Why I Dislike the Google Buses

If I lived in San Francisco I might very well join the Google bus protestors.  I’d stand with them in the street, in the dark early mornings, and block one of the many huge anonymous buses which Google provides for thousands of its employees, to give them a free ride to Silicon Valley.

I’d hold up my sign, like the ones I’ve seen on TV: “Stop the Tech Gentrifiction of SF” and “Warning: Illegal Use of Public Infrastructure.”

It’s a small group that mounts these occasional public protests, no match for the mighty Google and the mighty tech world that has changed the face of San Francisco.  The buses are only temporarily slowed, not stopped.  Of course the protestors know that cities and economies are always changing.  They just want folks to know the cost of those changes.

San Francisco has actively encouraged more tech companies to move in, along with tech workers, often young, who like city living.  But many still have to work an hour away in Silicon Valley, and Google was the first major tech company to offer free buses.  Now many companies do. 

With all the new buildings, and all the new workers, SF neighborhoods are changing overnight.   The minority population is shrinking dramatically; Asian American and African American renters, a long historical presence in SF, are vanishing.  As rents have skyrocketed, the elderly, artists, young non-techies, families, are forced out.  Many landlords are getting around rent control and leases with very questionable evictions.  More and more service workers, the folks who make a city run, can no longer afford to live in the city, but commute from farther and farther away.  The public schools offer no free buses to the teachers who come from 2 hours away to teach in SF.  Same with the garbage collectors and the workers at all those coffee shops that fuel the techies.

The buses are just a symbol, of course, of all these sudden and sad changes.  There’s nothing wrong with buses.  They’re a good thing, keeping thousands of workers from clogging the roads and clogging the air with their own cars, keeping lanes open for other drivers.  I’ve always been in favor of vanpools and rideshares.   Why protest bus riders?

Because I dislike how those big fancy plush buses just muscle their way around the city with no awareness of their impact.  The companies didn’t talk with the city, got no permits, paid no fees. They just showed up, and started picking up their passengers.  And they pick them up at the bus stops that the city built and maintains for the public city-owned Muni buses. 

That’s what galls me.  They just pull into the Muni bus stops.  Sometimes the public buses the rest of us use aren’t able to get past the behemoths to pull up to the curb.  And the Google buses are much wider than the Muni buses.  No problem if only they would stick to the wide streets.  But no, they go through the little neighborhoods picking up techies and blocking the way.  Everyone else, the workers and the kids going to school, they have to wait, they pay a fare, and they get no anonymous free ride with a toilet.

Google’s attitude reminds me of the Republican outraged victim comments after Obama said during the election, “You didn’t build that.”  You didn’t build the bridges and the system of low cost government grants and farm subsidies.  And the bus stops.  Republicans and Google act like they just arose one day fully formed and fully independent.  And fully arrogant.

(Just last week the city finally reached an agreement with the tech companies to pay a very paltry fee to use the bus stops.  And maybe to think about using only the wider streets and having the poor weak young workers walk a block or two for their free ride. I can’t help thinking the protests forced the city’s hand.)

My imagined protests sound a little petty, really.  I’m probably just jealous these workers are smart enough to get nice perks like a ride to work, not to mention free fresh food and rock climbing walls and dry cleaning on premise when they get to Mountain View.

Poor me, and poor San Franciscans, experiencing finally the dramatic income inequality and class warfare, the giant anonymous privilege and arrogance of the 1% that has plagued cities around the world forever.

But I’d still probably go out a few mornings and protest.  Then I’d go home and fire up my Apple computer and check my Facebook page and look for something on Google.  Thanks, tech workers, for making my life easier and more interesting.

Copyright © 2014 Deborah Streeter