Are there any actual critiques to be had against Google busses other than some vague misplaced anger? Here we have private companies using their own capital to provide a more environmentally friendly way of getting their employees to the South Bay. What exactly is the problem here? Would they prefer if things were more like LA and everyone of these tech employees had their own high priced car? Would that make the wealth disparity less apparent?
Then after a few anecdotes of assholes acting like assholes (as if that's representative of anything), Uber is of course targeted. I find this particularly hilarious because I would argue that ride-share companies are exactly the tech companies who are working on real problems. Go ride in a Lyft or Uber X and ask the driver how they feel about the company. Lyft is providing real jobs and making use of resources that would otherwise be notoriously redundant and misused (cars).
I have gone through similar feelings and you raise a great point: The buses from Google, Facebook, etc. are far better than those same companies quietly doing nothing as their employees clog the freeways, which is very common among other companies but basically invisible. So they get crap for doing a good thing.
Here's the flipside, although I've never heard anyone actually make the first argument:
-Google the company actively dodges taxes, albeit through tactics common in the corporate world. So while it is pampering its own employees, it is undermining public transit by not paying nearly its fair share into the federal (and likely state) pools that help fund the transit for everyone else. Thus, Google is actively exacerbating inequality.
-Google's buses use public land intended for public transit to provide "stops" for its employees. Google can clearly afford to compensate for this, but, as far as I know, does not do so. This at a time when Muni and other transit agencies could really use the money. Free rent for large corporations is never going to be popular.
-Although there are environmental benefits to the buses, Google, Facebook, etc. are almost certainly not motivated primarily by the environmental benefits but by self interest. In other words, the freeways are full, and getting to South Bay each morning is a nightmare. And yet many desirable engineers etc prefer to live in SF vs South Bay. Hence, the buses, which make it easier for these companies to recruit. This competitive element then puts pressures on other smaller internet companies to run their own buses, even if those buses are not particularly full or if they are driving large distances within SF to pick up only a small number of people or single person at a given stop.
1. Google does not "dodge" taxes. They follow the incredibly complex web of rules the system specifically designed for this sort of use (or abuse). Its absurd to expect any corporation or person to go out of their way to pay more than they need to. (Milton Friedman Why Tax Reform is Impossible: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TruCIPy79w8 )
2. Muni does not need more money. SF does not need more money. SF's budget is twice that of Idaho's, and we have far fewer people and far less space than Idaho ( http://www.sfweekly.com/2009-12-16/news/the-worst-run-big-ci... ). Look no further than the ridiculous extension of muni from China town to downtown to see a clear indication of how funds are being completely misused. No one wants to fix the budget problems in SF and its so much easier to just blame whoever happens to be successful at the moment.
3. I'm not sure I disagree with your third point at all but also don't understand how its a negative thing. You are describing normal competition between companies. I can at least provide one piece of information: I used to work in the South Bay and hated the commute and would do everything in my power not to ever do it again, bus or not. So there's plenty of incentive to stay and work in a small company here, I assure you. Do you see lots of small companies running buses (honest question, I'm simply not familiar)? I seem to just see the flipside happening: more small companies simply being in SF.
I was framing the argument more than taking a side, I can see both sides of this. Not sure what you mean about Google not dodging taxes though. Like I said, it's common among large corporations, but that doesn't mean it's not a fact that it's happening. Google's tax avoidance schemes are well documented, whatever your opinion of them is morally there's no use denying they exist.
The broader point I was making isn't Google Is Evil For Not Paying Taxes. The point was, if you're going to not pay taxes, you don't get to play the "I'm a benevolent corporation helping make society a better place" card when you run enormous luxury coaches all over town and use sketchy pick up locations. People will assume the worst intentions.
I actually lean Google on this one. But that doesn't mean I have to buy the argument they are doing this out of the kindess of their Googler hearts. I say make them pay through the teeth for these stops like any red blooded capitalist would. (Like, say, Milton Friedman.)
