companies are subverting their corrupt Government and creating an economic sovereignty. More power to them.
It won't be long before G consumes the entire city of Mountain View, which is now just a Palo Alto wanna-be.
They are creating nothing of any real consequence. Everything made by Google, Apple, Facebook, Zynga, etc. is designed to be obsolete in months. They also have a habit of destroying working products and laying off workers for no reason at all.
I have a perfectly usable 2G iPod that is perfectly unusable because it's no longer supported and it doesn't talk to anything except the mothership that disowned it.
What was the last new (new as in it has no contemporary substitutes) COMMERCIAL software product (as in you pay real money to a company that employs people at grown-up wages to buy it) written in a real programming language and introduced with the same usefulness and value as say, Photoshop, Office, Quickbooks, Skype or Final Cut Pro?
There isn't one. Why?
Because all the developers are too busy shoveling pure crap into app stores as fast as they can to try and make rent.
Truth is the "high tech" industry in America was deliberately bludgeoned into a coma in 2000 and 2001. All advancement of personal computers stopped then.
Since no real efforts are being made to rebuild it, the industry will probably never recover. Any future high tech industry will happen somewhere other than America.
So, the author is pissed off at Apple and Google for solving their own transportation and parking problems instead of waiting around for the incompetent local politicians to handle it?
Guess it was a slow news day on the "bitching about non-problems" desk at the LA times.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
If these companies have the cash and the incentive to bus their people around... why not?
If others don't get these perks... so what? Did those that get them somehow do so at the expense of those that didn't? Would denying some these perks somehow make for a better standard of living for everyone or would it just make everybody equally miserable?
Egalitarianism is only so much horseshit. And frankly, calling it such is doing horseshit a disservice.
Quote: the sharpening division between those who are riding the high-tech industry's good fortunes and those who are not.'"
How 'bout a little perspective? I'm not riding on one of those buses, but I do recognize the fact that the people who do aren't just lucky. They are actually contributing to the "good fortunes", which trickle down to everybody else.
Sorry if you are one of those who only get a trickle, but that's a lot better than nothing - especially if you contribute nothing.
If you want to get "upstream", try going to school for something useful (like STEM) and not liberal arts.
Railroads have had private commuter club cars for a century. A bunch of wealthy people get together, purchase or lease a train car, add nice seating, waitstaff, & amenities, and pay Amtrak/Metro North/CNWR to haul it around with their regular commuter trains. In exchange for not sitting with the riff-raff, they subsidize everyone else's fare.
Every so often, some young journalist realizes that rich people can afford nicer stuff and attempts to spin it into a scandal.
Maybe these tech companies should be working on inventing some sort of technology that lets people communicate and collaborate without having to be in the same place at the same time.
The fact that the need motorized transport to get around is indicative of an inherently inefficient and environmentally-unfriendly lifestyle.
They should either move closer to where they work, or leverage their special-snowflake-HTML-"programmer" talent to demand that these companies locate their campuses somewhere closer to where their employees would deign to live.
This just sprawl -- a long established wrecker of cities and communities. But because OMG-techies! nobody can see it for the same idiocy that has failed every time it has been tried.
So, if I understand this right...
One bus crash and then a hiring frenzy?
This is a logical extension of the sort of the carefully cultivated isolation you encounter on a university campus. Why subject your employees to the outer-world that is - let's face it - such a nuisance and an eye-sore. Who wants to deal with the unpleasantness of ghetto-fabulous Oakland or South San Francisco? Fuck that. Reality is for suckers.
To be fair, Silicon Valley merely compounds a problem that's been in the Bay Area for a while now - namely the ghetto-ization and nimby-ism that's been going on for decades now. The left-wing excesses begun in the sixties and seventies are now coming home to roost, though a lot of ex-hippies get to watch the drama unfold from the comfort of their homes in the Berkeley hills. Why yes I do bitter much.
Oil sands workers in Ft. McMurray.
The plants send out buses to pick up workers early in the morning, pretty much door to door service. Sys admins, truck drivers, and execs. BTW: truck drivers (big trucks - 400 ton) are highly valued, more so than lowly sys admins/IT workers.
