All the logic being thrown around here is correct. These buses exist because the municipal governments of the Bay Area, as well as the state itself, has spent decades abdicating their responsibility to develop transportation infrastructure. There was no reasonable way tech giants like Google or Facebook could possibly hope to fix MUNI, Caltrain, etc, and so an exclusive (and inefficient) network of buses was the only solution. It still beats putting cars on the freeway.

The importance of the anti-Google-bus sentiment has to be read between the lines. The newfound tech wealth of the latest SF tech boom has not floated all boats. The techno-elites get richer while everyone else gets poorer. This goes beyond the typical frustrations about gentrification and demographic displacement - this is really just a highly localized version of what HN itself likes to complain about: the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

The causes of this are complicated. The protesters are wrong in that tech workers are not the root cause of their misery. The tech workers are also wrong in that this isn't idle whining - this is the beacon around a very large social and political failure that pervades every minute or every day life in San Francisco.

cletus has a better explanation about why this whole thing is screwed up. He's also explained why I GTFO of SF and into NYC instead.

For instance, just changing 'sign' to 'symbol' in the title would by itself go a long ways towards making the whole article seem more reasonable.

But I do think it's pretty reasonable to complain about Google's tax avoidance activities. We've got a setup here where large companies pay dramatically less in taxes than small companies; Maybe it's just that I run a small company, but that seems pretty unfair to me.

But not the roads of San Francisco.

During dotbomb 1.0, if you worked in Mountain View or Cupertino, you had to really want to live in San Francisco if you were to stomach the commute. The bus system allows these companies to use SF as a sort of dormitory community and as a result brings in a lot of people who perhaps wouldn't otherwise be here. (Anecdotally, you hear about HR departments setting up new employees up in SF apartments on the bus routes.)

The real issue is that the Valley wants to host all these major corporate headquarters, but absolutely refuses to build housing for their younger workers. Perhaps many Google employees would prefer living in Mountain View if they could.

That is a good point.

>Perhaps many Google employees would prefer living in Mountain View if they could.

Most of the googlers I know live in mountain view; and when 'affordable' is defined by a google programmer salary? there is plenty of affordable local housing in mountain view and further south. If you work at google (I mean, as a full employee, and not a contractor doing menial tasks) living in Mountain View is easy and affordable (especially compared to living in SF.)

>The real issue is that the Valley wants to host all these major corporate headquarters, but absolutely refuses to build housing for their younger workers.

Here, it sounds like you are implying that housing is somehow cheaper or more available in SF than in the south bay. The south bay is building more apartments (mostly medium-density three-story apartments/condos, pretty much perfect for those 'young workers' and priced reasonably, for someone on a google salary.)

I mean, yeah, demand is outstripping the rate we build 'em, but we're trying.

It's worth nothing that many different companies run bus services in SF. The busses aren't prominently labeled so the locals refer to them all as "Google Busses".

You can safely blame this on city government. They've flat out refused to allow it any time it's been brought up. One example: http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/local/south_ba...

But doesn't San Francisco benefit from the tech people who live there? They have lots of spending power to support the local businesses, which creates local jobs. They pay sales taxes and real estate taxes, which supports the city government, schools, etc. Since most of the tech workers are young, they pose only a small burden on the school and health care systems. It would seem like a win for SF to have them there.

It seems to me like this should be in the interest of the employees as well. After all, what if I want to take a bus somewhere else on the weekend, or want to go somewhere with friends?

Maybe these aspects (community integration, public transit in general) are not part of your personal objective function, but that does not make the uproar ridiculous. It just explains why you personally do not care about it.

Google isn't paying for the roads or the right to use the public bus stops. It's taxpayer money; not every taxpayer (an aging lady, for instance) might want their money to go towards making a Google Bus possible.

Google and its employees are taxpayers. Google pays corporate income tax to California. The fuel Google buys to run the buses is taxed by California; fuel taxes typically go (or at least are intended to go) towards funding roads. Google employees pay state income tax, sales tax and SF real estate taxes.

And are you sure private companies don't pay to use the public bus stops? These stops are presumably owned by SF, so if they wanted to charge Google to use them they could easily do so.

That gives them right to use the roads. In this case, the Google bus is no different than other private bus or shuttle.

I don't really buy this argument. That's why all nations have and pay governments and governments should care about providing an overall public transportation system that works. That's why employees and companies pay taxes. I can totally understand that companies want to provide for their employees to do better work, but improving the public on their own is definitely outside of the scope for most companies.

If we wanted companies to fix the infrastructure themselves, we'd get a situation kinda like in Snow Crash.