Google's Best Perk — Transport 342
Reverse Gear writes "The New York Times has an interesting article about how different kinds of fringe benefits are starting to count more in the fight for the best brains in Silicon Valley. The article mainly focuses on Google's high-tech shuttle-bus system, which is quite extensive, covering a majority of the San Fransisco Bay area. The article quotes a transportation expert opining that Google's may be the largest such private system anywhere. One-quarter of the headquarters employees are now using it. A Google software engineer said: 'They could either charge for the food or cut it altogether... If they cut the shuttle, it would be a disaster.'"
Why not Google Housing? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:In saner parts of the world... (Score:4, Interesting)
Emery-Go-Round (Score:1, Interesting)
Great News (Score:5, Interesting)
Telecommuting is still better (Score:3, Interesting)
With a broadband connection you can work from home just as easily as from a cube. I've been doing that for years as an employee. As a moonlighting consultant I often work for people I have never seen in countries I have never been to.
Re:Why not Google Housing? (Score:3, Interesting)
At some point... (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting Side Note: Neil's Son (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Google is not the first to provide such perks. (Score:2, Interesting)
Here in Buenos Aires IBM does the same thing, as well as shuttles from and to some urban areas.
I'm guessing similar services are available in other places as well
Paranoid (Score:1, Interesting)
Naive much? Or just trolling? Don't be ashamed to admit it.
Re:Why not Google Housing? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why not Google Housing? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Cost Cutting - Business Judgment Rule (Score:3, Interesting)
As someone else note, Google's owners own 100% of the company - I believe you meant "founders" or perhaps "directors."
It's the way shared transit should be (Score:5, Interesting)
Part of the reason I hate public transit is the other people on the bus/train/plane with me: there are the ones who smell, the ones who talk to themselves, the ones who start ranting, the ones who panhandle, and the ones who won't fucking shut up and let me read.
If you discriminate on the basis of employment, you are likely to eliminate most of these bad behaviors, maybe with the exception of the ones who talk to themselves. Oh, and maybe smelling, depending on how many engineers there are on the bus.
In all seriousness, though, this makes the concept of shared transit palatable. I stopped taking the commuter rail after an incident in which a strung-out druggie was "escorted" off the train at the cost of over an hour. And you know what? Because it's public transit, that same person can get back on the train and cause problems the very next time she is freed from jail/rehab again.
Forget how you've been brainwashed. Discrimination on some criteria is good.
Finally, I should throw in a point about how this transit is entirely voluntary. There is no robbery (i.e., taxation) involved in paying for it. Google does it because they have determined that it is probably making them more profitable. If the experiment succeeds, other tech companies will probably start doing the same thing, perhaps even combining efforts. And it doesn't cost me a penny that I don't choose to spend. Contrast this with public transit in Boston, for instance, where the fare pays only 1/4 of the actual cost of the system, the rest being stolen from the taxpayers of Boston, Massachusetts, and the rest of the US (in decreasing degrees) at the point of a gun.
Why "Americans" hate public transport. (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's the thing with mass transit. I've lived in a variety of areas, from honestly rural (and I don't mean exurban, I mean rural), to highrise ferret cages, and most of the opposition to mass transit is in the suburbs or low-density urban areas.
The objection is pretty simple: if you bring mass transit into an area, it decreases the cost of living, because it no longer means you need to own a car. That means more people, particularly low-income people who might consume more services than they pay in (local) taxes, and thus it's a Bad Thing. There's also a lot of latent racism tied up in it, too, particularly if you have predominantly white suburbs lying outside urban areas with substantial non-white populations. But in my experience the racial influence is somewhat overstated; I'd say the single biggest factor that really scares suburbanites is that public transport will bring out young, low-income families who will overtax the public school systems (which as anyone who's lived in one of these places can attest to, are the centers of political and social power). Any proposal that might somehow negatively impact schools is a No-Go.
I've seen suburban and exurban 'bedroom communities' fight absolutely tooth and nail to keep out bus services, in particular. (Rail services seem to engender less opposition -- perhaps because you generally still need a car in order to get to the train station, so therefore it's less offensive.) Until you've seen one of these disputes in person, it's tough to appreciate the tenacity with which people will fight what seems at first glance to be a common-sense, win-win proposal. I've seen people pitch absolutely brilliant transportation schemes at local town council meetings, without realizing the minefield they were walking into, and that they were doomed from the beginning by factors essentially outside their control.
Re:Why not Google Housing? (Score:4, Interesting)
-25C in Toronto? That must have been a pretty extreme year. The couple of Christmases I was there, it was above freezing, and my grandparents never usually saw more than a sprinkling of snow. Where I'm from (northern Manitoba), -30C is a normal daytime temperature in January, and +30C is normal in July. The extremes are -55C and +40C. That's 95C difference (over 200F). That's extreme. That's why advances in energy efficient housing come from the prairies (and the American great plains).
Re:Great News (Score:3, Interesting)
Instead of everyone running their own private shuttles, hopefully what this means is that we will see collaboration to fund a comprehensive public transport system that is ubiquitous and truly competitive with private transport.
In too many cities bus and rail service is so poor that it is mainly reserved for the poor and those with no other choice. I have lived and worked in many cities whose transit systems take after this model. It is incredibly discouraging and hypocritical - to harp about the environment and the virtues of public transit, but to maintain a system that is so slow, so unavailable, and so dirty and dangerous that no one with the income ability will choose to ride it.
Hopefully if companies become serious about funding transport for employees we will see some *real* transit choices in cities.
I live in Ottawa, Canada, and it has one of the better transit systems I've seen anywhere. There is a bus-only roadway that spans the entire city, which permits buses to go ludicrously fast with no traffic lights, and stops are designed hub-style, where extremely rapid buses come every 3 minutes and take you to the next hub, from which you can transfer onto local buses. It's not perfect, but it works remarkably well, and is MUCH better than the VAST majority of cities have.