Buses come early and suburb house lights are all out by 10pm. Next day same same all over again.
Lots of money to be made and not a lot of folk believe they are in a long term position.
Still, though some residents initially didn't like the buses, the talk now is we'd rather have a dozen buses than all the cars with the concomitant parking hassles. Our housing prices are up, but thanks to CA property tax law, it doesn't change what I pay.
I continue to work at home, with a sub-minute commute time. Sure pity the fools who have to wait outside for a bus in all weather and then blow another 1.5 hours on commute. I say we continue the bussing, have them bring tax revenues into San Francisco & leave the city nice and quiet during the day.
Guess that's why Google, Facebook, etc., etc. are trying to open larger offices in the city.
So organized door-to-door mass transit, reduces the environmental impact of rush hour, reduces roadway congestion in an already congested area, removing the need to drive the commute, your fellow passengers will be co-workers, so it's expected that they'll maintain a reasonable level of public decency, and you don't have to find and subsequently pay for parking, and it's not being paid for with taxes but as a perk to attract more workers - and somehow this is a class warfare thing?
This is just a capitalistic thing.
You wanna know how you can get on those luxury buses that ferry people from point A to a company's door? Just work for the company. You wanna know how you can get those big salaries that are driving the gentrification of the worst parts of town, making them safe and livable for a family? Just work for the company. You wanna know how you can end up a millionaire? Have an idea, work it, and sell it or start up a company to grow it.
This isn't a class barrier, it's a time, effort, skill, and experience thing. That's how our economic system works.
It does suck that an area becoming a better class of neighborhood results in raised rents, but that is literally the price to be paid. The good news is that the more affluent individuals are in an area, the better it is for everyone. It might not increase in equal measures, but it's been well documented - average pay goes up in those areas, following the trend for cost of living.
It's not like a downtown of a city is ever going to be static. It was different than it was 20 years ago, and 20 years before that, and so on. It's always changing, and there's not anything wrong with that. Besides, what comes to mind when I think of a successful anti-gentrification trend is Detroit.
You don't want to end up like them.
Google has to ferry their people. Mountain View voted down Google's plan to build a 1000-unit dorm complex.
Bear in mind that most Google employees are not "techies". They're sales reps selling ads. When you think Google, think "Mad Men", not rocket science.
You're committing the same flaw of the user you replied to.
Giving every user the same stereotype and personality.
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
Who drives the bus... and where does he and his family get to live?
My company is located very near Microsoft's Redmond campus, and the situation is the same here. MS runs a large fleet of various people-carrying vehicles that pick up Microsofties all around the area. All the while the mass transit that serves the rest of us is going downhill fast. Every time I turn around MS is working hard to avoid paying more taxes. Gotta love those guys.
I am guessing the riders don't pay income tax on the value of the transportation
You guess incorrectly. We're taxed on it.
The real world is that public transit between SF and the peninsula sucks badly: it's slow, dirty, and inconvenient. You can't realistically commute from SF to SV by public transit unless you want to spend four hours doing it. So, the only real-world choice people used to have is to commute in their own cars. But that causes congestion, both in SF and on the highways. And now when tech companies spend a boatload of money trying to relieve the congestion and making life better for everybody, they are accused of "insulating" their employees. SF needs to stop whining and fix its transit system.
And, yeah, SF used to be a dirty, run-down, but cheap place to live, full sailors, social outcasts, non-conformists, weird artists, and recreational drug users, with a barely functioning city government. That had its charms. But people can't recapture that past and you can't preserve it by government decree. Until SF accepts that it has become an expensive city for the well-off, it will continue to be dysfunctional, and it will continue to be an overpriced dump. I used to live in SF but moved away; living there stopped being much fun, and it was way too expensive for the low quality of life it offered.
Now the people who work hard and are not egocentric enough to fill the highway by their personal ton of steel senslessly produced are having a "luxury". Company busses exist in Europe and Japan since a very long time, connecting the next station/city with big branches of a company, even for factory workers.
