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Google Loses Up to 250 Bikes a Week (siliconbeat.com)
What's happening to Google's 1,100 Gbikes? The Mercury News reports:
Last summer, it emerged that some of the company's bikes -- intended to help Googlers move quickly and in environmentally friendly fashion around the company's sprawling campus and surrounding areas -- were sleeping with the fishes in Stevens Creek. And now, a new report has revealed that 100 to 250 Google bikes go missing every week, on average. "The disappearances often aren't the work of ordinary thieves, however. Many residents of Mountain View, a city of 80,000 that has effectively become Google's company town, see the employee perk as a community service," the Wall Street Journal reported.
And for the company, here's one Google bike use case that's got to burn a little: 68-year-old Sharon Veach told the newspaper that she sometimes uses one of the bicycles as part of her commute: to the offices of Google's arch foe, Oracle... Mountain View Mayor Ken Rosenberg even admitted to helping himself to a Google bike to go to a movie after a meeting at the company's campus, according to the WSJ.
One Silicon Valley resident reportedly told a neighbor that "I've got a whole garage full of them," while Veach describes the bikes as "a reward for having to deal with the buses" that carry Google employees. Google has already hired 30 contractors to prowl the city in five vans looking for lost or stolen bikes -- only a third of which have GPS trackers -- and they eventually recover about two-thirds of the missing bikes.
They've discovered them as far away as Mexico, Alaska, and the Burning Man festival in Nevada.
And for the company, here's one Google bike use case that's got to burn a little: 68-year-old Sharon Veach told the newspaper that she sometimes uses one of the bicycles as part of her commute: to the offices of Google's arch foe, Oracle... Mountain View Mayor Ken Rosenberg even admitted to helping himself to a Google bike to go to a movie after a meeting at the company's campus, according to the WSJ.
One Silicon Valley resident reportedly told a neighbor that "I've got a whole garage full of them," while Veach describes the bikes as "a reward for having to deal with the buses" that carry Google employees. Google has already hired 30 contractors to prowl the city in five vans looking for lost or stolen bikes -- only a third of which have GPS trackers -- and they eventually recover about two-thirds of the missing bikes.
They've discovered them as far away as Mexico, Alaska, and the Burning Man festival in Nevada.
Immoral behavior such as petty theft has been endemic to the point that public officials fear not confessing to committing it from time to time. Citizens take note: the rule of law is failing in this country. You are only as free as you can afford to be, if you are today’s lucky winner in the game of arbitrary and capricious “law and order”.
I'd think it would be more the This-is-why-we can't-have-nice-things department.
1,100 * 10^9 bikes ?!?
Shoot on site. Itâ(TM)s theft, so youâ(TM)re allowed to shoot to kill. Then hang the bodies from trees as a warning to other thieves.
When everyone owns them, no-one owns them.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
"100 to 250 [...], on average" is not "up to 250". One of them is probably wrong or very poorly worded.
Now bikes too.
....of liberal utopianism getting its stupid face smashed in by ugly reality.
Wait... do I become a 'Googler' if I google, or is that title reserved for employees?
These are regular old "pedal-yourself" push-bikes? Why would anyone ever bother taking one. They're like $50 at Walmart.
I got mine at Burning Man. It's a nice bike.
Those 1,100 Gbikes are actually 1,024 Gbikes after formatting. It's in the fine print.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
They just need self-driving bicycles that can bring themselves back home.
We moved my office from downtown MTV to about a 22 minute walk from the caltrain station. What I quickly realized was that there were typically between 2-3 bikes just chilling out at the train station (about 3 miles from their main HQ, maybe more) so I and some coworkers would ride these bikes to our office, then dump them about a block from the office. The bikes always disappeared. Then around lunch we'd find another bike(s) and take them to the restaurant for lunch. In the evenings you can usually find one on your walk to the train station, and then just dump it as the station for someone else to use.
It's sort of Mountain View's unofficial bike share, especially now that the city of Mountain View has formally left the bay area bike share/ford gobike system.
moox. for a new generation.
What's happening to Google's 1,100 Gbikes? [snip]100 to 250 Google bikes go missing every week [snip] they eventually recover about two-thirds of the missing bikes
So ~175 bikes go missing each week, of which ~120 are recovered. So ~55 go permanently missing each week. If there's 1,100 total, that means they'll all be gone after 5 months. Presumably they're being reordered to replace the ones that disappear.
Also, hiring 30 contractors to track these down? Surely there's a more efficient way of doing this. Getting people to pay a nominal security deposit for use of the bikes would encourage people to return them ($1 would work surprisingly well, even for people making 6 figures. Psychology, bitches!). There are other, stick-based methods, but then more people will just dump them in creeks.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Thieves steal bicycles.
Film at 11.
