Heck in some industries, they give you a car, and yet I've never seen anything like this before. I've read a whole stack about this issue but still can't seem to make it click.
So companies have provided the awesome service -- as you mention -- of running busses. The buses sometimes use bus stops reserved for city buses. That itself isn't such a big deal. But within this specific context, the buses have become a symbol of the class strife in the area.
From the perspective of long-time SF residents: Here you have private buses illegally stopping in a zone reserved for the public, paid for by the taxes of the long-time residents quickly getting priced out of their own [rented] homes, which each day take their new neighbors to jobs that pay the wages, inflated by the economies of scale that come with the internet, that are the cause of the meteoric housing price rise.
From the perspective of San Francisco's nouveau riche: real estate is just another market, and SF is a market undergoing rapid change in which there will be winners and losers, and while it sucks to be a loser, that is inevitable as the "rich" and "not rich" zones of housing move around geographically, as they inevitably always will.
The stance of most people on both sides is, of course, somewhere in the middle, empathetic to the situation both sides find themselves in.
The anger isn't about the buses; it's about the evictions. The buses are just a symbol that attracts the activists' attention. (The activists are mostly transplants too, living out some fantasy that they're fighting capitalism, but whatever.) Nevertheless, here's why it's so vivid:
San Francisco is a city of extreme wealth contrasts in a nation of extreme wealth contrasts.
And many young tech workers want to live in places like the Mission, which are gentrifying but traditionally working class, ethnic neighborhoods, with a strong tradition of bohemia too.
So, picture this: a line of zillionaire white kids in geek t-shirts and laptop backpacks, waiting on a street corner that is caked with human filth and stinking in the sunshine. They are surrounded by ethnic (often undocumented) immigrants, and homeless people limping by, sometimes with untreated open wounds. Then a giant black monolith of a bus swoops down on the corner, releasing a whiff of air-conditioned comfort as the doors open, and whisks all those kids far, far away, to their playground offices.
True story: in the early days of the Google Bus, the contracting company sometimes ran out of buses. So they would have to dispatch other large vehicles instead.
You cannot imagine the burning looks I got stepping into a stretch limousine on 16th and Mission.
There's not a fuss around companies providing transport to their employees. There's a fuss around the employees, who are hated by "locals", living nearby. As described in the linked article, gentrification battles are phrased in other terms, because you lose PR points for saying "get out because, um, we hate you".
Threads about the buses on HN in the past have seen a lot of self-righteous grandstanding about "but the buses are breaking traffic laws!" -- completely disregarding the fact that everyone posting in the thread, San Francisco residents or not, breaks traffic laws every day.
I live in San Diego, so it might be just a clash of cultures. But I honesty would like to know, why does the tech community find SF so appealing. Is it just a function of that's were all the VC money is? Or am I missing something?
The protesters are angry that there are relatively prosperous individuals in "their" neighborhoods at all; they would rather it be an affordable slum than be priced out.
It is a rather complicated situation that involves a number of factors:
If Google was an SF company (or had a large SF campus that these employees could work at), the city would at least be collecting taxes from them that could be used to support all the public infrastructure that these employees and these buses use.
On top of that, it is horribly inefficient to have people commute 40 miles (~64 km) to their office. There is certainly some animosity towards these kinds of commuters who often spend very little time actually in San Francisco, pay little to no city taxes, but want to live here.
But when it comes right down to it, Google pays people extremely high wages that are a bit out of whack with what local companies pay which drives up rent in San Francisco. The thought goes that if the Google buses end, at least some portion of the employees would find it too big of a hassle to commute and actually move near where their office is.
You hear arguments about gentrification, but there are plenty of fully gentrified neighborhoods in San Francisco with people who would be happy to see these commuters go away. This is about rent prices, housing shortages and a general feeling that these commuters have no skin in the game.
Of course, really we need more housing stock too, but that's a more difficult problem.
This is arguable. Those people probably live in SF because they want to spend their evenings and weekends in the city, therefore spending all their money there (including on basic living expenses, like groceries). Most people don't really spend any money during work hours (except maybe for lunch, but that's a moot point when talking about Google/Apple/Facebook).
Also, the two city taxes I can think of are property taxes (which are rolled into rents anyway) and sales taxes (which are paid whenever they buy something inside the city). I don't see how commuters don't pay city taxes.
If I live in SF, I have to make a choice: take somewhat undesirable public transportation, drive my car in hellish traffic, or limit where I live (or where I work) to walking distance.
So when there's someone who has a difference choice that is pretty pain-free, of course it pisses people off. There's a feeling that some of these employees would not live in SF if they did not have the partybus, and thus rents are higher, too.
The liberal mentality would be for the companies to back improvements to public transportation. The libertarian approach is private buses.
And this type of fee reminds me of a Freakonomics article that talked about how a daycare started charging parents a late fee of $3 and it had an unintended effect of increasing the frequency of late parents, because it rid the parents of moral guilt for being late. In a similar way, despite the fee, the big tech companies are going to continue doing what they're doing, but now they won't feel as bad for it. I don't see how this solves anything.
Freakonomics article: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/chapters/0515-1st-le...
The purpose is not to discourage the buses. If a person wishes to live in San Francisco, and work at Google, that is their right (assuming they can pay the rent). No one has any moral basis for trying to stop them from exercising that right, any more than I have a right to stop people from paying high prices for caviar so, that I can afford it.
I've heard it happens on HN but (as only an occasional commenter) I've never noticed it. It just went from #5 to nonexistent.
[1] excuse the IRC lingo
http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...
The controversy surrounding these buses is just a symptom of the much larger problem, affordable housing development. If you want this issue to go anywhere, stop worrying so much about these buses full of people headed to work. Getting rid of the buses isn't going to solve the real problem. It's just something that people have latched on to.
SF will always be a second best city until it can face it's true demons: decisions made by ideology, that is, without regard to reality or even common sense. I want the tolerant SF of the late 1960s back - a bunch of dockworkers, businessmen, soldiers, factory workers who were cool enough to let freaks and weirdos take over their city. Now the cultural descendants of those freaks complain if you don't look, talk or get to work like them. This needs to stop.
