Actually the shuttle is a good idea on another level – the corporate masters get their minions to work while coming to and from work. Not enough that they work at home, on weekends, at night, and while in the office – now they can work 24/7. I love technology (some of which I’m responsible for…heh heh heh!)! There, 9:19pm, I just heard the last one for the night go by from the back of my house, 100 feet off the road.

My guess is that at some point they’ll be more cooperation between the companies and a consolidation of services.

Uh sorry, you may have voted for it, and you may be paying for it, but that’s not what the rail geniuses and the Transbay JPA and at Caltrain are planning for you.

2/3 of Transbay (4 of 6 platforms) are being being exclusively dedicated to high speed trains, even though high speed trains will be a minority of trains and high speed passengers will be a small minority of users of the tracks down the peninsula.

75% of Caltrain service is “planned” (I use the word is only the loosest sense) to terminate at the existing 4th&Townsend Siberia.

This is what Caltrain wants. This is what the High Speed booddogglists want. This is what the Transbay JPA is paying for.

Too bad for you, suckers! You may have thought you were voting for a “Caltrain downtown extension” but what you’re getting s $4 billion of park build three stories up in the air on top of a bus station.

Either way, I think there may be more efficient ways to get the job done … the school buses operate before the main commuting hours, and if the Genenbus has to deal with Glen Park, why isn’t the pick up point moved to another part of the BART line, or the shuttle turned into a BART feeder?

The main point is that Muni bus stops on city streets are not there for the private use of any corporation, whether they want to run their own private transit service or any other private use.

The shuttles using the bus stops is not any different than a competing private transit company starting up and expecting to use Muni’s infrastructure for free. Can you imagine if I started JoeSmoe’S Geary Street Transit and started advertising that I will stop at all 38-Geary bus stops every 10 minutes, and not only did I advertise that I would now be using Muni bus stops, but I advertised that I would only pick up people who were members of an exclusive members-only club? There would be outrage that I was using public infrastructure for my private use.

It’s totally naive to think that shuttles should just be allowed tacitly to use public transit infrastructure without getting approval to do so and having to regulated. These are big corporations with deep pockets. If they can afford to offer free rides to their employees, buy fancy buses and pay drivers, they can pay the City for the use of stops and behave according to a predetermined set of rules of proper behavior. It’s not like this is a casual, occassional practice with random unpredictable stops, like taxis. These are predetermined, daily routes and stops. It is a transit service, and it’s using public transit infrastucture. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

Plenty do. It’s called “working at home in your underwear”. But for those who have to visit customers, it won’t matter if the offices are opened in San Francisco, since the customers are probably still in the South Bay.

I am thrilled to hear about all the San Franciscans choosing to go car-free! I hope Caltrain will become easier to access by both bike or Muni since in the near future electric trains really need to be the workhorse getting people up and down the Pennisula. (Kudos to Stanford for encouraging Caltrain for their employees.) Caltrain ending downtown rather than Fourth and Townsend is essential–way more essential than the Central Subway. If I could cancel Central Subway and put all the money into speeding up the change of the Caltrain terminus, I would.

In addition, I hope all these San Franciscan commuters are pestering their employers to open offices here in the city. It seems a common sense thing to do if this is where a large percentage of their employees want to live.

i understand when they started you could have a seat to yourself, but not any more.

apple folks? are your shuttles empty?

seriously why should my company have to offer seats to other people when it’s not subsidized by public funds? are single drivers in mini vans expected to do the same? hey honey! let’s grab that homeless guy so he can sleep in the back seat while we do our errands all day. lets grab those teens who will steal our laptops and ipods!

everyone stops in a bus lane. people park in them. i bet you have too. a fine for pausing and not even holding up traffic? c’mon that’s just stupid.

(1) Use of curb space/bus stops. What is fundamentally a problem is the use of Muni bus stops and other curb space for private shuttles. Muni bus stops are not for use for anything else except for Muni buses, and non-Muni vehicles are legally not allowed even to idle there. I grant that there isn’t a Muni bus at the stop every minute of day. I would propose that if private shuttles want to use bus stops in the City, that they pay a usage fee for each stop. Say, $50 per pickup per stop, with additional specific regulations about how long they can stop for. Otherwise, they should be ticketed the full $270 fine for stopping in a bus stop.

(2) Excess capacity. These majority of these buses are not full to capacity. Thus, they represent unused transit capacity that could be available to other members of the public (i.e. non-employees of that company) who may have a destination nearby that of the shuttle and would find it useful to take that shuttle. As part of the regulatory system for these shuttles, the shuttles should be available to non-employees, and the companies can charge a fee if they want.

With those rules and fees in place, I would even support putting up signage at the bus stops used by the shuttles advertising this as a “Google stop” and listing the timetable and other pertinent information, just like bus stops list all of the other regional transit providers who service the stop (e.g. GGT, SamTrans, etc.).

Caltrain was never an option for me. A public transportation commute is over 2.5 hours *each way* on public transportation. Driving took me 45 minutes.

I love the shuttle and I can’t understand why anyone has an issue with it. The drivers are safe and yeah, maybe some cars have to wait the few minutes it takes to get everyone off at a stop but so what? That’s the same inconvenience you find with any MUNI bus. Unless MUNI hits someone and then the delays are even better.

The comment about not working in SF is bizarre to me. Do you think I want to work in Cupertino? I’ve tried for years to find well paying work in SF and it’s *not here.* Think SF is expensive? Try Cupertino. I can’t afford a place to live in Cupertino and maintain a car (you will have to drive everywhere as there is no reliable bus service and feel free to count how many people you see on the sidewalks actually walking). If you have mobility issues you will have to have a car. In SF I am able to afford a small flat and pay property taxes that benefit my city.

William – ask the drive to open the cargo space, you can put your bike under the bus and then just pull it out. People at my stop do that a lot.

Also, I meant that Stanford has no shuttles from SF. It runs its own local bus service, but it doesn’t have any employee commuter shuttles.

second, of course getting these workers out of their cars is great. The negative is that well behaved riders disappear from public transit both skewing the mix on board toward the more disorderly, and reducing political pressure for improvement.

third, the supposed need for face to face synergy on a daily basis is obsolete.

Since Caltrain won’t be getting much faster, it’s best to encourage more intense land use around the stations to help solve the transfer problem.

If Caltrain were running high-frequency 125mph expresses (something many well-to-do Japanese and European workers take for granted), then the last-mile problem would be a non-issue. Even with the most round-about slow VTA bus connection, a 125mph Caltrain+bus trip would be much more convenient than an employee shuttle bus.