Trash
I don't really understand the reason for this bicycle initiative.
Since the bikes are only to be used by environmentally friendly employees, can't those employees simply just have their own bike?
So because the bikes were "just chilling out at the train station" you felt it was your right to take them? If somebody has a television just chilling in their house do you think it's okay to take that as well?
It's not an "unofficial bike share," it's theft. The fact that you don't see anything wrong with taking other people's bikes is very worrying.
LOL, woke.
Apparently,
There are nine-million bicycles in Bing.
That's a fact,
It's a thing we can't deny,
The way that you casually justify theft is fucking disgusting.
You are a massive piece of shit. You should have your fucking hands cut off.
The lesson keeps happening, but people keep failing to learn from it.
I guess the assumption is that Google doesn't really mind, and thus it is not considered theft...
And to be honest, I would suspect that Google in fact might not really mind the people that take and leave the bikes at reasonable places. If nothing else, it's advertisement...
Exactly How do you know those bikes wern't left at the train station for google employees to use to transit from the station to the office? Now they are without a bike and have to walk thanks to your selfishness.
What google should have done is made their bikes just like the bikes commonly used for bike shares, with the electronic device on them to check out/in the bike. and track its location for recovery They could just use the employee ids to check out/in bikes and not charge like a fee. With google being the company that it is, you would think they would love to collect stats like that about which employees are using them and how frequently.
I wonder if there is any correlation between this attitude toward property and the rampant sexual abuse you see in the same regions. Nah, couldn't be. They're all totally woke on those issues. Couldn't possibly be that you cannot silo off such a mentality into just one area rather than letting it spill into other areas.
Fuck entitlement. If someone stole something, they committed a crime. A "garage full" of bikes likely qualifies for Grand Theft in California (value over $950), and can be charged with a felony. See how this person likes the "reward" of a criminal record or incarceration. Often times it takes the correct deterrent to prevent abuse.
Great thing about working for Google is having an employer that no only has access to your personal lives if you use their Google services, but also transportation with GPS that track the times you leave for work and leave work.
I'll pick up a souvenir the next time I'm in town.
> Thieves steal bicycles. Film at 11.
The italian film Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette) is actually one of the most celebrated works in post-WW2 cinema art: director Vittorio De Sica won an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a BAFTA for it in 1948. The british have ranked it in the absolute Top10 alongside works like Casablanca and Hitchcock.
Hmm, sounds like a challenge.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Considering the cost to live around there, and the people have to be making some cake just to live there. I am amazed at the theft going on in such a well to do area? Or is there a lot of people coming from poorer areas to steal, or maybe some Google people have found a way to make a little extra cake? What I don't understand is why Google didn't secure the bikes to begin with, but then is wiling to hire people to go find them? This is an example of brilliant thinkers who can't handle logical thinking of daily life.
Nothing was really stolen since at the end of the day, Google still had the bicycle.
If only the company had some sort of general search function.
Google should be happy that people are taking their bikes. Those people would likely have otherwise used a car; it's a great way to fight global warming!
So does somebody in Google have to file 250 reports of a crime and insurance claims with the crime report attached to it? Or do they have an AI to do it?
>It's sort of Mountain View's unofficial bike share, especially now that the city of Mountain View has formally left the bay area bike share/ford gobike system.
No, it's become the local culture to steal bikes.
Given a Google fleet of 1100 bikes, losing 200 per week is a blisteringly high rate of loss. And they can't be counting the ones that are are just borrowed overnight, like the example of the woman who works at Oracle and rides to the train station, because these would not be missed unless the count were to take place at the time the bike is not at Google. The articles describe many of these thefts as pure vindictiveness, like throwing them in the creek or stashing dozens of them in a garage because somehow, Google having its employees ride carpool buses is an excuse for class resentment. This is the pure class warfare, like those inner city kids who grab tablets from subway commuters just to smash in front of the victim.
Perhaps it's time for some major Silicon Valley companies to move to places where their jobs and money are more welcome.
Don't blame the shuttles. Unfortunately transportation in the valley is just terrible, and shuttles are part of a solution.
Using public transportation to get from San Jose to Mountain View would take about two hours. And even walking would be at a comparable speed. There are a patchwork of uncoordinated services which require you to switch multiple busses, walk long periods (since the busses to not share nearby stops), and spend a lot of money.
There is supposed to be VTA (valley transport "authority"), but they don't seem to have any real authority over the uncoordinated cities. People cite many reasons for this, including NIMBYism. However the end result is the same. Unless you happen to be exactly on a bus route, using a network of busses is just infeasible.
So the options are then:
- Driving in a personal vehicle on the already crowded highway
- Biking to work. This is usually much faster than public transport for many people.
