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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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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."
If only the company had some sort of general search function.
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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640KBikes ought to be enough for any [campus] body.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
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.
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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".
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".