I'm curious why you feel that the extension of Muni is a waste of funds. As the project is to extend it from Caltrain station through Powell and then on to China Town, do you think the entire thing a waste, or just the latter portion?
> The buses from Google, Facebook, etc. are far better than those same companies quietly doing nothing as their employees clog the freeways, which is very common among other companies but basically invisible. So they get crap for doing a good thing.
This is a false dichotomy. You are assuming they would drive instead, when in fact most would not live in SF in the first place. I know plenty of people who bus down to Google/FB/etc and I'm fairly confident in saying the vast majority would not live in SF if the buses didn't exist - its a long grueling commute that is expensive to boot, regardless if you drive or take Caltrain.
I always chuckle when I read comments buying into this notion that all of the "perks" offered by Google et. al. are pure employee luxuries. From the plush buses with WiFi to the cafeterias with restaurant-quality food (whatever that means), the vast majority of these "perks" are designed to maximize the amount of time employees spend at work (or working) and/or increase employee dependence on the employer.
Most of the folks promoting these nonsensical arguments that portray the Bay Area's legions of high-paid tech employees as a pampered, care-free gilded class apparently fail to recognize just how subservient most of these individuals actually are to their employers. They may not be wage slaves, but when your employer picks you up in the morning, takes you home at night and seeks to provide literally everything you need in between...
Right, it's a cost-benefit analysis for the company. Why does Google have a dentist on its campus? So employees don't need to take the day off to visit the dentist; they can just take a break from the normal workday and then come right back.
SF and California should raise income taxes. There's no way for Google employees in California to dodge them. The best part is that the bill falls on those people who need city resources.
I doubt that SF will get its act together regardless of how high it raises taxes. But we can run the experiment to try.
San Francisco CAN have a payroll tax, levied on companies based on pay to employees, a sort of shadow income tax. And indeed it does have a payroll tax. But you'll notice Twitter, Zynga and various other tech companies have gotten themselves exempted (for new hires, after moving to certain downtrod locations, at least in Twitter's case).
(There was a brief political battle between the left and unions like SEIU who opposed these tax breaks and a tech coalition involving Ed Lee, Ron Conway, Twitter and many others who support the payroll tax breaks. Obviously the latter group won.)
The buses use public land because they are entitled to - they pay road tax just like every other commercial operator. It makes me chuckle seeing the SF gov't complaining about this when it really makes SF richer through property and income tax paid by city residents who would likely live on the peninsula were it not for these corporate buses. Anecdotally I saw LOTS more engineers choosing to live in SF once the shuttles started at Google.
If paying "road tax" (DMV fees, in California parlance) entitled me to park or idle wherever I wanted — like in bus zones — I'd be a much happier driver :)
Also, as I've mentioned elsewhere in the thread, SF has no income tax (per state law), and the property taxes are held quite low by Prop 13, so saying Googlers make the city richer (compared to other residents) isn't really correct. They certainly do pay some nice sales tax, I'm sure, but it's not like a Googler who makes 2x median income is going to benefit SF 2x a median citizen.
With regards to your first point, I'm honestly surprised the city/county/state doesn't just pass laws that require these companies to register such programs with the government and pay fees to operate the bus routes. Those fees would then go directly to the public transit authorities at the various levels.
At the same time everyone of those google employees who lives in SF pays SF taxes, quite high taxes as a matter of fact, and that contributes to the community, 2-3x more than any of these hippy touchy-feely types who claim that SF is theirs and theirs alone.
I agree though that they should pay for the use of public land for their bus stops, as they are solving a problem they largely created by making it possible for their employees to live there in the first place.
SF already has pretty high taxes, so the creation of a lot of wealth is not google or anyone elses fault. If SF can't do anything to alleviate poverty with the vast amount of funds it collects then that is the problem.
And if it't not possible anymore because SF is just overall too expensive, then that's life, some cities are wealthier than others, you don't see people moving into Montecito, Bel Air or other rich neighborhoods and demanding affordable housing? Perhaps if the city has become that desirable it just isn't possible anymore.
