And since jrockway deleted his comment where he was "99.9% sure that Google has permission", without any evidence of course, and then when presented with evidence, doesn't even read it and posts a sarcastic response to a youtube video, I'll take the time to note here, there is plenty more news out there reporting the same thing, that Google does not have permission, this doesn't mean they don't have some hidden deal hence why I still think it'd be valuable to get a MUNI spokesman to comment on the matter, but you can see in the archives of their meeting there are numerous mentions of citizens questioning if Google has permission:
Hey, I agree with you. I don't live in San Francisco. I don't live in California. I don't even live on the West Coast. I don't work for Google's transportation team. I don't work for Muni. Why am I even commenting? More speculation isn't helping anything in this already overheated thread.
I did like my sarcastic YouTube link, though. In that respect, I regret nothing :)
Thanks for your reply. As someone who does live in San Francisco, and has lived here for a decade, I would like to encourage discussion of this topic, as I think both sides of the issue can be doing more talking about solutions, rather than the tech world which is mostly ignoring the problem, and the protestors whom don't have a clear message or agenda outlined.
Sure. What is the problem for residents? In my experience, cities are basically vehicle chaos from 6AM until 11PM. Taxis unload in the bike lane. Black cars block the street waiting for their flaky passenger. UPS trucks, parked six-abreast, unload Amazon Prime packages. Traffic blocks the intersection as the light turns red, and much honking ensues. Crazy homeless guy pushes his cart of possessions the wrong way down the bike lane.
Certainly, having big buses pulling in and out of traffic doesn't help speed up the flow of traffic at that precise instant in time. But the situation was already pretty bad, and if you're taking hundreds of individual cars off the road, that's a step in the right direction.
(Public transit won't work because the jobs are all in the Middle Of Fucking Nowhere. Try walking to the Google campus some time. It's in the middle of a swamp, separated from the mainland by a jam-packed freeway.)
So I'm not sure what the solution is. Move Google to San Francisco? Sure. But then the protesters are going to complain about how they watched 5 N trains go by without stopping because they're full. San Francisco was never designed to be "the big city" (that's San Jose, right?), it organically grew. People liked it a lot, they moved there, and now there are too many people that want to live there, and not enough space for them. That's a problem, but it sounds like a problem that can only be solved by not wanting to live there.
Shifting blame on to other offenders doesn't take away from the problems created by the buses. Given an Apple bus picks up at one of my corners, and a Google bus at the other, I often encounter the buses and their employees. Sometimes, the two buses need to be in the same place at the same time, this means either us MUNI riders have to wait for the corporate bus riders to get on and get moving or that the corporate bus blocks traffic while it waits for the MUNI bus to move.
As for the Google Campus, I have taken public transit to it, it's not hard, can take either SamTrans or CalTrain + a walk. That's not to say it's a solution though.
The only real solution to the real problem (increased rent prices causing gentrification) is to increase the housing supply and reduce demand on that supply. Google has some levers it can pull to do that (build dorms, invest in real estate projects, etc.)
I think the problem lies with Northern California's chronic NIMBY-ism, which makes it impossible to build infrastructure other than roads. (Let me know when BART gets extended down the peninsula.)
The deeper issue is that people choose San Francisco because of the relatively low density, which does make for rather pleasant neighborhoods.
High-density low-income housing projects have been proven a failure in every other major city, so I'm not sure that's a solution either. Most cities have already town them down, settling on San Francisco levels of density. As an occasional visitor, I certainly find it nice. (Though taking the bus to the Richmond District from downtown is quite an ordeal. 30 minutes to go like two miles!?)
There really is no easy answer; I don't think anyone knows what to do, and I don't think NorCal has the risk appetite to try something experimental. That's the problem.
(My solution would be to make San Jose more appealing to the tech-worker demographic. It doesn't have the charming hills or coastal location that San Francisco does, but it is pretty close to a lot of jobs. I would consider living there if I moved to the Bay Area. It's even biking-distance to Google, and it's not quite the suburban wasteland that Mountain View is.)
http://archives.sfmta.com/cms/cmta/httpwww.sfmta.comcmscmtaS... http://archives.sfmta.com/cms/cmta/SFMTABoardNovember62007mi... etc...