It is cost efficient and you have workers who are fresh and relaxed when they arrive at work. It makes economic sense for the company. Meetings start on time. It makes sense traffic-wise (for the space which one bus takes you can maybe have 3 cars, but there may be up to 60 people in the bus).
Further indicaiton that the article is biased: Coaches have air conditioning? That does not make them "luxury coaches". Every car driving there has air condition. The city busses in the city where i live have air conditioning. It is reasonable to have it in such climate. Plush seats? Really? No please tell me: The seat in the cars are probably made of wood. And When did the last time travel in a normal travel bus when the seat where not soft seats? The time that publi transport had wooden seats only is a long time ago. Wireless interent access? The budget bus line in germany has wireless interent access, as have the high-speed trains in germany, japan, austria, france (these are the countries i know of). Having interenet access in a mass transit system makes sense. Just because it does not make sense in a [personal car does not mean it is "luxury". If your employees can chek the mail on the way to work, this qquickly pays off.
So the bottom line is: This is not isolating the employees from the real world" but it is ecologically, economically, and socially reasonable approach. Only a complete moron woud turn around the need to hide yourself in your own car (and pay for it) as a sing of "being connected to the world". Instead of affording a car in a 40km ouside suburb i prefer to pay a little more rent, accept that there are time when the bus goes, get in the queue and relax, and do my private things by subway and walking/cycling.
..and build on site detention centers dorms.
The people commuting from SF to Silicon Valley are paying for the roads, police, traffic signals, air quality and services, and they are paying some of the highest income and real estate taxes in the nations for that. In fact, SF residents paid for using their own car and the infrastructure that using their own car would require. In addition, they subsidize SF's lousy public transit. Sharing rides using corporate buses reduces the cost and impact relative to what SF residents have already paid for and have a right to use.
Income tax? You are going with that? Really?
If they drove themselves, or rode the bus, then what? How does that affect income tax?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
SF residents already pay real estate and state income taxes, which is supposed to pay for the infrastructure supporting their individual cars. If they choose to use company-provided buses, they are saving both the city and the state a great deal of money in terms of road infrastructure and environmental costs.
This is a huge win for both SF and CA, and the fact that anybody criticizes this shows you how broken California politics has become.
Almost all the tech companies in Bangalore, Chennai, Bombay and Pune do this. Not just for top techies, for their entire work force. This practice started ages ago when factories were built far from the city but with major work force coming from the city. So factories would build "quarters" for essential staff who had to come at all odd hours, and bus the workers in for day shifts. The bus fleets of big public sector companies in Bangalore like BEL, HMT, ITT, HAL etc used to be comparable or even bigger than the city bus systems. Further the city bus systems are notoriously over crowded and wont be able to handle peak loads of shift changes in big factories.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This really shouldn't be a concern. If the bus has Internet access I am sure they are all using social media to connect with the world around them.
Which company?
"Every weekday starting at dawn and continuing late into the evening, a shiny fleet of unmarked buses rolls through the streets of San Francisco .. that ease the stress of navigating congested Bay Area roadways"
The reason the roadways are congested is that the car lobby acted to shut-down the public transport system way back in the early twentieth century.
AccountKiller
Depending on what your skill set is, and how much you are being paid where you currently are, 3X may be no problem. Wages tend to be significantly higher in the area.
They may have thought that you might not know the cost of living, and they could get you and sell you cheaply, and you'd hang on for the year required for their finder's fee to be non-refundable.
A comparison with Detroit in the 60's struck me as I was reading it. Certainly it was a different era, but the same hubris and ignorance seems to afflict the large firms in the tech industry as it did the Big Three. I suppose one benefit of the isolation of the tech industry is that it won't destroy the lives of so many people when it inevitably crumbles into dust.
Also, quoth the article:
San Francisco is becoming a city without a middle class.
This seems to be becoming true everywhere, not just SF. The middle class is getting absorbed into an enormous economic demographic of people who struggle with various degrees of severity to make ends meet.
Techology won't save us from that fate, it'll make it worse. There actually needs to be a social and political solution through income redistribution before we start witnessing real segregation - massive percentages of a community in poverty with awful basic services while the fortunate are shuttled to work from their gated communities and provided private company paid services, completely isolated from the city they work in. All while the company milks constant local tax breaks and leeches off the crumbling infrastructure.
