Serious question: Who is getting hurt by Google driving people to work on buses. It seems like this reduces congestion, and helps the environment, which is good for everyone. What am I missing here?
The issue was they're using public bus stops. It's not hard to picture why it's demeaning to be standing at the public infrastructure and see a fancy shuttle come and pick up "Google People" while you're left waiting to ride with the proletariat. Especially demeaning when the shuttle is in the way of the real bus.
Imagine if the NYC subway had a special car for Wall Street workers that was much more comfortable.
I get that it may be demeaning but that analogy doesn't really work. It would be like the NYC Subway didn't go to Wall Street at all, and the banks built their own subway for their workers which ran from an NYC Subway station.
How is this any different from someone driving a 2017 Lexus versus a 1990 Toyota? Both may be a reflection of the income one receives. Both take up the same public infrastructure of the road and parking spaces.
You seemed to imply in your original comment that taking the Google bus versus not taking the Google bus boils down to a class issue of "haves" and "have nots", so I was trying to illustrate that no matter what that class distinction would still exist.
If the Wall Street workers paid for it, what would it matter? The sense of entitlement is astounding. Whenever someone drives by in a Ferrari I don't suddenly feel entitled to throw rocks just because they aren't letting me drive it.
Want to ride the Google bus? Get a job at Google. If people studied code with as much interest as they study the Kardashians, perhaps more could move up the ladder.
The solution is that everyone at Google should drive their cars one day per week to simply illustrate the value of the Google bus. Perhaps all those workers could just stop buying things for a week and see how badly those people wish they were back.
The point isn't the existence of the shuttle, it's the freeloading on public infrastructure. Google was removing paying transit riders while using public transit infrastructure and inconveniencing the public. Oh and rent near a Google shuttle stop suddenly surged because of demand from Google employees. Quite literally a recipe for creating discontent in a neighborhood.
Google got the message and made a large donation, but like most things the damage was easy to make and hard to recover from.
And the solution is simple--Google (and any other company running a shuttle that uses public stops) should pay for what its using.
SF Muni is subsidized and severely overloaded. Taking some riders away doesn't hurt the system, it helps it cope.
If BART somehow ran a subway out to those neighborhoods, the rent there would be even higher. Having a reliable transit system is a very valuable amenity that most of the city lacks.
I'm guessing it's just hostility towards high-tech people in general.
My old Honda Civic eventually died one day. I had to take it to the scrapyard, fixing it would have cost thousands of dollars. The old guy at the scrapyard gave me a good look and said something like "so, you guys went public today, eh?" I could tell he was not in good shape (financially or otherwise), and he had some level of resentment towards what he perceived as entitled tech workers addicted to "easy money".
I didn't even try to explain that I'm by no means rich, I had to scrap the car because it was solidly dead, and yes, I was going to get a new car, but it was going to be a Civic, just like the old one. Not a Lamborghini. But there was a divide there, a whole set of wrong assumptions, that didn't seem I could bridge in a few minutes of conversation.
There are a whole lot of people in this area who are scraping by on tiny wages, and a lot of them don't think very highly of the high tech industry.
In that respect — traffic congestion — I think the buses are a good thing. But there's definitely a down-side.
Gentrification, for example, though usually regarded as a net, long-term win, is short-term very painful for many people. Families that have lived somewhere for years, and communities that have grown up over generations, are being shredded as property-owners rent-seek.
Now, yes, it's their property to do with as they will (subject to their remaining in compliance with the law), but I will continue to point out that there are some very interesting discussions to be had in the areas where the sets "things that are legal" and "things that are moral" don't intersect.
I was on a date with a woman — a high school teacher — Sunday night who lives in a rent controlled building in the Mission. (Aside: I'm not looking to start a debate over rent control, so please don't go there.) She told me that her landlord has been delaying depositing her rent checks until after their due date, in order to "establish" a pattern of habitual late-payment, which, presumably, he hopes to use in some later eviction action.
Does that kind of behavior — apparently increasingly common — qualify as hurting people? Because, if her landlord were able to kick (or buy) her out, he would be raising the rent on her apartment by over $4000/month, based on the price her new neighbors are paying for an identical unit (again, please don't turn this into a debate over rent control), and pretty much the only people who can afford that are making Silly Valley tech salaries — and probably doing so with roommates, at that.
A teacher, who teaches the children of San Franciscans, certainly can't afford ~$6000/month, not at SFUSD pay, so let's favor a couple of kids who work in Mountain View or Palo Alto, and have no expenses except rent and leisure activities? How does that make sense, again?
Maybe teachers shouldn't take jobs in areas they can't afford. Serious point. The market would then have to raise the prices for that labor due to the shortage until the rate equals the amount a teacher would need to afford the area.
But the real issue is that supply and demand is distorted in the area: no new supply, increasing demand. It doesn't take an engineer to see where that equation leads. Add rent control on top of that and you have modern San Francisco.
Time to open the floodgates and build. What would be wrong with Korea style 60 story housing? The problem is that people want quaint B&B style neighborhoods yet they complain about everyone wanting to live there; rather than addressing the supply issue, they want to address the demand issue. You can't even replace a toilet without having to go through regulatory and permitting hell.
I am not sure what people in San Fran actually want. It seems like they want an amazing place that's affordable while lamenting that everyone else wants to live there too.
I do take some comfort in the fact that this is one thing that can't be blamed on Republicans.
But there are many groups of people involved. Not everyone angry at tech workers, or at rising costs of living, are also anti-more housing. That's completely nonsensical. There are many people in San Fran and there are many different agendas.
For the nth time, it's not really about that. It's politics. It was an effective symbol for tenants rights activists to latch onto to get attention for eviction protections, which weren't going to momentum otherwise without a nice, sexy controversial symbol that would attract national media.
