[logjam]

I regularly drive down 19th Avenue in SF. Just south of Geary, the Google bus regularly parks blocking one lane of 19th Avenue for extended periods of time (tens of minutes) apparently waiting for employees to board, and creating a traffic jam on 19th Avenue behind it.

I'm not sure why the bus has to stop on 19th Avenue, as there are numerous side streets it could stop on -- and not one of the major north-south thoroughfares in west SF.

The difference with Muni buses, of course, is that they stop, let people off/on, and then get out of the way almost immediately. I'm not sure why the rest of us are waiting on Google employees for extended periods.

EDIT: I'm not sure how some of the peanut gallery here is reading anti-public-transportation sentiment into my comment. I'm a big fan of BART and Muni and use them regularly.

What I'm marveling over is why Google employees and/or their bus driver(s) can't seem to tell time sufficiently well to not require illegally blocking a major SF thoroughfare for extended periods of time. The Google bus blocks and delays Muni and other forms of public transportation on 19th Avenue just as effectively as it blocks autos. Muni doesn't do that.

[yannk]

I hope whatever comes out of this mess, is some positive change for everyone.

I'm annoyed at shuttles (not sure which company) at the Caltrain station which park in the townsend st. bike lane every single evening, making it dangerous for cyclists. This intersection is sufficiently messy as it is.

[VikingCoder]

If there's a law that says that private vehicles can't Stop, Stand, Park, etc. in the right lane, then it should be enforced.

If you think there should be a law, then that's also a fine discussion.

But from my standpoint, people are complaining about the lack of enforcement of a law that doesn't exist.

[rsync]

If you are a passenger in a vehicle that stops in a lane of traffic long enough to cause a traffic pileup, you speak up and fix it.

That's what you do.

Is the parent commenter suggesting that nobody riding the google bus has the gumption and the decency to sanity check an obviously ungracious and impolite behavior ?

[VikingCoder]

It would be much worse for the city, if all of those people drove their own cars to work.

Have these people done the ground-work of asking Google to move the route? To consider that they might be blocking traffic?

Or did they show up one day and decide to make Googlers late to work with no warning?

[markkanof]

Does everything in life need to be controlled by laws. I'm sure I don't succeed all the time, but I always try to just be considerate of the other people around me, even if there is no law preventing the thing that I want to do.

[qq66]

That's because you're a person. Companies do not act with such civility -- they're not structured to do so. That's why companies need to be regulated far more than individuals -- basic human decency reduces the need for a lot of laws.

[latj]

A company is not a living being. There is a person driving the bus. His boss who told him to park in the middle of traffic is a person. And so on all the way up the hierarchy of bosses and stakeholders.

We should expect civility from people even if they are acting from behind the shield of incorporation.

Regulation is ok, but its not the best. Ideally we could talk face to face with some humans and ask if they realize the consequences of their decisions.

But I understand this isnt the way things work.

[Locke1689]

You seem to be under the impression that a system cannot have emergent behavior beyond that of its components (i.e., a corporation is made of people and thus a corporation can be expected to behave and respond like a person).

This is incorrect. For example, you are "intelligent," but this does not imply that there is a "little man" inside your brain which is also "intelligent."

[johnchristopher]

> A company is not a living being. There is a person driving the bus. His boss who told him to park in the middle of traffic is a person. And so on all the way up the hierarchy of bosses and stakeholders. We should expect civility from people even if they are acting from behind the shield of incorporation.

Does the Milgram experiment ring any bell ?

[DanBC]

There's no laws preventing kids from pressing every button in an elevator, but that's pretty irritating when it happens. Now imagine the same kid doing it in the elevator that you have to use every day.

[aarkling]

Yeah sure but that doesn't give you the right to say, slap the kid. You have to go through formal channels like talking to his/her parents.

New people people coming in to a city have to learn to live in that city. But the opposite is equally true. The people in the city will have to learn to live with those new people. You don't get extra privileges for 'being there first'

[chrisCD]

I don't know, slapping sounds good. Too many have an attitude of no one is going to do anything. Changing their paradigm a little could be helpful. :O)

[qq66]

Also, the MUNI buses are authorized to stop in the bus stops. I'm not opposed to private buses, but they should have to pay for the right to use public streets to transact their business, just as businesses operating in Central Park have to pay for their locations.

