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

Activists in San Francisco’s Mission District weren’t giving up easily. David Campos had taken the baton from Chris Daly as the city Supervisor leading the anti-gentrification advocates, who were anchored in a handful of nonprofit community groups. During the springtime festivities for Cinco de Mayo in 2015, Campos called for a moratorium on all new housing construction in the Mission, saying it was the only way to give the district “a fighting chance.”

The idea that new apartment buildings would push rents higher was—and is—a source of endless exasperation for housing advocates. Scott Wiener, who’d taken a more centrist path than Campos, was now on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors and led the charge against the Mission moratorium, which was voted down twice. It was too drastic a step even for the progressive-leaning Board. But development in the district slowed dramatically in the face of all the political resistance: a proposed 10-story apartment building dubbed “the Monster in the Mission” by activists had become a symbol of the fight and was ultimately abandoned. (As of this writing it was being revived as an affordable housing project, though opposition remains, and no shovels have been turned.)

Yet the gentrification arguments weren’t only, or even mainly, about the rent. Nothing would show that better than the theatrical protests targeting what were universally known as the Google buses—or, more commonly in many circles, the “fucking Google buses.”

Cari Spivack, the mid-level Google employee who first created the company’s commuter shuttle program, never imagined she’d be sparking a yearslong political row over whether tech was destroying San Francisco’s soul. Her motivation was simple and personal: She was sick of sitting in traffic.

A designer by trade, Spivack had been working at the 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 your query, and a button that said, “I’m feeling lucky.” Spivack thought its pure functionality was inspiring, and a friend of a friend connected her to a hiring manager at the company. She was brought on as a product manager, joining Google at a magical time when there were just a few hundred employees. It was a dream job—except for the 45-minute white-knuckle commute from her home in Bernal Heights to the Google building in Mountain View.

She tried taking Caltrain, the creaking, then-diesel-powered commuter railroad that connected Silicon Valley and the city, but with inconvenient stations and glacially slow and infrequent trains, it took forever. She tried carpooling, and that worked better, but the coordination was a constant hassle. “We’re all leaving at the same time going to the same place on the same road—I thought there has to be a better way,” she recounted later. A friend who worked at Genentech, the biotech pioneer based in the industrial city of South San Francisco, mentioned that the company had a bus that picked people up at the Glen Park BART station and dropped them off at the office. Maybe Google could do that?

“Google was the type of place where you saw the patterns of problems and just came up with solutions,” she says. The company had hired her, in fact, for that very mindset. She was a product manager on the engineering team with no background in engineering. But nobody quite knew what product management was anyway, and she could teach herself programming. She had the quality that was judged “Googley,” as the company would come to call it, and though a computer science degree from a prestigious university would later be all but required for many jobs, it wasn’t like that 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 commuter buses.

“I was yapping about it at lunch with people and they were like, ‘Larry would love that idea,’” she recalled, referring to cofounder Larry Page. A few days later she mentioned it to him in the cafeteria line—the company still worked that way in 2004—and he said sure, figure it out. So she did, researching the cost of a bus, where it would stop, and trying to answer the critical question of whether anyone would actually ride it. Page liked the idea of reducing the company’s carbon footprint, Spivack says, though Sergey Brin was doubtful that people would be willing to leave their cars behind in the city.