- Taking an uber. Again much faster, and not much more expensive ($12 vs $15)
Given these limitations many tech companies employ their own shuttle service (including Google). This not only saves a lot of time, it also frees the highways, since the shuttles would rarely be empty, and would take any cars off the highways.
At NASA we had "free range" bikes, which were just bikes that got abandoned or donated into common use, they were marked. I found out that even though the idea was that they should be randomly distributed to bike racks around the campus, the reality was they were usually piled up at one particular administrative building. See, administrative people tend to have meetings, lots of them, at various buildings on site. They would walk to those other buildings, then grab a free range bike back to their own building - EVERY TIME.
There were bigger issues than that, if you brought your own personal bike to the space center - and many people didn't bother to lock them up because theft was quite rare inside the fence - the same asses who wouldn't just get their own bike - would take someones obviously personal bike too if it wasn't locked up. I personally had spokes broken on my bike because I did have it locked up and someone jerked on it in the rack hard enough to break spokes as the wheel rolled back. Even though out in public I run cable locks through both wheels at the space center I started locking up just the frame outside to prevent damage from a "don't care" type.
I even saw free range bikes standing in the middle of parking lots. It was obvious that someone rode the bike all the way to their car and left it.
I love the idea of a free-range, common use bike pool. I found that in reality people are assholes and don't care. Even in place like the space center where I know for a fact you can leave a brand-new Alienware laptop unattended for weeks at a time in full view in a not actually public but still accessible to many area with nothing holding it down but a power and Ethernet cable. I found that even in a place where people have shared common goals that a shared candy bowl will have one person pick out all their favorite stuff and hoard it in a personal lock box.
Nope, we as human creatures can't be trusted to have a public use anything, unless it's got a self-enforcement or monitoring mechanism which sort of defeats the whole idea.
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Google has already hired 30 contractors to prowl the city in five vans looking for lost or stolen bikes
By definition a Google bike can't be lost. This is basically code for asshole employee behavior.
And most stolen bikes are the residents enforcing their legal rights to remove these dumped eyesores due to the Google assholes.
From wikipedia:
The tragedy of the commons is an economic theory of a situation within a shared-resource system where individual users acting independently according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling that resource through their collective action.
Progressives just don't clue in on this.
If Google doesn't want to supply the city and potentially the rest of the world with bikes then issue one bike per employee and tell them that if they loose it they can either buy a new one or do without it.
If employees keep buying them and bikes keep ending up in different parts of the world then it's really not a company loss is it? The GPS on the bikes should give Google what they love most...DATA! They LOVE data and they'll find some way to use it.
This is the mentality of people today. If a person or company is wealthy, you have a right to help yourself to their property. I am reminded of a black woman who won the lottery in Houston. While she was at the lottery office collecting the check, her black neighbors broke into her house and took almost everything. While they were searching through her belongings, they were heard saying, "Well, she won't be needing this anymore".
It turns out real people are assholes too.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
640KBikes ought to be enough for any [campus] body.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
"a reward for having to deal with the buses that carry Google employees." Some of these uneducated bums that are scattered around Mountain View, simply b/c they or their families moved there a few decades earlier, should be more appreciative of the high tech workers. If Google and other companies (including from 80s and 90s) didn't adopt the valley as "the valley" their houses won't be worth as much and they wouldn't be sitting on millions due to their "accidental" real estate investment. Also these bums don't pay anything for their property taxes (tied to the original house price) and the "Google employees" who are new to the area pick up the slack and pay their share of property taxes too, given the houses have gone up so much in the meantime.
... Google maps?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
That's a good insight. These are a bunch of wannabe-commies doing what always happens.
It's not surprising that they would view sexual prey from an "according to his needs" perspective.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
We now have the anecdote of a rocket scientist.
Would a brain surgeon care to share his own anecdote?
#DeleteFacebook
That is known as 'karma'. It isn't even a minuscule part of what Google has stolen.
OMG. You're just justifying your actions. Officially, the gBikes are only to be used by Google employees on Google property. Visitors aren't supposed to use them at any time. Taking them to random spots around the city is not allowed. Just because they're not locked up, people assume that there are no rules.
They better not take MY stapler.
> It's not an "unofficial bike share,"
Correct. It's an official bike share - just one that's only designated for use by Google employees. They are not employee-owned bikes.
2 or 3 bikes if they catch the garage guy
Several startups offer bikes that dont need docking racks. You just pick them up and leave them anywhere. As expected you large piles at popular destinations and shortages elsewhere.
Nope, we as human creatures can't be trusted to have a public use anything, unless it's got a self-enforcement or monitoring mechanism which sort of defeats the whole idea.
I think the trouble is with all of these bike shares you're always going to have individuals who will try to push the limits of what's accepted. And if there's no consequence they'll keep pushing those limits those limits will become the new standard for what is accepted. And then people will then push the new standard as well.