>everyone of those google employees who lives in SF pays SF taxes, quite high taxes as a matter of fact
Not sure what this refers to but San Francisco funds come mainly from payroll tax, sales tax, property tax, and real estate transfer tax.
Payroll tax is levied on companies not people, and even then it's not being levied on the people using these buses as they work down in Mountain View (excepting the small number of SF Googlers who also use the bus, if they do).
Sales tax is going to impact Googlers roughly the same as others in SF. Maybe even less since days are spent in South Bay (if you use the bus and don't work in SF office) and you're likely doing a disproportionate amount of online shopping :)
Property tax is relaively low in San Francisco due to Prop 13, so if you're renting it's not hitting you hard as the property has been held likely for a long time and is held basically steady under prop 13. If you're buying a home in SF you may pay some higher than average property tax but this is held in check by the fact that a 2/3rds popular vote is required for any property tax hike under prop 13. So they're not that bad.
>2-3x more than any of these hippy touchy-feely types who claim that SF is theirs and theirs alone.
As a purely practical matter, payroll tax is levied on both sides of the employment transaction in the US [0]. Beyond that, diverse economic research in and out of the US suggests that the bulk of the tax incidence [1] of payroll taxes is on employees [2].
>> 2-3x more than any of these hippy touchy-feely types who claim that SF is theirs and theirs alone.
> Citation needed. This sounds pretty out of wack.
Here's some napkin analysis. [3] claims Google's average salary for a software engineer is 113k, and [4] claims that San Francisco / San Mateo's average salary is 64k. Since the 64k is dragged upward by the Google salaries, let's speculate that the Googlers on average make twice as much as the "touchy-feely" residents. It seems totally reasonable to think that someone making twice as much money will pay twice as much across the suite of payroll tax (they earn more), sales tax (they spend more), property tax (they own more property), and transfer tax (they exchange property more often). One would want to empirically corroborate this, but it doesn't sound unreasonable to me.
You missed that the vast majority of Google's workers, and an even higher percentage of those on the buses, are not paying SF payroll tax because they are not based in SF. (SF payroll tax cannot be levied on an employee in Mountain View, no matter where they live.)
Also, it doesn't make sense that Googlers would pay 2x property tax. Property tax does not scale with salary. You can make a ton of money but if you rent you pay (indirectly) the same property tax as your neighbor and the same as the tenant five years ago paying 1/2 the rent (since the same landlord has held the building the whole time and you can't re-appraise under prop 13).
If you buy, meanwhile, Googlers pay extra only to the extent property values rise. While they have gone up (~25% in a year), we have not seen anything close to a doubling. (And it's not clear that Googlers "own more property" as you suggest. While they tend to be wealthier, they also tend to be younger and more geographically mobile, which would encourage renting.)
As for sales tax, think about where that comes from. It doesn't apply to groceries or rent. We're talking about restaurants, bars, car dealerships, and discretionary retail. We're also talking about a population who can eat dinner and lunch and breakfast at work, and get free haircuts and laundry, who tend to order discretionary retail products online, and who live in SF and take a bus to work. Do we really expect them to spend 2-3x buying cars, patronizing local retail, and going out restaurants, and bars?
I do realize Googlers go out and spend big locally from time to time. My point is that the office perks, use of transit, and use of online retail are going to mitigate their contribution to the local sales tax base. They might still spend more on sales tax-able items than the typical San Franciscan, but 2x-3x?
> You can make a ton of money but if you rent you pay (indirectly) the same property tax as your neighbor and the same as the tenant five years ago paying 1/2 the rent (since the same landlord has held the building the whole time and you can't re-appraise under prop 13).
You seem to be confusing SF rent control with California property tax re-appraisal rules. Prop 13 limits on the increase in tax basis value of property don't affect landlords ability to raise rents.
> If you buy, meanwhile, Googlers pay extra only to the extent property values rise.
And, because of Prop 13, not more than 1% more for that reason per year, unless they buy new property or do something else that allows an unlimited move to full market value.
>You seem to be confusing SF rent control with California property tax re-appraisal rules. Prop 13 limits on the increase in tax basis value of property don't affect landlords ability to raise rents.
