10 ms·

Buses for Tech Workers in San Francisco Will Pay Fee

36 points by brnstz 13y ago

girvo 13y ago
As someone in an entirely different country (and lives in a state where they've decided a 30% increase in public transport prices every year is acceptable and not idiotic...) can someone explain to me why there is such a fuss around companies making their employees lives easier by taking care of transport for them? Heck in some industries, they give you a car, and yet I've never seen anything like this before. I've read a whole stack about this issue but still can't seem to make it click.
- fiatmoney 13y ago
  They are protesting the people in the busses, not the busses. The protesters are angry that there are relatively prosperous individuals in "their" neighborhoods at all; they would rather it be an affordable slum than be priced out.
  - m_ke 13y ago
    It sounds to me like the people who gentrified the area are now complaining about getting priced out of "their" neighborhood. I expect the same to start happening in Williamsburg once the yuppies start moving into all of the new condos.
    - jrockway 13y ago
      Williamsburg is already pretty expensive, even for the tech elite. (Well, I couldn't afford it when I looked a couple years ago, anyway :)
    - yazmeya 13y ago
      In Williamsburg, we're a few years past that point. The new "in" thing is to complain about being priced out of Bushwick. At this rate, neighborhoods all the way down to Kennedy Airport should be fully hipsterized by 2020 or so.
    - throwaway28483 13y ago
      the gentrifiers got gentrified out of williamsburg, and most of BKs western neighborhoods, years ago. average 1 bedroom prices are already at about $3400/month in williamsburg[1]. [1]http://www.mns.com/brooklyn_rental_market_report http://www.mns.com/brooklyn_rental_market_report
- thaumasiotes 13y ago
  http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/09/gray-defeats-fenty-what-does-it-mean-for-the-city/63042/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/09/gray-def... There's not a fuss around companies providing transport to their employees. There's a fuss around the employees, who are hated by "locals", living nearby. As described in the linked article, gentrification battles are phrased in other terms, because you lose PR points for saying "get out because, um, we hate you". Threads about the buses on HN in the past have seen a lot of self-righteous grandstanding about "but the buses are breaking traffic laws!" -- completely disregarding the fact that everyone posting in the thread, San Francisco residents or not, breaks traffic laws every day.
  - x0054 13y ago
    This is an honest question, that maybe someone in SF could answer for me. I have been in SF several times, and I didn't like the city all that much, but that's just a personal preference. But in that area their are so many nice cities to live in. My personal favorite is Santa Cruise, but there a ton of other great cities around the bay. If San Fransisco natives hate the tech workers so much, why stay? I live in San Diego, so it might be just a clash of cultures. But I honesty would like to know, why does the tech community find SF so appealing. Is it just a function of that's were all the VC money is? Or am I missing something?
    - w1ntermute 13y ago
      Silicon Valley is seen by young people as really boring suburbia with no culture. San Francisco, on the other hand, has a long tradition of being hip. That's why tech is shifting from the valley to SF.
    - potatolicious 13y ago
      San Francisco is the only thing resembling a dense urban core in the area. There are many other nice places in the Bay Area, but very few of which will afford you the archetypical car-less transit-centric lifestyle that many people desire, while maintaining commutability to suburban offices. Many places are anti-urban by choice. At the risk of being a bit flippant, it's not that people find SF so appealing, but that they find everywhere closer to work unbearable. By any measure I can think of SF is a deeply dysfunctional city with incredible failures in basic quality of life - but it is the only city around that even begins to offer a lifestyle that many people want.
- Aloisius 13y ago