[calbear81]

I don't get how shuttle buses haven't already paid for their right to use public streets the same way a business can deliver something w/o paying an additional fee. Using this logic, FedEx and UPS should be paying even more fees for flashing hazards and double parking all over the city. The city should either bake in the fees into shuttle licensing or just recoup it by having a traffic officer ticket the Google shuttles at every Muni stop and generating a nice revenue stream. The other option is for Google to rent a space at their stops either inside a private lot (it's temp anyways) and not have these problems.

[qq66]

Double parking for commercial delivery is already authorized by SF city ordinance. If the city decided that enabling Peninsula tech workers to live in the city is a good thing (and there are many reasons in favor and against doing so), then they could similarly authorize private buses. Until they do so, these buses are breaking the law and should be fined.

[SavvyGuard]

http://blog.sfgate.com/stew/2013/12/09/protesters-block-goog...

There's a pilot program that's set to start next summer that charges the corporate buses. It's halfway down the article.

[dnautics]

"but they should have to pay for the right to use public streets"... Do you suppose there are no regulatory costs to operating a bus?

[mc32]

I do think it's sensible they use side streets to board/offboard.

That said, what do you think about MegaBUS and the sort which also park and use regular bus route stops and shelters for minutes at a time while passengers board? There are also chartered buses which do the same.

Or are those okay, or are they also problematic?

If people made the Google buses and other private busses more difficult for employers to have, what would happen is people would cram into cars creating a bigger problem. Or businesses could take their employees back to the suburbs and you could have new Detroits at the extreme. And then people decry the flight of wealth out from the cities...

You can't have it both ways.

[theorique]

Good question.

I fail to see how these buses are any different from:

* Megabus / BoltBus / other private bus companies that park on city streets (mentioned in the parent comment)

* privately chartered bus (for a school or community group)

Is the issue that they are crowding out actual city buses? Because I could see that would be a problem if the Google bus waits X minutes at a bus stop and people need to walk around it to get to the "real" city bus.

But if it just shows up to pick up a handful of people and then leaves, without disrupting the regular public transport, I don't see what the issue is, or why these "activists" are so butthurt about it.

[mwnz]

At least they utilize mass transit. You, in your car, do not. Cars are an inefficient burden on the city and the economy. Would you rather the entire company drove?

[qq66]

Those aren't the two possible outcomes. The third outcome is that without the buses, the employees choose to live closer to work, not in the city. I don't had an opinion on whether that's a better or worse outcome.

[lclarkmichalek]

Well, I guess that solves every transportation planning problem ever.

[mwnz]

Some would; However, many would not. There is a reason they endure the 40-60 minute commute as it stands.

[jack-r-abbit]

There are so many different reasons that people might (at this exact moment) live 50 miles from their job. To simply say "move closer" ignores so many of them.

[qq66]

It's very clear that many more Peninsula tech workers have chosen to live in the city after the advent of private shuttle buses. It doesn't explain all of them (for example, some dual-career couples have one person in the Peninsula and one in the East Bay -- SF is a good point in between), but it certainly enables many of them.

[mwfunk]

The fact that so many people opt for a 90-minute commute because they think it will make their social life more interesting is much more burdensome than whether they make that commute in a car or a bus. If you want to rail against someone for something, rail against that.

I don't necessarily have any problem with people doing that myself (long commutes or driving themselves). I just repeatedly see this bizarre cognitive dissonance in the Bay Area where some of the people who spend 3 hours a day riding a bus up and down the peninsula try and assert some sort of moral high ground over the people who choose to have a reasonable commute but drive themselves, because cars.

[mwnz]

Because cars, and suburbia. Suburbia is inherently less efficient than cities (where resources are shared). So yes, there is moral high ground.

When the south bay can compete with the cities amenities, then we will see those who value those amenities move south. Until then, the problem will perpetuate.

[melling]

You are waiting because no one bothered to build sufficient mass transportation.

Now that it's bad enough, maybe people can try to cure the disease instead of treating the symptoms.

[mathattack]

Having dual modes of transportation does drive people nuts. In NYC it's the black SUV motorcades that sometimes double park on streets.

I would love to see the solution being Google using Big Data to improve SF traffic.