Not confused on that. My point is that the guy paying 2x rent than his predecessor in the unit — rents can rise freely on vacancy under Costa Hawkins, so rent control doesn't play into this as you point out — is not contributing one extra dime in property tax, since the property tax on the building hasn't changed.
Good point on for-sale property, I didn't realize 13 held down those taxes even at sale.
> Not confused on that. My point is that the guy paying 2x rent than his predecessor in the unit — rents can rise freely on vacancy under Costa Hawkins, so rent control doesn't play into this as you point out — is not contributing one extra dime in property tax, since the property tax on the building hasn't changed.
The property tax will change each year as the assessed value can change year to year (but only, absent a change of ownership, increase no more than 1%/year.) The only time it won't change is if the assessed value doesn't change.
Companies don't pay taxes it's the shareholders and the employees who pay taxes. So if Google "avoids" taxes on its' income it will end up being paid (at probably a much higher rate) by the shareholders and employees of the company.
That their intentions aren't pure enough for some is not a reason to not celebrate what they're doing for their employees.
>if Google "avoids" taxes on its' income it will end up being paid (at probably a much higher rate) by the shareholders and employees
Also not true. Long term capital gains tax is 15%. Dividends are taxed at the same rate, unless you make over $400k per year, at which point you pay 20%. Corporate taxes, in contrast, are 35% at the federal level. Taken with state taxes the effective rate is close to 40% (http://www.kpmg.com/global/en/services/tax/tax-tools-and-res...). So it's a net loss when Google dodges taxes.
(And I didn't even get into shares held abroad or in retirement accounts.)
(Edits with slightly less confrontational language.)
Ultimately everyone pays. Since corporations aren't humans they aren't paying anything. Everyone else in the corporation has to take fewer profits and less compensation as a result of those taxes. They aren't free.
Companies don't pay taxes it's the shareholders and the employees who pay taxes.
You're dead wrong.
The corporate tax is 35% at the federal level and anywhere from 1-12% at the state level. Reductions in corporate taxes increase the net income available to shareholders. One easy way for under-levered companies to increase profits for shareholders is to go borrow a bunch of debt (interest expense is deductible). As a sidenote, Minsky thought eliminating corporate taxes might increase economic stability because it would remove the incentive for corps to increase leverage in order to minimize taxes.
You might be thinking of a REIT or a MLP where taxable income is passed through to the partners.
I think what he/she means is that companies paying taxes means less money going to shareholders and employees, which means that those two groups are effectively the ones paying those taxes
Yes, but on the other hand if all these private companies used their capital to contribute building a decent public transportation system instead of building parallel ones, that would be far better for everybody.
In any other developed country in the world, it would take less than 30 minutes to go from SF to Palo Alto with a modern train.
It's just a tipping point. The disparity is becoming much more obvious and in-your-face, and busses some people can ride on and others cannot (while in reality totally reasonable) really serve to highlight the feeling of divisiveness.
The funny thing is it seems like this is nothing we haven't seen before- it's gentrification, except some sort of ultra-gentrification where the middle-class are driven out by the upper-middle-class.
Yea, I don't like the article's insinuation that programmers aren't middle-class. Programming is not a upper-class job, like say lawyers or doctors. We are not making that much money. I would definitely say upper-middle-class though.
What I don't understand is why people don't go where the jobs are. Historically if there was a market boom in a certain industry, people then sought out those skills and went for those jobs. I realize programming is computers and computers are a foreign language to a lot of people, especially middle-class people, but that doesn't mean it's impossible to learn if you just take the time to learn it and maybe some classes or training.
I feel like non-techie middle-class people never even consider a programming job, because it requires doctorate level education or something. It's a total misconception. Anyone can learn Ruby in a couple months if they put their mind to it and get a decent job.