Twice a day I see either a Google Bus (tastefully plain white, with a subtle "MV" (mountain view) or "GB" (Google Bus) on the destination display) or an Electronic Arse bus (plastered with "EA - WE'RE THE SHIZNIZZLE WORK FOR US" kinda graphics) rolling down my street - I chuckle quietly to myself, pick up a coffee, and stroll the 30 steps back to my home office. Ahhhh, the joys of being freelance :-p ... But yes, they're a good thing. The traffic on 101 is hell and many people would quit rather than do that commute twice a day.
As for living down there? Ugh, silicon valley is boring boring ugly boring.
I work for a company with offices in SF and Dublin (Ireland, not the one by Pleasanton). In both cases they strongly encourage the use of public transit, and we go out to local restaurants for lunch most days. Interaction with folks in the community is encouraged. Perhaps the issue here isn't tech, but rather the isolation that comes from working in remote suburban campuses far away from the city people want to live in. Thankfully I work in the center of both of these fine cities. If only most Googlers were so lucky! I assure you if these same companies put their campuses in places you could easily get to via BART (or even Caltrain; right now it's great for getting to a point 5 miles from your job) you'd see plenty of people taking normal transit instead of the private buses. As it is now I'd say it's a hell of a lot better to put one bus on the road than 45 cars.
If the employer provides transportation service, that is a Taxable Fringe Benefit according to the IRS.
If you drive yourself, you've paid income tax on the money you used to buy that car. If you use company transportation, that alleviates you from spending money on a car as often, yet does not increase your income taxes the way a direct monetary raise would.
And the company writes it off as a business expense, so they also pay less taxes.
It's not quite as much of a tax write-off as buying a private jet for your CEO, though.
You can't make public transport better. It doesn't meet the necessary requirements, and making it meet them would make it practically useless as public transportation. Here are the requirements:
#1: You only associate with the employees of your company during your trip, so that any work-chat isn't heard by an employee of a competitor.
#2: Any networking on the bus is secured to internal company network standards to avoid electronic eavesdropping.
#3: To avoid terrorism, targeted attacks on the company or its employees, or protest-based denial-of-employee presence at work via stopping the transportation, either through things like spike-strips or human chains, etc., the transportation must not be marked by operator, route, or destination (the "Google bus" in the movie "Interns" was a specially built prop; real Google busses look exactly like the Apple, Facebook, Genentech, and other tech company busses).
#4: The trip must be quick to maximize employee productivity; this means very few stops at either endpoint area, and no stops in between.
#5: The trip must be quick between origin and destination, in order to make it more attractive than taking a personal car, since everyone can afford to have a personal car.
#6: At the near end point, you can use personal transportation belonging to yourself; at the far endpoint, loaner personal transportation must be available in order to make up for not having personal transportation available. There should be no or low flat rate subscription cost for this loaner transport.
#7: The transport must run frequently; in general, this can be up to 12 times more frequently (5 minute intervals) for some areas.
#8: The transport must run exceedingly early, somewhat late, and sometimes exceedingly late, when there are company functions, such as "all hands meetings", "beer bashes", and so on.
#9: Alternate transport at no extra cost must be provided for a minimum number of "emergency" trips per month. There must be no extra charge unless this number is exceeded. Exceeding this number must be capable of being reimbursed on a case by case basis, and emergency trips must be counted as a single event for round trips with an arbitrary intermediate delay at the emergency destination.
#10: The transportation must be comfortable; there must be at least one restroom, adequate lighting, comfortable seating, etc.. ...I really don't see public transport meeting any of these criteria today, and I don't see it meeting 6, 7, 9, and 10 without a near-infinite amount of funding, given the way publicly administered transportation services have to spend about 60%+ of their budget funding pensions and benefits to union employees in California.
Yikes. Apparently nothing works the Slashdot crowd into a lather quite like holding a mirror up to the narcissistic self-interests of Silicon Valley excess...
So what's you point?
The IRS gets the money, not local transportation districts.
This is totally non-germane.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Transportation is a benefit to you on which you must pay income tax.
