The untold story of the Google buses that took over San Francisco

San activists Francisco’s Mission District was not giving up easily. David Campos took the baton from Chris Daly as the city supervisor leading anti-gentrification advocates, who were involved in a few community nonprofit groups. During springtime Cinco de Mayo celebrations in 2015, Campos called for a halt to all new housing construction in the Mission, saying it was the only way to give the area a “fighting chance.”

The idea that new apartment buildings will drive up rents has been, and continues to be, a source of endless discontent among housing advocates. Scott Weiner, who has taken a more centrist tack than Campos, is now a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and has led the charge against moratoriums on the mission, which has been voted down twice. It was too radical a move even for the progressive-leaning board. But development in the area slowed dramatically in the face of all political resistance: a proposed 10-story apartment building that activists called “The Beast in Mission” became a symbol of the struggle, and was eventually abandoned. (As of this writing, it has been revived as an affordable housing project, though opposition continues, and no shovels have been moved.)

However, gentrification arguments were not solely, or even primarily, related to rent. Nothing could demonstrate this better than the theatrical protests targeting what was universally known as… Google buses— or, more commonly in many circles, “the damn Google buses.”

Carrie Spivak, the mid-level employee at Google who first created the company’s ride-hailing program, never imagined she would spark a years-long political row over whether technology was destroying the soul of San Francisco. Her motivation was simple and personal: she was tired of sitting in traffic.

Spivak, a professional designer, was working at networking company 3Com in the early 2000s when she saw the simple elegance of Google’s website, then just a white screen with the Google logo, a box to type in your query, and a button that said, “I feel lucky.” Spivak thought her pure job was inspiring, so a friend put her in touch with the company’s hiring manager. She was hired as a product manager, joining Google at a magical time when the number of employees was only a few hundred. It was a dream job, except for the 45-minute commute from her home in Bernal Heights to the Google building in Mountain View.

I tried taking Caltrain, the then-rickety diesel rail line that connected Silicon Valley to the city, but with inconvenient stations and slow, infrequent trains, it took too long. I tried carpooling, which was better, but coordination was a constant issue. She later recounted: “We would all leave at the same time, heading to the same place and on the same road – I thought there had to be a better way.” A friend who worked at Genentech, a leading biotechnology company based in the industrial city of South San Francisco, mentioned that the company had a bus that picked up people from the Glen Park BART station and dropped them off at the office. Maybe Google can do that?

“Google was the place where you saw patterns of problems and came up with solutions,” she says. In fact, the company hired her for this very mindset. She was a product manager on the engineering team without any engineering background. But no one quite knew what product management was anyway, and she could teach herself programming. It had a quality that was judged “Googley,” as the company called it, and although a computer science degree from a prestigious university later became required for many jobs, that was not the case at the time. Employees were encouraged to think creatively and use 20 percent of their time for their own projects, which could include almost anything, even passenger buses.

“I was talking about it over lunch with people and they were saying, ‘Larry would love that idea,'” she recalled, referring to co-founder Larry Page. A few days later, I mentioned it to him in the cafeteria line — the company was still operating that way in 2004 — and he said sure, figure it out. So I did, researching the cost of the bus, where it would stop, and trying to answer the crucial question of whether anyone would actually ride it. Spivak says Page liked the idea of reducing the carbon footprint. For the company, although Sergey Brin was skeptical that people would be willing to leave their cars in the city.