  As someone in an entirely different country (and lives in a state where they've decided a 30% increase in public transport prices every year is acceptable and not idiotic...) can someone explain to me why there is such a fuss around companies making their employees lives easier by taking care of transport for them? It is a rather complicated situation that involves a number of factors: If Google was an SF company (or had a large SF campus that these employees could work at), the city would at least be collecting taxes from them that could be used to support all the public infrastructure that these employees and these buses use. On top of that, it is horribly inefficient to have people commute 40 miles (~64 km) to their office. There is certainly some animosity towards these kinds of commuters who often spend very little time actually in San Francisco, pay little to no city taxes, but want to live here. But when it comes right down to it, Google pays people extremely high wages that are a bit out of whack with what local companies pay which drives up rent in San Francisco. The thought goes that if the Google buses end, at least some portion of the employees would find it too big of a hassle to commute and actually move near where their office is. You hear arguments about gentrification, but there are plenty of fully gentrified neighborhoods in San Francisco with people who would be happy to see these commuters go away. This is about rent prices, housing shortages and a general feeling that these commuters have no skin in the game. Of course, really we need more housing stock too, but that's a more difficult problem.
  - ahomescu1 13y ago
    > On top of that, it is horribly inefficient to have people commute 40 miles (~64 km) to their office. There is certainly some animosity towards these kinds of commuters who often spend very little time actually in San Francisco, pay little to no city taxes, but want to live here. This is arguable. Those people probably live in SF because they want to spend their evenings and weekends in the city, therefore spending all their money there (including on basic living expenses, like groceries). Most people don't really spend any money during work hours (except maybe for lunch, but that's a moot point when talking about Google/Apple/Facebook). Also, the two city taxes I can think of are property taxes (which are rolled into rents anyway) and sales taxes (which are paid whenever they buy something inside the city). I don't see how commuters don't pay city taxes.
- eob 13y ago
  A variety of factors -- some strange rent laws intended (ironically) to protect tenants, lack of new units, overabundance of millionaires -- have resulted in a situation where housing in San Francisco is rapidly exceeding a price where ordinary people can afford it. If you're not making 100k+ per year, you will have trouble finding a nice one bedroom home, let alone more bedrooms. At the same time, many of the newly rich CS folks don't actually work in the city -- they work an hour away in the valley. So companies have provided the awesome service -- as you mention -- of running busses. The buses sometimes use bus stops reserved for city buses. That itself isn't such a big deal. But within this specific context, the buses have become a symbol of the class strife in the area. From the perspective of long-time SF residents: Here you have private buses illegally stopping in a zone reserved for the public, paid for by the taxes of the long-time residents quickly getting priced out of their own [rented] homes, which each day take their new neighbors to jobs that pay the wages, inflated by the economies of scale that come with the internet, that are the cause of the meteoric housing price rise. From the perspective of San Francisco's nouveau riche: real estate is just another market, and SF is a market undergoing rapid change in which there will be winners and losers, and while it sucks to be a loser, that is inevitable as the "rich" and "not rich" zones of housing move around geographically, as they inevitably always will. The stance of most people on both sides is, of course, somewhere in the middle, empathetic to the situation both sides find themselves in.
  - neilk 13y ago