Even lawyering and doctoring is not upper-class. The defining feature of upper-class in America is making money with money, so the only upper-class lawyers or doctors are the ones that (for example) own a practice instead of working day-to-day, much the same way that a programmer who now owns his own billion-dollar tech company would be upper-class.
try London where most of the new property built in central London is owned by rich outsiders as investments / bolt holes in case their country sufferers civil unrest
If anything, the presence of company busses is a clear signal that local government has failed to provide adequate public transport (despite happily taking the taxes that these companies and their employees pay), and that is where any anger should be directed.
This is at best an unfair critique. For example, I used to work for Apple and the BART does not get that far. That is because Cupertino decided they didn't want the BART getting there. The reasons for this are varied and complex. The fact of the matter is that buying 10 busses to shuttle your employees is easy, and getting involved in a possibly 20 year boondoggle to extend the BART is hard, probably requires approval from the voters (who will probably yet again vote against it), and even if it does get done it doesn't consider the potential downsides to the communities it brings the BART to. At the end of the day it is completely unfair and unrealistic to essentially assign the responsibility of transportation management to companies simply because they are successful and because government is incompetent (look at SF's budget and you'll see they really shouldn't need anyones help to be making transportation better). The reality is that SF is a completely mismanaged city, where we are spending 5 years extending the light rail from china town to downtown not because anyone actually needs it but because of politics, instead of focusing on the actual transportation issues people face every day. That's where the anger should be focused. Google, et al are doing their best with what they're given and I think they've done pretty well so far.
I don't know the details as specifically as you, but do you really argue that Muni doesn't need improvement? As it is now, there is no efficient way to get to the northeast of the city (Chinatown, Nob Hill, Russian Hill, etc.) and Muni is barely faster than walking.
You ask me --- lots of really rich people moving into town? Great! Tax 'em.
Who would ride that? Google provides the service for free and you get to use WiFi while on board. MUNI operates within city limits, makes no sense to offer a bus outside of the city.
If there was a public route, Google would potentially reconsider.
My point in response to grandparent was that no matter how much money you throw at BART and Muni, political, jurisdictional and infrastructural issues will block further development.
I think that dichotomy is not quite right - you're saying that without the buses, the Google and Apple folk would still be in SF, they'd just be polluting more.
The other possibility is that far more people would live close to work, in the South Bay.
I saw the latter happen. The buses enabled an exodus to SF. This puts pressure on housing cost.
it's evened out because people now live where they work instead of have EVERYONE live one place and work numerous other places.
I'm a capitalist whose fine with everything going on in SF to be honest, but I agree that Google is essentially solving a problem it is also helping to create with the buses, so while I don't think they should be criticized I'm also not sitting here cheering them for being environmentally friendly when it was evidently in their best interests to do what they did.
My understanding is the main complaints are that they're massive and block traffic and they also often illegally make use of public transportation's bus stops, which can force blocked public transportation into letting out their psssengers onto the street.
I think one big problem is that it allows workers to easily get from the city to the office outside the city. Without the ease of transport a lot of these people might live outside the city freeing up space for people who actually need to live there.
The Google Bus isn't the main issue, it's just a convenient and highly visible lightning rod. The class war that's happening in SF goes much, much deeper and has much more profound impact on people than just a bunch of buses zipping around town.
But most of these issues aren't nearly as viscerally visual and high-profile as an exclusive "you can't get on" bus fleet. It's simply an incredibly in-your-face reminder of everything else that is wrong with San Francisco.
> "I find this particularly hilarious because I would argue that ride-share companies are exactly the tech companies who are working on real problems."
As someone who lived in SF, and now lives in NYC, I find this statement sad yet hilarious.
Uber and Lyft exist because of a fundamental dysfunction in Bay Area transit. Lyft isn't even a thing here in NYC, and Uber is barely on anyone's radar - because we have working mass transit. These are only "real problems" because MUNI and BART represent the transit savviness of a wet paper bag. I used to spend more than a NYC subway monthly pass's cost on Ubers when I lived in SF every month, because the transit in that city is so utterly and completely fucked. Even among my social circles of relatively-highly-paid tech-workers, none of us have used Uber more than once or twice.
