San Francisco Will Tax and Regulate Google's Buses

One month after protestors blockaded one Google bus in San Francisco and broke the window of another one in Oakland, San Francisco officials are stepping in with a plan to quell an escalating conflict in the city’s ongoing saga, “How Do We Accommodate Tech Without Pissing Off Residents?”

Mayor Ed Lee and the city’s transportation agency have produced a plan to effectively tax and regulate private shuttle services that pick up and drop off on city sidewalks. Shuttles will only stop at approved bus stops and yield to public buses, and companies will pay fees based on the number of stops a shuttle makes.

It’s a small but significant turn as Google rolls out private projects in public spaces, sometimes without municipal cooperation. The tech giant faced criticism in the fall when it was discovered to have floated a mysterious barge in San Francisco Bay without proper approval. The barge, which Google said is an “interactive space” in progress, has since been put on hiatus as federal regulators check Google’s permits.

The buses, which shuttle 5,000 per day, have been a more sustaining presence.

Each weekday for several years now, tech companies, including Facebook, Apple and Genentech, have deployed fleets of private buses to shuttle city dwelling employees from corporate campuses on the peninsula up to their homes and back again. They pick up and drop off at dozens of bus stops, sometimes holding up public commuter buses during peak hours.

The companies bill the system as a way to curb traffic congestion and cut carbon emissions. Critics say the system exploits public infrastructure and insulates a privileged class from the plight of average commuters who rely on the Bay Area’s oft-delayed public transportation edifice.

"We're stopping the injustice in the city's two-tier system where the public pays and the private corporations gain," said a group calling itself the San Francisco Displacement and Neighborhood Impact Agency during a bus protest in December. Delaying a bus full of engineers on their way to work for a half hour maybe isn’t a longterm strategy for offsetting any socioeconomic divide the tech industry is exacerbating. But it apparently stirred up enough fuss to help persuade city officials to consider the costs and benefits of giving tech carte blanch over certain city resources.

It remains to be seen who will reap the highest rewards of Google’s self-driving cars (which are being surreptitiously tested on public roads), Internet relay balloons, and “interactive space” barges. Maybe before the next major disruption-promising innovation stirs the ire of affected residents, regulators can take a more proactive role in contemplating the tradeoffs.