But this tax goes to the Feds, not to the local cities or states, so it matters not a wit for the discussion at hand.
Remember that all public transit loses money. Every rider you add to the system costs the system more than the rider pays in fares. If the city/county had to add buses for this purpose it would be a much bigger loss.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
When those workers get to be about 35 YO, they'll be back to reality when they're looking for work and a place to live that they can afford.
Enjoy it while you can - your ass will be kicked to the curb before you know it.
Get out and see the country dude. It's called a commuter bus service. Used in many parts of the country for commuters traveling relatively long distances in and out of the city to their homes in the suburbs where the city or local buses do not go.
Tour style buses with plush seats, A/C, individual LED lighting and vents, and free wi-fi on quite a few of them. That is not something special.
I lived in Kitsap county Washington, Northern VA, and Queens and all had the same exact bus service between them and their respective metropolitan areas. The one I use now in Northern VA to DC has wi-fi on some of them too.
Whether people live or work in the suburbs, if they don't do both they are degrading urban life. The degradation stems from their diluted stake in maintaining the social and economic diversity that makes cities attractive.
It's about time that municipally run transit services copy these private services. The key thing here is the annual subscription. You pay one fee, once per year, thus saving the municipality all the costs of having to sell and check tickets. A subscriber gets an identity card and they can then travel freely anywhere, when and where they wish. No extra fees. You can still have enforcement checks asking to see proof of being a paid up subscriber but even that can be done in a less intrusive way. The IDs could have RFID in them so that you can count them in and out the doors of the buses, or stations, and you could use the RFID for enforcement. Set up a barrier a short distance from the bus and ask everyone to pass by. There is a scanner and if it beeps, that person is detained and checked out. Nobody else has the inconvenience of fumbling through their purse for a ticket. And if you lose the ID, no problem. Report it and it will be deactivated and replaced. After all, you are a paid up subscriber so even if you happen to travel without the ID, you aren't a criminal.
"They may have thought that you might not know the cost of living, and they could get you and sell you cheaply, and you'd hang on for the year required for their finder's fee to be non-refundable."
Exactly. When I've shown recruiters the math, they just moved on. Presumably to find some poor young soul who will swallow their (seemingly but actually not so) generous offer.
Recruiters, the new real estate agents... underpay the seller, overcharge the buyer, nobody gets exactly what they want.
The worst are the "stagers"; just like you can "stage" an apartment, they offer to "help write a good resume", hold "interviewing seminars/classes", and sell people in above their ability, and beat feet with their commission.
I guess for profit education, which is basically "seller pays fixer-uppers", may come a close second.
I've seriously considered trying to do something about this, starting with a ratings site, and going from there, up to the point of the equivalent of "the board of realtors" for recruiters, but I'd really hate to displace Paul Vixie as "The most sued person in America".
The public transport network is optimized for cost... whats the cheapest network we can run whilst still being useable and affordable to poor people without cars
The private bus networks have a different optimization goal... employee productivity... employees have 24 hours a day and their time is valuable... sleep, travel, work, fun, family... save them time and effort in the morning... and most importantly give them wifi on the bus (which you don't get on plublic transport)... suddenly you have an extra hour of employee productivity for the price of a bus ticket
They rent. Apartments. Or with roommates.
Stiletto is right about who is buying houses. The market hasn't actually recovered in the Bay Area, it's actually riding a bubble by people who believe that they can buy the property for rentals, or can do a fix-and-flip again. Actual housing prices in places like the Inner Sunset in San Francisco are in the $535/square foot range, which puts a $180,000 house in Utah in about the $750,000 range in the Inner Sunset. Some of the flip condos that have been fixed but not yet flipped are sitting at $650/square foot.
Compare this to Manhattan "Million Dollar Listing prices at $2600-$3000/square foot, which basically gets you a (purchased) apartment for in the $6 range. You have to work at it to find this in the Bay Area - like across the pond from the Columns Of The Palace Of Fine Arts park. Or near Robin Williams house in the Sea Cliff neighborhood.
'By reading the second paragraph of the article you linked to':
..
