The Google bus protests were a series of community based activism held by residents of the San Francisco Bay Area beginning in late 2013, when the use of shuttle buses employed by Google and other local area tech companies became widely publicized. The buses are used to ferry employees from their homes in San Francisco and Oakland to corporate campuses in Silicon Valley, about 40 miles away.
The term "Google bus" is pars pro toto, in that many other tech companies such as Apple, Facebook, Yahoo and Genentech also pay for shuttle services operated by private transportation companies. Protesters viewed the buses as symbols of gentrification and displacement in a city where rapid growth in the tech sector has led to increasing rent and housing prices.
In reaction to the protests, the City of San Francisco began provisional regulation of the shuttle services in August 2014, with some of the shuttle stops being closed or reassigned to other locations within the city. A permanent solution, known as the Commuter Shuttle Program, took effect on February 1, 2016. Owing to these new regulations, by May 2017 the protests had largely abated.
Video Google bus protests
Protests
Background
According to author Rosanne de Koning's analysis of the Google buses from a spatial justice viewpoint, it was growth in the technology sector of the economy which encouraged affluent tech workers to move to San Francisco. Inadequate public transportation between San Francisco and Silicon Valley workplaces became a leading factor in the initial acceptance by Silicon Valley employers of Google buses as viable alternatives for transportation. Busing ensured workers had a convenient way to commute to work while allowing for tech workers to live outside of Silicon Valley. By reducing the number of employees driving their own cars to work, the buses reduced approximately 11,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions (or 25,581 barrels of oil) per year. According to a 2012 report by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), there were approximately 6,500 tech commuters who used shuttle buses to take them from their respective homes to work locations outside the city. Concomitant to this were the effects that the growing presence of technology companies in the surrounding metropolitan area were having upon the city itself, namely, gentrification. The exclusive buses and suburban locations of tech companies served to isolate tech workers from other San Francisco residents, in a manner similar to gated communities. Writer Rebecca Solnit has described the Google bus phenomenon:
"The buses roll up to San Francisco's bus stops in the morning and evening, but they are unmarked, or nearly so, and not for the public. Most of them are gleaming white, with dark-tinted windows, like limousines, and some days I think of them as the spaceships on which our alien overlords have landed to rule over us. Sometimes the Google Bus just seems like one face of Janus-headed capitalism, in that they contain the people too valuable even to use public transport or drive themselves."
Additional concerns were over implementation of the busing, most notably, the shuttles' usage of existing, public bus stops. The process of having two different transportation systems each attempting to use the same designated areas at each stop in an uncoordinated fashion brought about unnecessary traffic congestion, usage that the City of San Francisco was not being compensated for. With complaints rising over gentrification and evictions in local area housing occurring with growing frequency by late 2013, the fact that private bus services were operating without paying fees to the local government only served to increase the likelihood of direct action being taken by city residents. According to Dustin O'Hara, the resulting protests functioned "as both a literal expression of privatized infrastructure, and a symbolic expression of economic inequality."
Direct action
The protests started on December 9, 2013 when activists from a group called Heart of the City blocked and entered a double-decker bus used by Google in San Francisco's Mission District, at 24th Street and Valencia Street. This sparked other groups in Oakland and Seattle to protest private tech commuter buses in their areas. In the majority of incidences, protesters merely blocked the buses from leaving the stops. In isolated incidents across the bay in Oakland, a protester broke a window of one bus and slashed the tire of another.
On April 1, 2014, April Fools Day, protesters wearing blue, yellow and red costumes again blocked a Google bus at 24th and Valencia, preventing it from departing. An organizer named "Judith Hart" -- claiming to be the director of Google's new Gmuni program -- began answering questions from the gathering crowd of onlookers while passing out free Gmuni passes, which she claimed allowed the public to ride the Google buses for free. After several people from the crowd were denied boarding, the organizer acknowledged to arriving police that the bus driver "may not have received notice of the program" and the bus was ultimately allowed to depart.
In almost all incidents protesters obstructing buses eventually moved, either of their own accord or at police direction. Very few incidents of arrests were made during the protests, due largely to so-called Graham factors, whereby use of the police power to arrest is considered inexpedient in cases where people are viewed as peacefully protesting. In these cases San Francisco Police Department officers are trained to de-escalate the situation using other, more appropriate means.
Resolution
With the accumulation of media and public interest that the protests garnered, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors stepped in early on, holding their first three-hour meeting at City Hall on January 7, 2014. Tech shuttles had been offered a solution whereby they would be charged $1 per stop per day, regardless of how many workers got on or off. Angry residents, citing the $2 fee San Franciscans had to pay to board city buses, demanded that the private bus services pay more for their share. In the meantime, SFMTA was mandated by the Board of Supervisors to commission a panel to begin gathering information on a long-term solution. By January 21, 2014, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency began imposing its preliminary fee for each public stop used by a private company. The fee was expected to raise $1.5 million a year.
In February, Google donated $6.8 million to the transit agency to provide free public transit for low-income children in San Francisco. On February 5, 2014, Alexandra Goldman with UC Berkeley City Planning released details of her research on the "shuttle effect" stating that rents rise up to 20% around Google bus stops. The average change was 5%. On March 31, 2014, tech-advocacy group sf.citi, led by Ron Conway, angel investor in Google and other tech companies, released a statement of support for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency's pilot program. In 2015, SFMTA released its fact-finding report which found about 47% of such workers in tech would drive to work in their own private car if they did not have these shuttles available to them, increasing the amount of privately owned cars in the area.
In late 2015, SFMTA's board of directors approved a year-long version of the Commuter Shuttle Program set in place by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Sporadic protesting continued through February 2016, as SFMTA approved an extension to the program allowing it to continue beyond March 31, 2017. The extension carried tighter regulations of the shuttles, including limits to larger buses and final approval on all main roads to be used. The extension also made permanent the city's ability to collect a per-stop fee made when loading and unloading passengers, which as of August 2017 stood at $7.31 per stop.
Maps Google bus protests
Notes
References
Further reading
- "Income Inequality In The San Francisco Bay Area". National Public Radio. Special Series of Reports from All Things Considered on NPR.
- Dreyer, Leslie (May 8, 2014). "Google Bus Blockades for a Right to the City".
- Kobek, Jarett (February 9, 2016). I Hate The Internet. Serpent's Tail Publishing. ISBN 9781781257623. OCLC 966256781.
- Swan, Rachel (February 19, 2014). "The Evolution of Protest: The Bay Area Has Been Shaped by Dissent, But No One Can Stand in the Way of What's Coming". SF Weekly. Archived from the original on March 13, 2014. Retrieved March 16, 2014.
- Tracy, James (2014). Dispatches Against Displacement: Field Notes from San Francisco's Housing Wars. Edinburgh, UK: Ak Press. ISBN 9781849352055.
- Wong, Julia Carrie (January 23, 2014). "When companies break the law and people pay: The scary lesson of the Google Bus". Salon. Archived from the original on January 24, 2014. Retrieved January 23, 2014.
External links
- Map of Google bus stops in San Francisco (2017) SFMTA Commuter Shuttle Program
- April Fools Day 2014 Google bus protest: "Gmuni Program" Video footage of direct-action protest by Heart of the City
Source of article : Wikipedia
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