1,000 white-collar tech shuttles are stalling Bay Area public transit
This article is part of Into the Valley, a feature series from OneZero about Silicon Valley, the people who live there, and the technology they create.
In2004, in the Glen Park neighborhood of San Francisco, an unmarked employee shuttle bus rolled up to the curb in front of a group of employees. The crowd was likely dressed in the uniform of tech workers: blue jeans and sneakers, with backpacks slung across their shoulders and headphone cables dangling from their ears. Onboard, the small group of tech workers would have settled down for their 80-minute journey to Google’s Mountain View headquarters, plugging cables into outlets and connecting their laptops to the in-bus Wi-Fi. The bus averaged 155 Googlers a day that year.
Thus began the era of the Silicon Valley tech shuttle bus. At the time, the BlackBerry was the hot handset, YouTube would soon be launched from a Menlo Park garage, and Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl” topped the Billboard 100. Google was the first of many tech giants to launch tech shuttles. The following year, Yahoo and Electronic Arts introduced their own shuttle bus services from San Francisco to the peninsula — “the Pepsi to Google’s Coke,” jeered a reporter. Ebay introduced shuttle buses in 2007, Juniper Networks in 2008, and so on.
The buses improved employee quality of life, the companies said, and that of local residents; they eased congestion and were better for the environment. By 2008, 1,600 Googlers boarded 150 buses around the Bay Area daily, with drop-off points stretching from the foggy oceanside town of Santa Cruz to the city of Concord, located toward California’s hot and dusty Central Valley. “We are basically running a small municipal transit agency,” Google’s security and safety director told the New York Times in 2007.
In retrospect, this was peanuts. By 2014, more than 750 buses carted some 37,000 employees into the valley and back each day. Those buses covered approximately 25 million miles of tarmac a year, at an approximate operating cost of $249,000 per bus per year to employers.
Today, there are an estimated 1,020 private commuter shuttle buses in the Bay Area, according to unpublished data from the San Francisco Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC). Add that up and you have a private transportation system worth more than $250 million — the seventh-largest transit system in the Bay Area, ahead of the ferry network, the County Connection buses, and the Marin Transit Network. Even back in 2014, almost as many people traveled by private shuttles as they did on Caltrain, the commuter train that runs from San Francisco to San Jose.
A source of protest and poetry, these shuttles constitute a vast commuter network that has affected the basic infrastructure of the region. They have reshaped the modern geography of the valley, and their stopgap existence has disincentivized transportation officials from updating their own networks, say public transit activists in the area.
“We are basically running a small municipal transit agency.”
“We have a major lack of accountability for regional mobility in our region,” says Ian Griffiths, policy director of Seamless Bay Area, a public transit nonprofit. Organizations like Seamless want to see the region’s fragmented transit agencies integrated, with a new transit body to oversee standardized fares, handle tickets, and implement a regional bus network with dedicated highway express lanes in Silicon Valley and beyond.
But the private shuttle network tailored for tech workers is sapping energy from efforts at a regional transportation revolution.