The Untold Story of the Google Buses That Took Over San Francisco

Employees of San The Mission District of Francisco was not defeated. David Campos took the baton from Chris Daly as the city manager to lead the activists, who were concentrated in several non-profit groups. During Cinco de Mayo celebrations in 2015, Campos called for a moratorium on new housing in the Mission, saying it was the only way to give the district a “fighting chance.”

The idea that new housing would raise rents was—and is—an endless source of inspiration for housing advocates. Scott Wiener, who took a more radical approach than Campos, was now on the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco and led the charge against the suspension of the Mission, which was voted down twice. It was a big step even for the forward-leaning Board. But development in the region slowed down in the face of political opposition: the 10-story building called “Monster in the Mission” by activists became a symbol of the war and was eventually abandoned. (As of this writing it has been revived as an affordable home, though critics remain, and no shovels have been turned.)

However, the gentrification debate was not only, or even mainly, about rent. Nothing can show it better than the world famous sports shows Google buses-or, more often in many circles, “Google stupid buses.”

Cari Spivack, the middle-aged Google employee who developed the self-driving car app, never thought she would spark a decades-long political debate over whether technology was destroying San Francisco’s lifestyle. His motivation was simple and personal: He was sick of living on the streets.

A developer by trade, Spivack was working at the Internet company 3Com in the early 2000s when he saw the simple beauty of Google’s website, then a white screen with the Google logo, a box for typing your question, and a button that said, “I feel lucky.” Spivack thought her performance was encouraging, and a friend of a friend put her in touch with a hiring manager at the company. He was brought in as a product manager, joining Google at a magical time when there were only a few hundred employees. It was a dream job—except for the 45-minute commute from their home in Bernal Heights to the Google headquarters in Mountain View.

He tried to ride Caltrain, the high-speed, diesel-powered train that connected Silicon Valley to the city, but with slow and erratic subways and trains, it took forever. He tried driving, and that worked fine, but the connection was always difficult. “We’re all going at the same time to the same place on the same road—I thought there had to be a better way,” he said later. A friend who works at Genentech, a biotechnology pioneer based in the industrial city of South San Francisco, said the company had a bus that picked people up at the Glen Park BART station and dropped them off at the office. Maybe Google can do that?

“Google was the kind of place where you saw solutions to problems and just found solutions,” he says. The company hired him, for the same reason. He was a sales manager in an engineering group with no engineering background. But no one knew what product management was, and they could teach themselves programming. He had a personality that was called “Googley,” as the company called it, and although a degree in computer science from a prestigious university would require a lot of work, it was not the case at the time. Employees were encouraged to think creatively and spend 20 percent of their time on their own projects, which could include anything – even shuttle buses.

“I was having lunch with people and they were like, ‘Larry would love that idea,'” he recalled, referring to co-founder Larry Page. A few days later she explained it to him in the cafeteria line – the company still operated this way in 2004 – and he was sure, he understood. So he did, checking the price of the bus, where it stops, and trying to answer the difficult question of whether anyone would actually get on. Page liked the idea of ​​reducing the company’s carbon footprint, Spivack says, although Sergey Brin was skeptical that people would be willing to leave their cars in the city.