Collective goods are possible, but you need some sort of re-enforcement, either positive or negative, to keep people acting responsibly. Otherwise you're relying on people to act responsibly when they see everyone else getting away with being a bad actor.
I stole this Sig
Quote:
> Company transportation executive Jeral Poskey told the paper he once took action when he saw what appeared to be a homeless woman on a commandeered Google bike.
> “If I could describe her, you would agree with me,” Poskey said. “She looked all panicked, and then she showed me her Google badge.”
I did this when I went to the Bay for a job interview with Cisco in '94.
My friend, who already worked for Cisco, took me down to see their new HQ being constructed at W.Tasman in Milpitas.
We're both standing in the car park looking at the construction and this old homeless bum shuffles past and smiles at us.
I turn to my friend and said "Site security seems very relaxed letting an old homeless bum like that wander around".
My friend replied "That's John Morgridge the CEO".
You have no idea how many times I've given up on collective good arrangements even to as small of a scale as my own household. I'm seriously considering getting a safe when I get my next TV so I can lock up the remote control when I'm not home. I would love to share it, but it spends 90% of it's time misplaced.
I've also considered drilling a hold through the casing somewhere and affixing a cable to it - since some public use things do work.
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In this case it's an interesting data point when you consider the demographic.
"One Silicon Valley resident reportedly told a neighbor that "I've got a whole garage full of them," while Veach describes the bikes as "a reward for having to deal with the buses" that carry Google employees. Google has already hired 30 contractors to prowl the city in five vans looking for lost or stolen bikes -- only a third of which have GPS trackers -- and they eventually recover about two-thirds of the missing bikes. "
Scumbag liberal thieves
Yeah! He needs to start doing ethical things...like downloading content from Piratebay.
Nope, we as human creatures can't be trusted to have a public use anything, unless it's got a self-enforcement or monitoring mechanism which sort of defeats the whole idea.
Something like...GOD?
When an issue comes up next between the city and google I am not going be on the side of the city.
In my city, each property ends at the sidewalk. Then between the sidewalk and the street is a strip of city-owned land called (confusingly) the Right of Way. (Not to be confused with streets, which are not a right of way but are a place where you have a right of way. Which is not to be confused with having the right to use the way right this moment...)
Anyways, if somebody places a TV on the grass between the sidewalk and the street, and there is not a moving van next to it, then it considered free. Before throwing things away, people often put them in a box and place them by the street. It means you can take it, it has been abandoned. Although if nobody takes it, you have to un-abandon it and throw it away, or else it is littering. In any case, people put TVs, stereos, food, all sorts of things. If it is left 5 feet away, on the private side of the sidewalk, nobody touches it. Well, if it was a bike it would get stolen, but if it was a TV nobody would touch it. (TVs don't have solid resale value these days)
Unlocked bikes abandoned in public are not a clearcut "don't touch it" situation, especially if there are lots of them and they all have a logo of a local business on them. Keeping it, or selling it, might be theft, but riding it around and abandoning it in a similar situation as you found it might be totally legal. Obviously it will vary by jurisdiction, but it is going to be a matter of splitting hairs for the judge almost anywhere.
In this case, the bikes are not actually restricted to use only by Google employees, so it is clearly legal to ride them around. And if it wasn't legal to ride them, then it wouldn't be legal to abandon them in public bike racks, either! Once the owner's policy is to abandon them in public for later use, it really pushes the hairsplitting towards allowing borrowing.
False equivalence.
A person's television in their house has an explicit owner present.
The bikes, they were abandoned or otherwise neglected by google. If anything, google should be fined for littering and illegal dumping every time one of their bikes is found not in use outside of their property.
I guess the assumption is that Google doesn't really mind, and thus it is not considered theft...
And to be honest, I would suspect that Google in fact might not really mind the people that take and leave the bikes at reasonable places. If nothing else, it's advertisement...
Yes, that's why they are paying 30 people to meander around town looking for them, because they don't care they are gone.
Google has plenty of brand awareness without having to give away free bikes.
So lots of thieves in Mountain View
Just have more upright three-wheel bikes. A nice basket in the back for stuff.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Then Google employees taking them to the train station are thieves as well.
Fuckstain
Even in place like the space center where I know for a fact you can leave a brand-new Alienware laptop unattended for weeks at a time in full view in a not actually public but still accessible to many area with nothing holding it down but a power and Ethernet cable.
I guess at NASA you can't really count on gravity holding stuff down...
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
"Google litters bikes around town, gets upset when people move them."
... garbage collection to free up resources?
What about bounds checking or strong typing?
When Google gives away a product for free, it's because they're going to gather data from it and use it to build an AI to do the same thing.
Perhaps this is part of their 'self-driving bike' initiative? ;-)