    eob is correct, more or less. The anger isn't about the buses; it's about the evictions. The buses are just a symbol that attracts the activists' attention. (The activists are mostly transplants too, living out some fantasy that they're fighting capitalism, but whatever.) Nevertheless, here's why it's so vivid: San Francisco is a city of extreme wealth contrasts in a nation of extreme wealth contrasts. And many young tech workers want to live in places like the Mission, which are gentrifying but traditionally working class, ethnic neighborhoods, with a strong tradition of bohemia too. So, picture this: a line of zillionaire white kids in geek t-shirts and laptop backpacks, waiting on a street corner that is caked with human filth and stinking in the sunshine. They are surrounded by ethnic (often undocumented) immigrants, and homeless people limping by, sometimes with untreated open wounds. Then a giant black monolith of a bus swoops down on the corner, releasing a whiff of air-conditioned comfort as the doors open, and whisks all those kids far, far away, to their playground offices. True story: in the early days of the Google Bus, the contracting company sometimes ran out of buses. So they would have to dispatch other large vehicles instead. You cannot imagine the burning looks I got stepping into a stretch limousine on 16th and Mission.
- mcantelon 13y ago
  Perhaps the east coast elite want to see the public associate west coast tech, rather than Wall Street, with economic oppression so eastern media has focussed on relatively minor protest incidents against the tech industry.
- babesh 13y ago
  It's the f you, I've got money, I can do whatever I want mentality that some people don't like. Illegally using bus stops, threatening to move out of the city if your capital gains taxes aren't lowered, etc... It pure power play that shows that tech is no more enlightened than say Wall Street despite pretensions otherwise.
  - babesh 13y ago
    The liberal mentality was that everyone is in it together and if not make it so. The libertarian mentality is to get what you want and if not change things so you do. It's a clash of us vs them and two philosophies advocating change. The Bay Area was traditionally liberal but many prominent techies are heavily pushing a libertarian agenda. They are backing the Democrats in power and are slowly shifting the agenda toward libertarian ideals. The liberal mentality would be for the companies to back improvements to public transportation. The libertarian approach is private buses.
    - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
      Very few techies are actually libertarian; I would hazard to guess they are much less than average, definitely less than rural farmers and other less-government tea partiers. Techies are overwhelmingly liberal, in the same way that most young college educated people are. Private buses are being used because they work environmentally and economically. There is nothing libertarian about this, and Google runs shuttles from the CalTrain station also.
      - babesh 13y ago
        It's not that techies as a group are libertarian but that there are many powerful techies who are libertarian. They don't work environmentally. Move the offices closer to where they live or live closer to work. That's like arguing that improving plane efficiency is good for those who want to live in Malibu and commute to Mountain View. Mountain View to SF eats up a LOT of gas. It's that Google and other companies benefit from groups being in the same office. Edit: the reality is that those buses are a perk because otherwise far fewer people would be able to live in SF since commuting to Mountain View, Cupertino, etc during rush hour takes untenable amounts of time. Thus to compete for tech workers who want to live in SF, companies are choosing to provide these buses.
- IvyMike 13y ago
  Shared pain. If I live in SF, I have to make a choice: take somewhat undesirable public transportation, drive my car in hellish traffic, or limit where I live (or where I work) to walking distance. So when there's someone who has a difference choice that is pretty pain-free, of course it pisses people off. There's a feeling that some of these employees would not live in SF if they did not have the partybus, and thus rents are higher, too.
manifesto 13y ago
“You allow these companies to illegally use public spaces.” The fix is either stop them from doing so, or make such action not illegal.
- ojbyrne 13y ago
  Or make them pay something towards the cost of those public spaces. Which is what the city is doing. I don't think $1 per bus per day is enough though really - it seems so obviously a token amount that I'm sure its going to go up.
  - jack-r-abbit 13y ago
    It is $1 per bus per stop. Basically, every time a bus pulls into a public bus stop, they pay $1. So at a minimum that will be $2 a day (pick up in the morning, drop off in evening). But I believe buses make multiple stops.
cbgb 13y ago
"In a small, cramped city, ...". San Francisco certainly may be small, but I've never known it to be cramped. I feel like its not being cramped is precisely the root of the problem for which "Google" buses erroneously take the blame.