Thanks for pointing that bit out, now could you provide an original source for that quote, something like this would do
"The second count charged that the defendants had violated Section II of the Sherman Act by conspiring to eliminate competition in the sale of motor buses and supplies to National City Lines companies" ref
AccountKiller
There seems to be a lot of misunderstandings about these busses from people who have no idea what they're talking about.
First, the people riding the busses are picking where they live based on things like bars, restaurants, nightlife, etc. Removing the busses won't send them all moving closer to work. The companies aren't moving either. San Francisco doesn't have the office space to accommodate all the big tech companies.
The people on the busses would not switch to public transit if they didn't have the busses. They would drive. Going from San Francisco down to the peninsula by transit can easily put you through four different transit systems (muni, Bart, Caltrain, samtrans). These different systems don't plan and communicate effectively. There is no easy, one system alternative to get from SF to where these companies are located.
Finally, people on the busses are working. The busses have wifi and the employees have company laptops. You can start syncing, catch up on email and browse the web a bit before you reach the office. By the time you get in you can get down to serious work. Employees are happy and more productive. This wouldn't happen on a city bus.
The companies involved get happy, productive employees. It's probably just as cheap to run a small fleet of busses as it would be to set aside the extra real estate space the parking lot for all of those employees would take up.
This is the plot of T Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities. Do try to be original.
It consists of everyone who can pass a drug screen and isn't too drunk to make it into the FedEx parking lot.
We are eternal, all this pain is an illusion.
Alla y'all can shoot off your Slashdotting mouths, but this issue directly affects my life in a major way. I am an educator and artist with a strong technical skill set. But I am of no use to the Apples and Googles of the world, and they are, frankly, of no use to me either. So there is no place for me in the Bay Area any longer. After 20 years in San Francisco, I am forced out by the spiraling rents. And why is the rent going out of control? It's precisely because of the gold rush described here. The Mission neighborhood, in particular, is being gentrified at an extremely alarming rate. Rents have increased more than 400% in 20 years. That's a quadruple factor, my friends. And yet, the crime and misery on the street continues unabated. There are literally thousands of homeless on the streets of this one neighborhood alone. And the private buses taking the technorati to their business parks in San Jose are symptomatic of this very real problem. As for me, fuck it, I'm moving to Portland. This place makes me sick, and I used to love it. End of line.
Maybe if so much of the peninsula wasn't zoned for low-density single family housing, people would live near their jobs instead of one of the only decent cities in the bay.
... not having to "interact with the free world"...
Ridiculous. What a ridiculous article. I suppose the writer would be happy if everybody was 'equal', in spite of people not doing equal amounts of work, and not having equal intelligence...
"Ground zero for this growing array of grievances is the Mission District, a historically working-class Latino neighborhood "
Now there's a surprise...
This post might as well have been called "Kids cho0sing to live in trendy SF instead of cultural vacuum of Silicon Valley"
The valley is dull - really dull. You need a car to get from one store to the next, let alone to get anywhere interesting. That means you have to be sober the whole time, which is dull. SF on the other hand, has decent public transport, has some cool places to go, and because you're on public transport you can have a drink whenever you want.
If anything's getting worse, it's the lack of public transport between SF and the Valley.
I wouldn't move to the Bay area unless I had a helicopter take me to and from work.
SF has always been a bedroom community for Silicon Valley, to some extent: I moved to SF from the Peninsula in '93.
Caltrain is simply not capable of being a full solution to the problem of getting people out of their cars, so the buses are a very reasonable solution. I'm lucky enough that my company moved to SF this year, so it's Muni every day for me. (Sometimes a mixed blessing!)
Not to be too cynical, but San Franciscans will always have something to complain about. My grandmother didn't like all the "new development" out in the Sunset, which since it happened in the 1920s gives you some perspective. I love my crowded quirky little city, and certainly don't begrudge the Apple, Google, and Genentech buses in my neighborhood, though I do wish they'd coexist better with Muni.
I sort of laugh at the people being shocked at "houses built right next to each other": um, have you never been to a city before? (I'm talking about Paris, Manhattan, London, or Tokyo, not someplace spread out like Phoenix.) We have the density but not the height, lots of trees and parks, and many neighborhoods are very walkable.
