Wow this is badly written. It's almost a stream-of-consciousness serious of unrelated anecdotes.
The article only touches the main point that has caused any real opposition to the private buses: real estate prices in San Francisco.
SF is almost a schizophrenic city. It's a mix of the cultural revolution of the 60s (and the offshoots from that), hipsters and "tech elite" (to use the article's populist label).
A significant portion of SF (and, let's face it, the Valley) wants things to stay the way they've always been. This means no high-density building, they want rent control (a disaster from an overall housing point of view), a desire for the city to remain relatively affordable (that ship has sailed), etc.
Some want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the money the tech sector brings in but they still want nothing to change.
Economics is a bit like water. It'll find the leaks. Terrible public transport to and in SF? Well, that's almost be design to keep people out. The solution? Private bus companies of course.
I couldn't work in the Valley personally. The Valley is expensive suburbia that makes one car-dependent. Living in SF and spending 2-3 hours a day on the bus? No way in hell. I'd go insane.
The Valley's position of tech-dominance is largely historical. This is far from guaranteed. The biggest threat is the difficulty on businesses to grow in size (in or out of SF) and the increasing lack of affordable housing, well, anywhere.
Compare this to NYC where I live in the city and have a 5 minute walk to work. Sure this isn't cheap but if you worked in NYC you could, say, live in Queens/Brooklyn. If you want a house, you can live in NJ, Westchester or Long Island and get to the city in <45 minutes for cheaper than you can buy a house in, Santa Clara or Mountain View. And you'll get good public transport to boot.
Plus if you live in NYC you don't need a car (many still maintain cars from what I see in SF).
IMHO NYC has done a lot of things right. You pay NYC income tax but you get a lot for your money. The MTA which runs 24x7. Cheap cabs. A responsive police force. And total NYC taxes are probably lower than CA taxes now too.
That's an insightful writeup on the life in SF, but I didn't understand what private buses have to do with real estate prices. Isn't it just bad public policy?
My city (and many others) allow private inter-state buses to pick up passengers from certain designated locations late in the evening (so it doesn't cause a traffic jam). When implemented correctly, this is /fair/ because the service is accessible and (more-or-less) useful to everyone. That's taxpayer money (roads, public congestion) being put to good use.
There are also lots of private company buses that pick up passengers from their homes and drop them at their place of work (which is probably a factory very far away), that don't even require explicit permission. If they weren't early morning/ late evening buses, and caused a lot of congestion, the public would certainly complain. The company would have to make amends to make everyone feel more comfortable.
From what I've read, the Google Bus is the worst kind of private bus. It's masked as a public bus, and uses the regular bus stops. Yet, it's designed in a very unfriendly manner and does not indicate where it's going. In other words, it's not easily accessible to everyone. And people naturally complain because of the rift it creates in society.
There are even building rules in every city: one city is so particular that its buildings must look friendly that everything is pink! (look up Jaipur). Good public policy is about using taxpayer money to make public spaces/services as friendly and equitable as possible.
That said, I don't deny that there might be terrible public transport in SF. In which case, the solution is not to throw private buses out the window (I've already stated that they're not fundamentally unworkable), but rather to pick the points of criticism and make amends.
> "but I didn't understand what private buses have to do with real estate prices."
It's pretty simple. These companies are located very far outside of the city, but a substantial portion of their employee base prefer urban lifestyles. So companies run these bus lines into the city in order to attract said employees.
The normal housing demand in San Francisco is proportionate to the number of jobs in San Francisco. Now the housing demand is all the jobs in San Francisco and all the jobs in the Valley - and that's a lot of extra jobs. By running these bus lines Google, Facebook, et al have successfully unloaded a lot of the housing demand from their local areas into the city, raising prices sharply.
It doesn't look anything like a public bus. It looks like a sleek black monolith on wheels, with no markings or indications where it's going. Other private companies advertise themselves (Yahoo) or are more obviously what they are. But Google goes out of its way to make the whole affair look sinister.
It's true that it does use some corners in SF that are also used by public transportation. Those places are guaranteed not to be blocked by parking, and they are usually near subway stops and other public transport hubs. I don't know if they have a deal with the city to allow this, or if they even need one.
What's crazy is how expensive the San Francisco suburbs are. You can buy a house in Pehlam for $500k walking distance from a train that'll get you into midtown in 30 min (leaving every 15 min during peak times). Westchester towns are built around the train stations (no huge parking intimidating pedestrians), so you can take the train everywhere. Greenwich is a few stations up, with all the WASP-y shopping places, Port Chester has the Costco, etc. Everything is walkable from a train station.
> "And total NYC taxes are probably lower than CA taxes now too."
My total overall tax rate dropped moving from SF to NYC (I pay the NY City tax). Looking at the enormous difference in infrastructure and services between the two cities, one has to wonder what California does with all that tax money.
My latest theory is that there is a giant tax money incinerator somewhere in the state. It is the only feasible explanation for how one can get so little for so much money.
I just went from Lower East Side, Manhattan to living in Mitte, Berlin. You should see what it's like around here. There's simply no comparison in terms of rent, public transport, safety, etc.
The article only touches the main point that has caused any real opposition to the private buses: real estate prices in San Francisco.
SF is almost a schizophrenic city. It's a mix of the cultural revolution of the 60s (and the offshoots from that), hipsters and "tech elite" (to use the article's populist label).
A significant portion of SF (and, let's face it, the Valley) wants things to stay the way they've always been. This means no high-density building, they want rent control (a disaster from an overall housing point of view), a desire for the city to remain relatively affordable (that ship has sailed), etc.
Some want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the money the tech sector brings in but they still want nothing to change.
Economics is a bit like water. It'll find the leaks. Terrible public transport to and in SF? Well, that's almost be design to keep people out. The solution? Private bus companies of course.
I couldn't work in the Valley personally. The Valley is expensive suburbia that makes one car-dependent. Living in SF and spending 2-3 hours a day on the bus? No way in hell. I'd go insane.
The Valley's position of tech-dominance is largely historical. This is far from guaranteed. The biggest threat is the difficulty on businesses to grow in size (in or out of SF) and the increasing lack of affordable housing, well, anywhere.
Compare this to NYC where I live in the city and have a 5 minute walk to work. Sure this isn't cheap but if you worked in NYC you could, say, live in Queens/Brooklyn. If you want a house, you can live in NJ, Westchester or Long Island and get to the city in <45 minutes for cheaper than you can buy a house in, Santa Clara or Mountain View. And you'll get good public transport to boot.
Plus if you live in NYC you don't need a car (many still maintain cars from what I see in SF).
IMHO NYC has done a lot of things right. You pay NYC income tax but you get a lot for your money. The MTA which runs 24x7. Cheap cabs. A responsive police force. And total NYC taxes are probably lower than CA taxes now too.