02/05/2014   English German

  Edition # 106  
San Francisco, 02-05-2014


Figure [1]: The Yahoo shuttle clearly states which company is running it.

Michael In the beginning, there was only the Google bus. Dating back to 2008 (Rundbrief 05/2008), the Internet giant has been picking up employees all over San Francisco and is driving them down to Silicon Valley every day. And even back then, upset neighbors complained about the dark heavy luxury buses, roaming through small residential streets in the early morning hours, some of them letting their engines idle for ten minutes while waiting. The gossip site Allthingsd ran the story "San Francisco May Crack Down on Corporate Shuttle Buses" and even rumored that San Francisco might soon be imposing new regulation for the tech buses.

Figure [2]: With "GBUS MTV" on the display, the Google shuttle indicates somewhat cryptically that it's destined for the Google campus in Mountain View.

Nowadays, every big Silicon Valley company offers shuttles as a perk, because they're all aware that tech workers who are forced to commute during rush hour between 7:30 and 9:00 in the morning on the chronically clogged freeways 101 and 280, will sooner or later either go bananas or look for different employment opportunities directly in the city. Today, I'll let you in on which company is running which bus, as most of them are unmarked and only employees know their shuttles and where they're headed. Actually, on sfist.com someone went through the exercise of following the shuttles on their routes through the city and put the findings on a map.

Figure [3]: The Apple shuttle reveals its destination "Main Campus Ridgeview"

The shuttles also offer cargo areas in their lower parts, accessible via the side hatches, allowing for luggage to be stored and brought along on the ride. Some hipsters live quite far from the shuttle stop, ride their bikes there and then store them in the shuttle's belly when it arrives. On the bus, the passengers enjoy free Wifi to hook up with the company network during the ride, to check email or get work done, just as if they were sitting at their desks at work.

Each shuttle-operating Silicon Valley company covers different neighborhoods. Google offers the best coverage with an astounding 22 unmarked stops across town (Figure 5), provided by a half-dozen different bus routes. As soon as they reach the city limit, they proceed non-stop to Google's headquarters in Mountain View.

Figure [4]: Just another day on the shuttle stuck in traffic on freeway 101 between San Francisco and Sunnyvale.

Most of the company shuttles pick up employees at otherwise rarely used public transit stops, frequented otherwise by San Francisco's MUNI bus system. Occasionally, this gets people confused, because if there's ten people waiting in line, it happens that regular folks or sometimes even homeless people join in, only to realize later that those young computer nerds (easily to recognize by shouldered backpacks and smart phone in hand) then start boarding an unmarked private shuttle with destination unknown.

Figure [5]: Google offers the most shuttle routes, frequenting stops across the city.

Every once in a while, a confused Googler lines up at the Yahoo stop, which is when they're politely directed to their stop around the corner. Employees can be told apart by watching for tiny details: Yahoos are often carrying backpacks of the "Targus" brand, with a small "Y!" label on it, and many of them are wearing "Flickr" t-shirts. Googlers carry their laptops in unmarked backpacks of the "Swiss Army" brand. Google t-shirts seem to have gone out of fashion, hardly anyone is wearing them anymore. The shuttles themselves conceal their identiy as well, except for the purple Yahoo bus which sports a big "Yahoo" banner on its back. All others can be distinguished only by looking very closely for small marks, only known to insiders.

Here's a few insider tips: The Google shuttle is usually a black double decker bus with tinted windows, displaying "GBUS MTV" on an LED screen in one of the lower side windows to indicate that it's destined to Google Headquarters in Mountain View, at the "Shoreline Boulevard" exit. Facebook is running a big single decker bus, coyly displaying "MPK" on the side top to hint on the fact that it goes to the Facebook campus in Menlo Park. The Apple shuttle displays "Main Campus Ridgeview", and Apple employees know that the bus will stop at the main Apple campus in Cupertino, as well as the smaller campus at Ridgeview Court.

Figure [6]: On sfist.com someone drew a map with all secret shuttle routes.

It's not very common that riders talk to each other at the stop, if you're working for a company with more than 10,000 employees, that's like a small city, and you wouldn't strike up a conversation with random people either. Until recently, one of the Yahoo stops was located right across the street from a gathering point for South American esquineros (day laborers, see Rundbrief 05/2009), who are dressed up in hoodies and waiting for the next pickup truck to take them to a nearby construction site to make a few dollars off the record. They must have wondered what was going on across the street, where a line of backback-wearing hipsters kept growing by a person a minute, each of them silently typing away on their smartphones.

Figure [7]: Protesters block the Apple shuttle.

Recently, a few upset hooligans even blocked a fully occupied Google bus and prevented it from leaving the stop. The protesters voiced their concerns about private companies using the public bus stops without paying for the privilege. The city of San Francisco promptly reacted and now plans to charge them 1 Dollar per stop per bus, which will flush the city coffers with about 1.5 million dollars ... at least in theory, but city officials have admitted that this will only cover the costs of collecting and enforcing the payments, so in the end, there's no profit. Hard to explain why they're doing it anyway.

The funniest part was a hooligan dressed up as a Google employee (you guessed it: shouldering a backpack), who pretended to be upset and yelled at the protesters. He was part of the show.

Although the phenomenon of social envy isn't very common in the U.S., it's more prominent in San Francisco than in other places. Compare this to, say, New York City in the 80ies, where it was considered normal that stretch limos chauffering the super rich dashed by peddlers on the sidewalk (today, only tourists ride in stretch limos, how the times are changing), whereas in San Francisco in 1996, when your humble narrator entered the scene, there were already disgruntled locals combing through the former Mexican working class Mission district at night, applying scratches on the paint of expensive-looking parked cars. Interestingly, then and now those hooligans weren't ethnic minorities, but disgruntled white anti-capitalists working as milk foamers in trendy coffee shops, who have been living in the neighborhood maybe five years longer than the Googlers they all hate. What a bunch of idiots!

Across the Bay, in the traditionally more rustic city of Oakland, the protesters displayed a "Fuck Off Google" banner and an apparently deranged person shattered a side window of the bus by throwing a rock at it. I wonder if there's soon going to be live TV broadcasts featuring software geeks roughing up vandals to get to work? In any case, it's a hot topic right now and various opinions are floating around, fueled by droves of flourishing click-whore publications playing the opposing fronts against each other.

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