In short: cities are dense, people like to complain, and private mass transit is good at moving people from once place to another.
But unless they're at working 12 hours a day, you complain about how they're overpaid and underworked and need to get into the office and see how REAL people have to work.
So I can avoid income tax if I say "My employer pays corporate tax, therefore I pay a lot of tax. 'cos if they didn't they'd be able to pay me more and I'd have more money, therefore that loss of renumeration is a tax on me!".
Or does it mean I can claim I pay my sales tax therefore I can avoid my income taxes?
No, Employment taxes are not the corporation tax that Apple have to pay.
There are a whole lot of workers in the oil patch that get flown in for a week from wherever in the country they live, and then flown back home at the end of the week.
This replaces the old "company town" model, where the company would actually move whole families closer to the work site. The downside is that there are an awful lot of familes that are effectively single-parent half the time.
One of my friends is currently doing this, and it's terribly disruptive for his kids--it takes several days to adapt when conditions change.
Would you rather have all those Indians driving up/down 101 and 280 in their Priuses and Camrys? No thanks! It's bad enough as it is.
Plush busses? In SVLand, that's like plush horse-drawn carriages, 'fer goodness sake! If they really want an in-your-face two-tier comon-serf and house-serf system, they could, and should do a bit better than that.
It's not like there aren't good ideas to rip off. Like, why not a hyper-catapoolt, for example? That's sure to work much faster. That's a Helen Mysk project, by the way. Claims to be the evil clone of a rather famous someone or other. Not that I believe her. She lies a lot.
The idiots who live in SF but work on the peninsula are the dumb, superficial ones. Only a complete and utter moron would pay SF rent when 10 miles away you can pay around 60% less. For the privilege of that cost you get - concrete and pavement everywhere, the smell of piss, fucking bums and derelicts all over the place. Unless youre into paying way too much for a drink or way too much to stuff your face with organic matter, there isnt much worth doing in the city. Its full of trendy, dumbshit hipsters (bowler hats now - fucking seriously?) who are stupid enough to blow $3k a month for a tiny-ass studio apartment. If those fucking retards werent carted out of the city every morning, the locals would bitch even more.
"The private mass transit system has become the most visible symbol of the digital gold rush sweeping this city, and of the sharpening division between those who are riding the high-tech industry's good fortunes and those who are not."
Oh, so the mass of BMWs and Mercedes from the 'old money' bankers are just fine, but these schmucks who walk, or ride transit, to get to the bus stops, well, that's going too far? And the city was 'rescued' when companies based there went bankrupt, and is being destroyed by prosperity? Tell that to Detroit.
I am not saying it's easy to maintain a diverse, mixed-income city; it is not. But being a luddite and smashing the buses is not part of the answer.
From the George Packer article in the New Yorker:
That I think is Exhibit A. Cupertino sucks so badly that Apple has to offer to bus new employees in from San Francisco, but instead of putting some of their much vaunted design genius to work on improving the town, they're building a round pentagon to protect themselves from it. There's a medieval fortress vibe about this scheme that really should give one pause, (if one were capable of finding the pause button on one's slyFad 9).
(By the way, before you start singing the praises of San Francisco's hills and harbor, consider that the Mission district has nothing to do with that stuff. If urban communities are just a matter of brand creation and network effects, a place like Apple really ought to be able to figure it out.)
Though the author uses the buses as an indicator, the real point of the article is the increasing tone-deafness of the tech world to the lives of those not plugged into today's high tech world. Now the extreme other end of the spectrum proposed by the author suffers from the same kind of tunnel vision that "my way is right and just" but the point remains - well-heeled tech workers are cocooning themselves in a tech-focused echo chamber.
As a member of the (moderately) well-heeled tech life (though nowhere near SF) I can see the tunnel vision closing in on my world view. To my socially-impaired self that is comforting but to my intellectual self it is dangerous in the long term.
I was just in San Francisco. I got on the California line and, sure enough, it had wooden seats. There was no air conditioning. Heck, it didn't even have doors and there were even people hanging off the side.