[tippytop]

If you're ever in Mountain View and walk by the Google campus around 4-4:30p, you can witness the vast network of Google buses picking up their colonist cargo ready for dispersal throughout the Bay Area. It's not just one or two buses, the road is literally backed up with them, each with a little LCD display to let you know what town or neighborhood they're going to. It really is a sight to behold. I can understand why locals view them as an invading army.

[tptacek]

What a shocking, egregious display of carpooling.

[pcl]

Hopefully, Google burns coal out back as a carbon offset.

[Tomte]

If you're ever near Sindelfingen (Germany), take a look at the buses at shift changes.

More than twenty bus companies are shuttling workers to and from the factory.

And it's no big deal. Of course you curse them when you happen to be in traffic right behind several of those, but they evoke no hatred in the populace, but even some kind of pride.

But, of course, there's not much jealousy involved when it comes to Daimler. Everyone knows someone working there. And the workers there don't generally carry the stigma of being filthy rich.

Google is more elite, I guess.

But the problem is certainly not the buses or the traffic per se.

[morgante]

> I can understand why locals view them as an invading army.

I can't. The comparisons to colonialism are laughable, at best. Tech employees are predominantly Americans who chose to live in Silicon Valley. So apparently moving within your own country and establishing a lasting presence (including friends and family) in your home is colonialism and military invasion now?

What exactly makes tech workers not locals? Many tech workers have lived in the Valley for over a decade. I surely hope that's long enough to establish that they are, in fact, locals.

This is just ridiculous.