Slashdot Mirror
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.
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."
Wait... do I become a 'Googler' if I google, or is that title reserved for employees?
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.
And have it stolen? Are you nuts?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
Apparently,
There are nine-million bicycles in Bing.
That's a fact,
It's a thing we can't deny,
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?
At this point, it would be probably cheaper to offer a reimbursement program for an employee to go purchase their own bike and lock, and be responsible for it themselves, and simply install bike racks everywhere.
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.
Hmm, sounds like a challenge.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
People mostly don't steal them in the sense of taking them home and locking them up or selling them, they steal them in the sense of just grabbing one, cycling where they need to go, and leaving them there. Why spend $50 and be responsible for securing the bike, they think, when there are bicycles everywhere and you can just grab a convenient one whenever you want one.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
They're often used for short hops between different Google campuses. A lot of employees come into work on the bus or train, so don't want to have to take a bike with them, but would cycle for short trips rather than drive if there's a convenient bike for them to use.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
A bike at the other side of public transit can be worth more than a bike I personally own.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
If only the company had some sort of general search function.
>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.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
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.
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
Since the bikes are only to be used by environmentally friendly employees, can't those employees simply just have their own bike?
Hauling my personal bike from home (in Utah) to the Google campus every time I go there for a couple days' worth of meetings would be... impractical... shall we say. Even for local employees, most don't live close enough to bike to the office, so they come to work in their car or via mass transit, which would also make it infeasible to bring their own bike.
And the purpose isn't to enable employees to be "environmentally friendly", it's to enable employees to get from building to building in a reasonable amount of time. Without the bikes, I guess the company would have to run shuttles all the time between buildings. That would be more expensive than buying 50 cheap bikes every month. Walking is certainly possible (and fairly common) but the campus is large enough that it would become a significant time sink.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
That's what the T-1000 said.
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.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
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.
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.
Just have more upright three-wheel bikes. A nice basket in the back for stuff.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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".