As someone who used to do the "reverse commute" from SF to Oakland for a couple years, I'd add that it's pretty attractive for SF residents who like a slightly less crazy pace as well. I mean, you can actually go places for lunch and get in, and not pay $14 for a sandwich. And going the opposite direction of traffic (or taking the opposite BART) sure beats sitting on the 101.

But most people I worked with were definitely in the boat you describe - East Bay dwellers who really, really didn't want to deal with trying to fight their way into SF. And who can blame them? I think this is a great move for Oakland and Uber.

I live in Oakland (10m walk from the new Uber office, but 3m from a 580 onramp), and my office is basically at AT&T Park. The commute has gotten markedly worse over the past 15 months. :( And it's not even a particularly bad east bay to sf commute; I know people who drive from Moraga.

Last year, my 95th percentile commute at 10am was 35 minutes door to door, and the median was about 25-30. This year, the 95th is more like 45, and the median is more like 35 at that time. To arrive at 9am, it's dramatically worse -- basically an hour 95th, and sometimes up to 90m (once or twice a year), and the median is about 45m (BART is 50m door to door, but is absurdly crowded at that time, and I'm uncomfortable walking around with a laptop bag at 5-7pm in Oakland after 2 people got their laptops stolen in front of me in one week).

I usually try to go in really late and wfh in the mornings so it's 20-25m, but it's still usually 30-40m on the way back at 7-8pm. If I have to be in at 9am, I have to leave at 7:45 to be comfortably on time with high confidence. And the traffic basically starts between 0530 and 0600, so being early is almost impossible; it's full-bad around 0630-0700.

10 miles on a electric bike could be 40 minutes. (In Europe they are limited to 15.5mph). Depending on your physical fitness you could get it down to 30 minutes but you'd need a shower at the other end ;)

The new part of the Oakland Bay Bridge has a bike lane, but only out to Treasure Island; there's no bike lane from Treasure Island to SF.

That has to be by design.

They're two separate bridges built decades apart. They put a bike lane on the new eastern span despite it not being very useful at the moment so that whenever a new western span is built it won't run into the exact same issue (and there's some ideas being thrown around for adding a bike lane to the current bridge, but they're all hideously expensive).

Thank you for providing a least-hypothesis that is even more probable than "ordinary racism/classism". :)

there isn't a design, which is the problem. it's two bridges and people in the Bay Area are lucky to have one of them in-the-can. There's been a lot of argument over the design of the western spans; I despair of ever seeing them built before one of the faults underlying the area renders the argument moot.

Just curious, but how does someone get away with stealing a laptop during rush hour? I've lived in Oakland for about 6 months and I haven't seen anything like the crime you describe. Your description of congestion is spot-on, though.

Away from the station. On the sketchy block of Harrison between Grand and the Whole Foods. In the first incident, someone came running at me at full speed holding a laptop bag across his chest; I thought for about 300ms as he ran toward me about putting him on the ground because I thought he was running at me to attack me, but I moved to the side behind a pole and he kept running, then a (very very slow) security guard ran after him, and then some sad looking middle aged guy as well. Second time was someone running across a street and then disappearing down 23rd. Easy to identify people with laptops from a distance, with probably 75% accuracy.

I'm convinced 4-7pm Fridays is a great time to steal laptops from commuters; they're tired, it's relatively low traffic, OPD's response times are...not impressive, etc. It's really a 5-10 block area behind the stupid Auto Row and some sketchy semi-SRO housing in the area which is a problem. (Pro tip for cities: auto dealers are horrible for foot traffic.)

I upgraded from a very obvious laptop sleeve on strap to http://www.pacsafe.com/intasafe-z500-anti-theft-backpack.htm...

Steel wires through the straps, and looks like a backpack. I'm also big enough that unless it is rip and run, or a clear and unambiguous threat to my life, I'm not as concerned, so having a strap which won't break is enough.

Ugh please stop. So much fake going on. Oakland is just like any city in the last 20 years. Just fine but still remembered for their past.