prostoalex 13y ago
Sure hope the same standards are applied to charter tourist buses and those double-deckers that carry tourists back and forth.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
w1ntermute 13y ago
Read this book to understand the real problem and how to solve it: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0078XGJXO http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0078XGJXO
sprizzle 13y ago
$1 per stop is chump change for a company like Google. I don't see how this fee will create any difference for what the protestors are demanding. And this type of fee reminds me of a Freakonomics article that talked about how a daycare started charging parents a late fee of $3 and it had an unintended effect of increasing the frequency of late parents, because it rid the parents of moral guilt for being late. In a similar way, despite the fee, the big tech companies are going to continue doing what they're doing, but now they won't feel as bad for it. I don't see how this solves anything. Freakonomics article: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/chapters/0515-1st-levitt.html http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/chapters/0515-1st-le...
- pyoung 13y ago
  This is just for the pilot program. State law forbids the city from collecting more money than the estimated costs of the program.
- yetanotherphd 13y ago
  The purpose is to deal with the issues arising from the physical presence of the buses, and $1 a stop might be enough for that. The purpose is not to discourage the buses. If a person wishes to live in San Francisco, and work at Google, that is their right (assuming they can pay the rent). No one has any moral basis for trying to stop them from exercising that right, any more than I have a right to stop people from paying high prices for caviar so, that I can afford it.
- greglindahl 13y ago
  On the East Coast, it is not unusual to have private bus systems that share street stops and bus terminals with public buses. More public transit is a public good, and it's smart to keep fees low to keep people out of cars.
mphillips2357 13y ago
People in the comments below have already started complaining that the 1$ fee isn't enough. What would be enough anyway? What do you feel charging a fee is going to accomplish? The controversy surrounding these buses is just a symptom of the much larger problem, affordable housing development. If you want this issue to go anywhere, stop worrying so much about these buses full of people headed to work. Getting rid of the buses isn't going to solve the real problem. It's just something that people have latched on to.
blackjack48 13y ago
Putting aside the tangential issues of housing and gentrification, the real problem that needs to be addressed is street space. The Mission (where most of these buses are stopping) is a densely-populated urban environment, and yet residents often expect available on-street parking so they can use their basements as storage. Making bus stops and loading zones longer would go a long way towards reducing traffic problems in the area.
eob 13y ago
Meta-comment: did this post just get kickbanned [1] from the front page? I've heard it happens on HN but (as only an occasional commenter) I've never noticed it. It just went from #5 to nonexistent. [1] excuse the IRC lingo
- supersystem 13y ago
  "The controversy penalty can have a sudden and catastrophic effect on an article's ranking, causing an article to be ranked highly one minute and vanish when it hits 40 comments. If you've wondered why a popular article suddenly vanishes from the front page, controversy is a likely cause. " http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really-works.html http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...
spikels 13y ago
This is so stupid. The fee is equal to the cost of the program. Flushing $1.5 million a year down the toilet. Bizarrely this is a victory as the activists wanted the buses outlawed completely. SF will always be a second best city until it can face it's true demons: decisions made by ideology, that is, without regard to reality or even common sense. I want the tolerant SF of the late 1960s back - a bunch of dockworkers, businessmen, soldiers, factory workers who were cool enough to let freaks and weirdos take over their city. Now the cultural descendants of those freaks complain if you don't look, talk or get to work like them. This needs to stop.