To be blunt, Uber and Lyft are solutions to the problem that San Francisco can't get its shit together to save its life.
Others in this thread mention that if the investment made in private company shuttles were poured into the public transit system then everyone could benefit. It would be nice, but I don't think this is actually true - the problem with MUNI, Caltrain, and BART isn't due to lack of funding, it's due to extensive corruption and mismanagement. At the agency level, at the municipality level, and at the regional level. Google could've thrown truckloads of cash at them and it would've disappeared into the ether with little to show for it.
I don't blame Google, Facebook, and Apple for running their own shuttles. It was the most rational, least evil choice in response to a fundamental governmental dysfunction. The protest against the growing divide is a red herring - the divide largely exists and is perpetuated by a woefully incompetent and corrupt city government.
There is a growing collection of startups whose primary purpose is fixing SF/Bay Area dysfunction - Uber and Lyft being among them. I'm disappointed at how revolutionary people seem to think they are, when they seem more like they're solving problems that shouldn't exist in a competent, working city, in a highly exclusive and upmarket way. Transportation is horrifyingly broken and people can't get around? Solution: upmarket shiny black sedans priced completely out of reach for everyone except the monied techno-elite. It may be necessary, but forgive me if I don't cheer loudly.
At the risk of making a crappy analogy, the roof is leaking and you're congratulating the guy who came along and put some buckets on the floor.
You can blame government for the dysfunction, but I wouldn't be quick to completely blame local government for the stalls in public transit development.
The majority of NYC subway development occurred prior to the introduction of environmental policies such as NEPA (1970). In fact since 1956, NYC has only constructed 2 additional subway lines (1988, 1989) and currently has one more under construction.
Meanwhile SF BART didn't start operations until 1972. In fact I believe if BART didn't start planning and construction prior to national environmental policy implementation, BART may have never been built.
If we look overseas, since 1970, Tokyo opened 6 subway lines (4 Tokyo Metro, 2 Toei subway--Tokyo has two subway companies). While that doesn't seem like much of a difference, consider that those subway lines directly compete with surface rail transit systems operated by 8 different companies which are "feeder" lines and additional JR which not only is a feeder system, but also operates the main loop line for Tokyo.
It should also be noted that NEPA was actually a direct response to the Interstate Highway project where a common complaint was residents losing their communities or properties due to highway being paved right through the city. But NEPA requires environmental reviews for any new development so mass transit systems were affected as well.
So I would say the dysfunctional is not just at the city or state level, but also at the federal level as well.
But most of these issues aren't nearly as viscerally visual and high-profile as an exclusive "you can't get on" bus fleet. It's simply an incredibly in-your-face reminder of everything else that is wrong with San Francisco.
Are people really envious and want to ride a bus that goes to one place in effectively the middle of nowhere where there is a business park they have no business being at? A lot of things are exclusive, people's cars and residences are some of those. There may be a divide, but no one is complaining they don't get to go inside someone else's house whenever they want, and if they did, they wouldn't be taken seriously.
I'm not sure this is the actual reason or the message you mean to portray.
Aside from the wishy-washy fairness argument, I can see a couple of actual critiques:
1) The busses displace the attention and money of a lot of motivated and well-off tech workers who might otherwise demand improved public transit systems.
2) The busses artificially distort the housing market in SF. Previously the number of people who wanted to live in SF was limited by the number of jobs available in the city - now that number includes anyone with access to a shuttle. And the people with jobs in SF now can't afford to live where they work.
I think the fallacy here is that without the busses, you'd have 10,000 (or whatever the number) tech workers driving 1+ hours from North Beach to Mountain View in their own cars. In reality, most of those people would just move closer to where they work.
Then after a few anecdotes of assholes acting like assholes (as if that's representative of anything), Uber is of course targeted. I find this particularly hilarious because I would argue that ride-share companies are exactly the tech companies who are working on real problems. Go ride in a Lyft or Uber X and ask the driver how they feel about the company. Lyft is providing real jobs and making use of resources that would otherwise be notoriously redundant and misused (cars).