Tech shuttle buses have taken over San Francisco's streets, creating a transportation caste system. I wanted to know what it was like inside. So I got on.
The biggest, baddest, and most frequent visitor to my neighborhood: the Google bus.
Day and night in San Francisco, tech company bus shuttles zoom along the streets, some stopping at the public bus stops, others whizzing right by. Or not whizzing so much as hulking. Physical manifestations of the fact that tech suffuses every square inch of the city, they dwarf the cars, the bikes, even the buildings.
At first, the buses were all the same to me. But over time, I learned to decode the owners of these six- to eight-wheeled, air-conditioned, Wi-Fi-enabled magic carpets of progress. The giant green Genentech bus ferried people up to the tonier Noe Valley. Apple's gleaming, mostly white iPods on wheels pick people up across the street from Google's armada — black buses, white buses, double-decker, and single-story. Every now and then, a garish Electronic Arts van swings by, with noisy decals and what looks like a video game console near the front. Facebook stops nearby too, but its shuttles display the charter company's logo, like camouflage. And just last week, I noticed that Apple had started leasing giant, brightly colored shuttles.
All of them have smoke-tinted windows, though, in case you're tempted to peer in. And who doesn't want to peek inside? These private bus system are sleek and shiny, potent symbols of the whole tech lifestyle — the free lunches, the big salaries, the endless opportunities to jump from job to job.
The public buses limp behind them like dirty dishrags. San Francisco's MUNI service is legendarily awful: I've been groped, flashed, sexually harassed by a pre-teen and doused with vodka over the last decade of riding San Francisco public transit. I walk miles to avoid boarding a city vehicle. I wanted to know what it felt like to be literally inside the tech boom, part of a private transit system.
So I got on the bus.
Stamen Design mapped the routes, in a style reminiscent of the London Tube or NYC Subway.
Source: content.stamen.com
How widespread is shuttle use? Until recently, when data powerhouse Stamen Design decided to map the routes themselves, this information was unknown. The tech companies guard information about the timing and location of their shuttles tightly. Stamen had to confirm information about the stops posted on Foursquare with actual eyeballs on the buses: a team sat at a stop in the Mission to count and paid others to watch the vehicles. The volume was pretty astounding: Stamen saw that Google alone runs 125 trips daily, and they estimate that ridership is as much as 40% of those who ride Caltrain, a regional commuter train.
At Stamen's website, I noticed that they mentioned several employees live on bus routes. I asked Eric Rodenbeck, the studio's founder, about whether, in general, they perceived this big private transportation network as a positive or negative for the city. He offered no value judgment, but remarked that it was an opportunity to collect data on "this whole thing that's happening in the open."
But he also acknowledged the power of the shuttles as a symbol, an "ambassador," as he put it. "The buses bring the values of the Valley into San Francisco," Rodenbeck said.