36 points by brnstz 13y ago

girvo 13y ago

As someone in an entirely different country (and lives in a state where they've decided a 30% increase in public transport prices every year is acceptable and not idiotic...) can someone explain to me why there is such a fuss around companies making their employees lives easier by taking care of transport for them? Heck in some industries, they give you a car, and yet I've never seen anything like this before. I've read a whole stack about this issue but still can't seem to make it click.

fiatmoney 13y ago
They are protesting the people in the busses, not the busses. The protesters are angry that there are relatively prosperous individuals in "their" neighborhoods at all; they would rather it be an affordable slum than be priced out.
- m_ke 13y ago
  It sounds to me like the people who gentrified the area are now complaining about getting priced out of "their" neighborhood. I expect the same to start happening in Williamsburg once the yuppies start moving into all of the new condos.
  - jrockway 13y ago
    Williamsburg is already pretty expensive, even for the tech elite. (Well, I couldn't afford it when I looked a couple years ago, anyway :)
  - yazmeya 13y ago
    In Williamsburg, we're a few years past that point. The new "in" thing is to complain about being priced out of Bushwick. At this rate, neighborhoods all the way down to Kennedy Airport should be fully hipsterized by 2020 or so.
  - throwaway28483 13y ago
    the gentrifiers got gentrified out of williamsburg, and most of BKs western neighborhoods, years ago. average 1 bedroom prices are already at about $3400/month in williamsburg[1]. [1]http://www.mns.com/brooklyn_rental_market_report http://www.mns.com/brooklyn_rental_market_report
thaumasiotes 13y ago
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/09/gray-defeats-fenty-what-does-it-mean-for-the-city/63042/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/09/gray-def... There's not a fuss around companies providing transport to their employees. There's a fuss around the employees, who are hated by "locals", living nearby. As described in the linked article, gentrification battles are phrased in other terms, because you lose PR points for saying "get out because, um, we hate you". Threads about the buses on HN in the past have seen a lot of self-righteous grandstanding about "but the buses are breaking traffic laws!" -- completely disregarding the fact that everyone posting in the thread, San Francisco residents or not, breaks traffic laws every day.
- x0054 13y ago
  This is an honest question, that maybe someone in SF could answer for me. I have been in SF several times, and I didn't like the city all that much, but that's just a personal preference. But in that area their are so many nice cities to live in. My personal favorite is Santa Cruise, but there a ton of other great cities around the bay. If San Fransisco natives hate the tech workers so much, why stay? I live in San Diego, so it might be just a clash of cultures. But I honesty would like to know, why does the tech community find SF so appealing. Is it just a function of that's were all the VC money is? Or am I missing something?
  - w1ntermute 13y ago
    Silicon Valley is seen by young people as really boring suburbia with no culture. San Francisco, on the other hand, has a long tradition of being hip. That's why tech is shifting from the valley to SF.
  - potatolicious 13y ago
    San Francisco is the only thing resembling a dense urban core in the area. There are many other nice places in the Bay Area, but very few of which will afford you the archetypical car-less transit-centric lifestyle that many people desire, while maintaining commutability to suburban offices. Many places are anti-urban by choice. At the risk of being a bit flippant, it's not that people find SF so appealing, but that they find everywhere closer to work unbearable. By any measure I can think of SF is a deeply dysfunctional city with incredible failures in basic quality of life - but it is the only city around that even begins to offer a lifestyle that many people want.
Aloisius 13y ago
As someone in an entirely different country (and lives in a state where they've decided a 30% increase in public transport prices every year is acceptable and not idiotic...) can someone explain to me why there is such a fuss around companies making their employees lives easier by taking care of transport for them? It is a rather complicated situation that involves a number of factors: If Google was an SF company (or had a large SF campus that these employees could work at), the city would at least be collecting taxes from them that could be used to support all the public infrastructure that these employees and these buses use. On top of that, it is horribly inefficient to have people commute 40 miles (~64 km) to their office. There is certainly some animosity towards these kinds of commuters who often spend very little time actually in San Francisco, pay little to no city taxes, but want to live here. But when it comes right down to it, Google pays people extremely high wages that are a bit out of whack with what local companies pay which drives up rent in San Francisco. The thought goes that if the Google buses end, at least some portion of the employees would find it too big of a hassle to commute and actually move near where their office is. You hear arguments about gentrification, but there are plenty of fully gentrified neighborhoods in San Francisco with people who would be happy to see these commuters go away. This is about rent prices, housing shortages and a general feeling that these commuters have no skin in the game. Of course, really we need more housing stock too, but that's a more difficult problem.
- ahomescu1 13y ago
  > On top of that, it is horribly inefficient to have people commute 40 miles (~64 km) to their office. There is certainly some animosity towards these kinds of commuters who often spend very little time actually in San Francisco, pay little to no city taxes, but want to live here. This is arguable. Those people probably live in SF because they want to spend their evenings and weekends in the city, therefore spending all their money there (including on basic living expenses, like groceries). Most people don't really spend any money during work hours (except maybe for lunch, but that's a moot point when talking about Google/Apple/Facebook). Also, the two city taxes I can think of are property taxes (which are rolled into rents anyway) and sales taxes (which are paid whenever they buy something inside the city). I don't see how commuters don't pay city taxes.
