Skip to main content

Google buses Good

I've been seeing a lot of bad press for the google buses that ferry people out of San Francisco into the Mountain View Google campus. While I think using the public bus stops might be a problem for other reasons. I think the buses are good overall. Check this comment from Slashdot:
"The Director of Sustainability for New York's MTA is calling out Google, Apple, and Yahoo for 'deliberately' building their campuses away from public amenities like restaurants, and public transportation. 'With very few honorable exceptions like Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, who recently moved his company headquarters from suburban Henderson to downtown Las Vegas, tech companies seem not to have gotten the memo that suburbs are old and bad news,' he writes. Instead of launching their own bus services to ferry people from the city to their campuses, as the tech companies have done, the Googles and Apples of the world should 'locate themselves in existing urban communities. Ideally, in blighted ones,' says Dutta."

I don't think this is right. While, of course, setting the high-tech campus in the middle of the city is good for the city, busing allows the people to live in the city where they maintain the ecosystem of a city going. I mean really the problem is suburbia and how it guts cities' ecosystem. If the campus is far and you take a bus from the city that's not a problem. I'm thinking part of the issue in SF is that people use public transportation to get from the suburbs to the city and then the bus out and that would defeat the purpose. But if the bus is only for city residents, what's the harm? Way better than they driving or worse, moving to the suburbs and fomenting sprawl.

#Edit: 2015, July. I've just been told the busses aren't open to the public just for google employees. Now that just sucks. Open them to everyone. Jeez. If you're using a public bus stop, the bus should be public. Maybe they should charge and employees ride free but come on, if people want to ride the bus to go to Google, let them!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Building my own home.

I've decided. I want to build my own home. There is something special about building your own things. I built a desk for my tiny room when I first moved to L.A. My room was so small that I had to sit on the bed to use the computer so I build a high desk so I could sit on the bed and work on the computer. My roommate Trentity helped me cut the ply-wood to the right side. I still have that desk. It now sits on the living room covered by a cloth hiding the surplus of costume parts my current roommate Sean uses in his creations. Learning to build and fix things continue. And the feeling of satisfaction from fixing even small things is great. So a few years ago I heard on the NPR program the Story about a couple of educators that moved to a tent in their back-yard so they could rent their house and afford to send their kids to college. They had a special type of tent called a yurt and cooked and showered in an RV they had parked next to it. I thought I could do that. Housing in Lo
2 comments
Read more

Contrasting Styles of Writing: English vs. Spanish

There is interestingly enough a big difference between what's considered good writing in Spanish and English . V.S. Naipul winner of the 2001 Nobel prize for literature publish an article on writing . In it he emphasizes the use of short clear sentences and encourages the lack of adjectives and adverbs. Essentially he pushes the writer to abandon florid language and master spartan communication . This is a desired feature of English prose , where short clipped sentences are the norm and seamlessly flow into a paragraph. In English prose the paragraph is the unit the writer cares about the most. This is not the case in Spanish where whole short stories (I'm thinking this was Gabriel Garcia Marquez but maybe it was Cortázar) are written in one sentence. Something so difficult to do in English that the expert translator could best manage to encapsulate the tale in two sentences. The florid language is what is considered good writing in Spanish but unfortunately this has lead t
3 comments
Read more

My Fake Resume

Inspired by the over aggrandized bio of Joseph Rakofsky I want to write my own. If you don't know who he is; Joseph Rakofsky is a lawyer who earned a mistrial for a criminal client due to his (alleged) incompetence as reported on the Washington Post . There has been quite a few commentaries on his "Streisand-house" approach of suing all the bloggers and even the Washington Post and American Bar Association for reporting his (alleged) ineptitude. ("Streisand-house" is what happened to Barbara Streisand who wanted to have a picture of her mansion removed from the internet and she sued to have it removed. Unfortunately suing requires the filing of public documents with a picture of her house. The lawsuit had the direct opposite effect it intended. Everybody now could see legally, since it was a public document, a picture of her house.) But all that internet gossip aside I'm most impressed by his resume. Here is a quote from the website: Prior to stud
1 comment
Read more