Currently #2 in US. Hardly the past.

http://lawstreetmedia.com/crime-america-2015-top-10-dangerou...

I'm not even arguing that Oakland as a whole is dangerous; it's specific blocks in the good/high-traffic areas, and then large areas (Oakland is huge geographically) which are bad-but-no-one-goes-there. There's some street crime on top of that, but not actually much more than similar areas in SF. Way more than, say, Salt Lake City, though.

Most of the serious crime in Oakland is in places you won't accidentally go (although there's a sketch area a few blocks away from downtown, and on the other shore of Lake Merritt), by and against poor people, often one or more involved in gangs/drug entrepreneurship/whatever. Same as most cities.

Except most cities aren't on that list. SF has similar places where "good rich people" avoid -- but it still isn't in the top 10.

I also don't like this implicit because it's "poor against poor" then somehow that's ok and we can ignore those statistics. Poor people are people too. Talk about gentrifying.....

It isn't that it is ok -- but having rich people and businesses move to Oakland, pay taxes, and thus better fund things like schools, police, and other jobs will help with poverty. Because the violence isn't uniformly distributed and thus isn't targeted at them, it is less of s deterrent.

Also, a lot of that current violence is due to war on drugs and after effects, so the best way to address it is to wind down the war on drugs.

Plus, you can take the ferry over. That's a sweet commute.

The broken internal-to-SF and internal-to-Oakland transit systems make that a bit complex, I think. I guess if you biked?

I used to bike to the Ferry building from the Mission and then onto the office across the street from the Sears building. It was much better than taking the coach down to the Peninsula, that's for damn sure.

Why wouldn't you just take BART?

The scenery from the ferry is a hell of a lot nicer than the inside of a BART car?

This is on my to-do list. I have friends who take the ferry and it looks quite enjoyable compared to the other options.

Also less crowded, I think. I take the bus, for both reasons.

Much more pleasant ridership, unless you enjoy listening to whatever's playing out of that guy's cell phone.

Not sure if a $40B company that generates staggering losses and faces brutal competition globally can be considered a rocketship any more ...

> faces brutal competition globally

There is no competition to Uber in Toronto. It's so cheap and accessible it's almost competing with public transit at this point.

They are facing a ton of competition in their 3 largest markets. USA (Lyft 1bn+ funding), China (Didi 3bn+ funding) & Ola (couple 100mm's).

plus the impending lawsuits for wrongly classifying their employees as contractors... thats going to take years to play out and could hit their profitability really hard.

Ola?

IIRC it's OlaCab, in India.

That isn't exactly a counter to the OP's point. Just because they don't have competition in one global location does not mean they do not have global competition.

Depends on your interpretation of the word globally. I took it to mean 'everywhere' or 'pertaining to the whole world' like 'global variable'.

*51bn company.

Can you explain "Uber salaries tend to be pretty good (partially to make up for the stock being so high)" ? :)

If the stock is high, then stock options are unappealing. Basically just illiquid cash.

This is assuming they won't grow much past $50bn right?

That's a given, isn't it? They are nowhere even worth that much today. Private company valuations aren't based on rationality, they are based on emotion.

Uber's current backwards valuation is capturing all speculation about future robot fairies that'll save them in the 5-year future (which always seems to be 5 years out, doesn't it?).

For some reason, the funding geniuses behind Uber seem to assume no other company on the planet can mass produce shared purpose autonomous vehicles at scale? That's just crazy thought. There are four companies today that could entirely wipe out Uber if they wanted to, but other companies are playing a longer game.

Don't compete where the market is, compete where the market is going to be. First mover advantage isn't a thing anymore. First to sustainable scalability combined with emotional grounding is the new advantage.

I was with you until the thing about four companies that could wipe out Uber. Which companies and how?

Lyft, Sidecar, Haxi?

Tesla, Google, Apple, ? somebody else.. oh that company that retrofits self-driving kit onto existing cars maybe?

Yes, I wish more legit companies would move to Oakland

Moraga is rural? In what sense?

Compared to Fremont, I guess...