eob 13y ago
A variety of factors -- some strange rent laws intended (ironically) to protect tenants, lack of new units, overabundance of millionaires -- have resulted in a situation where housing in San Francisco is rapidly exceeding a price where ordinary people can afford it. If you're not making 100k+ per year, you will have trouble finding a nice one bedroom home, let alone more bedrooms. At the same time, many of the newly rich CS folks don't actually work in the city -- they work an hour away in the valley. So companies have provided the awesome service -- as you mention -- of running busses. The buses sometimes use bus stops reserved for city buses. That itself isn't such a big deal. But within this specific context, the buses have become a symbol of the class strife in the area. From the perspective of long-time SF residents: Here you have private buses illegally stopping in a zone reserved for the public, paid for by the taxes of the long-time residents quickly getting priced out of their own [rented] homes, which each day take their new neighbors to jobs that pay the wages, inflated by the economies of scale that come with the internet, that are the cause of the meteoric housing price rise. From the perspective of San Francisco's nouveau riche: real estate is just another market, and SF is a market undergoing rapid change in which there will be winners and losers, and while it sucks to be a loser, that is inevitable as the "rich" and "not rich" zones of housing move around geographically, as they inevitably always will. The stance of most people on both sides is, of course, somewhere in the middle, empathetic to the situation both sides find themselves in.
- neilk 13y ago
  eob is correct, more or less. The anger isn't about the buses; it's about the evictions. The buses are just a symbol that attracts the activists' attention. (The activists are mostly transplants too, living out some fantasy that they're fighting capitalism, but whatever.) Nevertheless, here's why it's so vivid: San Francisco is a city of extreme wealth contrasts in a nation of extreme wealth contrasts. And many young tech workers want to live in places like the Mission, which are gentrifying but traditionally working class, ethnic neighborhoods, with a strong tradition of bohemia too. So, picture this: a line of zillionaire white kids in geek t-shirts and laptop backpacks, waiting on a street corner that is caked with human filth and stinking in the sunshine. They are surrounded by ethnic (often undocumented) immigrants, and homeless people limping by, sometimes with untreated open wounds. Then a giant black monolith of a bus swoops down on the corner, releasing a whiff of air-conditioned comfort as the doors open, and whisks all those kids far, far away, to their playground offices. True story: in the early days of the Google Bus, the contracting company sometimes ran out of buses. So they would have to dispatch other large vehicles instead. You cannot imagine the burning looks I got stepping into a stretch limousine on 16th and Mission.
mcantelon 13y ago
Perhaps the east coast elite want to see the public associate west coast tech, rather than Wall Street, with economic oppression so eastern media has focussed on relatively minor protest incidents against the tech industry.
babesh 13y ago
It's the f you, I've got money, I can do whatever I want mentality that some people don't like. Illegally using bus stops, threatening to move out of the city if your capital gains taxes aren't lowered, etc... It pure power play that shows that tech is no more enlightened than say Wall Street despite pretensions otherwise.
- babesh 13y ago
  The liberal mentality was that everyone is in it together and if not make it so. The libertarian mentality is to get what you want and if not change things so you do. It's a clash of us vs them and two philosophies advocating change. The Bay Area was traditionally liberal but many prominent techies are heavily pushing a libertarian agenda. They are backing the Democrats in power and are slowly shifting the agenda toward libertarian ideals. The liberal mentality would be for the companies to back improvements to public transportation. The libertarian approach is private buses.
  - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
    Very few techies are actually libertarian; I would hazard to guess they are much less than average, definitely less than rural farmers and other less-government tea partiers. Techies are overwhelmingly liberal, in the same way that most young college educated people are. Private buses are being used because they work environmentally and economically. There is nothing libertarian about this, and Google runs shuttles from the CalTrain station also.
    - babesh 13y ago
      It's not that techies as a group are libertarian but that there are many powerful techies who are libertarian. They don't work environmentally. Move the offices closer to where they live or live closer to work. That's like arguing that improving plane efficiency is good for those who want to live in Malibu and commute to Mountain View. Mountain View to SF eats up a LOT of gas. It's that Google and other companies benefit from groups being in the same office. Edit: the reality is that those buses are a perk because otherwise far fewer people would be able to live in SF since commuting to Mountain View, Cupertino, etc during rush hour takes untenable amounts of time. Thus to compete for tech workers who want to live in SF, companies are choosing to provide these buses.
IvyMike 13y ago
Shared pain. If I live in SF, I have to make a choice: take somewhat undesirable public transportation, drive my car in hellish traffic, or limit where I live (or where I work) to walking distance. So when there's someone who has a difference choice that is pretty pain-free, of course it pisses people off. There's a feeling that some of these employees would not live in SF if they did not have the partybus, and thus rents are higher, too.

manifesto 13y ago

“You allow these companies to illegally use public spaces.” The fix is either stop them from doing so, or make such action not illegal.

ojbyrne 13y ago
Or make them pay something towards the cost of those public spaces. Which is what the city is doing. I don't think $1 per bus per day is enough though really - it seems so obviously a token amount that I'm sure its going to go up.
- jack-r-abbit 13y ago
  It is $1 per bus per stop. Basically, every time a bus pulls into a public bus stop, they pay $1. So at a minimum that will be $2 a day (pick up in the morning, drop off in evening). But I believe buses make multiple stops.

cbgb 13y ago

"In a small, cramped city, ...". San Francisco certainly may be small, but I've never known it to be cramped. I feel like its not being cramped is precisely the root of the problem for which "Google" buses erroneously take the blame.

prostoalex 13y ago

Sure hope the same standards are applied to charter tourist buses and those double-deckers that carry tourists back and forth.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

w1ntermute 13y ago

Read this book to understand the real problem and how to solve it: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0078XGJXO http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0078XGJXO

sprizzle 13y ago

$1 per stop is chump change for a company like Google. I don't see how this fee will create any difference for what the protestors are demanding. And this type of fee reminds me of a Freakonomics article that talked about how a daycare started charging parents a late fee of $3 and it had an unintended effect of increasing the frequency of late parents, because it rid the parents of moral guilt for being late. In a similar way, despite the fee, the big tech companies are going to continue doing what they're doing, but now they won't feel as bad for it. I don't see how this solves anything. Freakonomics article: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/chapters/0515-1st-levitt.html http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/chapters/0515-1st-le...

pyoung 13y ago
This is just for the pilot program. State law forbids the city from collecting more money than the estimated costs of the program.
yetanotherphd 13y ago
The purpose is to deal with the issues arising from the physical presence of the buses, and $1 a stop might be enough for that. The purpose is not to discourage the buses. If a person wishes to live in San Francisco, and work at Google, that is their right (assuming they can pay the rent). No one has any moral basis for trying to stop them from exercising that right, any more than I have a right to stop people from paying high prices for caviar so, that I can afford it.
greglindahl 13y ago
On the East Coast, it is not unusual to have private bus systems that share street stops and bus terminals with public buses. More public transit is a public good, and it's smart to keep fees low to keep people out of cars.

mphillips2357 13y ago

People in the comments below have already started complaining that the 1$ fee isn't enough. What would be enough anyway? What do you feel charging a fee is going to accomplish? The controversy surrounding these buses is just a symptom of the much larger problem, affordable housing development. If you want this issue to go anywhere, stop worrying so much about these buses full of people headed to work. Getting rid of the buses isn't going to solve the real problem. It's just something that people have latched on to.

blackjack48 13y ago

Putting aside the tangential issues of housing and gentrification, the real problem that needs to be addressed is street space. The Mission (where most of these buses are stopping) is a densely-populated urban environment, and yet residents often expect available on-street parking so they can use their basements as storage. Making bus stops and loading zones longer would go a long way towards reducing traffic problems in the area.

eob 13y ago

Meta-comment: did this post just get kickbanned [1] from the front page? I've heard it happens on HN but (as only an occasional commenter) I've never noticed it. It just went from #5 to nonexistent. [1] excuse the IRC lingo

supersystem 13y ago
"The controversy penalty can have a sudden and catastrophic effect on an article's ranking, causing an article to be ranked highly one minute and vanish when it hits 40 comments. If you've wondered why a popular article suddenly vanishes from the front page, controversy is a likely cause. " http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really-works.html http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...

spikels 13y ago

This is so stupid. The fee is equal to the cost of the program. Flushing $1.5 million a year down the toilet. Bizarrely this is a victory as the activists wanted the buses outlawed completely. SF will always be a second best city until it can face it's true demons: decisions made by ideology, that is, without regard to reality or even common sense. I want the tolerant SF of the late 1960s back - a bunch of dockworkers, businessmen, soldiers, factory workers who were cool enough to let freaks and weirdos take over their city. Now the cultural descendants of those freaks complain if you don't look, talk or get to work like them. This needs to stop.