Abby is in summer camp this week. Her very first summer camp experience ever! She’s so excited about it and is having fun, spending 6 hours a day doing gymnastics. Well maybe a few breaks, lunch and an art project thrown in.
Her summer camp drop-off changes my commute. Instead of driving up the pristine, beautiful and traffic-less 280, I’m stuck on 101 with what seems like the rest of the bay area, all at the same time. And there was an accident today too.
I did notice something as I was driving along, in much greater volume than my mellow 280 drive. Charter bus after charter bus, with either explicit call outs of the companies these buses were taking people to or semi-cryptic code names or none at all. I must have seen 60+ charter buses ushering people to their jobs, all in a 10 mile stretch. Here are some of the ones I saw:
GBUS: Google buses, there are a gazillion of these
MPK: assuming this is Facebook, using my Inspector Gadget kills
Cisco: pretty straight forward
Genentech: pretty straight forward
LinkedIn: again, pretty straight forward
Y!: Yahoo buses and they are purple too!
There were also a handful of unlabeled buses; I do wonder where they are taking people to!
It’s not unusual for companies to enlist the services of these charter bus companies to get workers to their jobs. A lot of people want to live in San Francisco, but don’t want to travel via car to work 30 miles south into the heart of the Silicon Valley. In the case of where I work, we hire these buses to take people from the South Bay north to our offices for the 30-40 mile drive. These buses are seen as an employee perk.
Are these bus brigades typical in other parts of the country or only here?
We don't see bus brigades in LA. I think the Bay Area has a unique concentration of very large employers, as well as great public transportation to "feed" employees to pick-up spots for the busses. Also, the companies you mentioned have campuses with cafeterias, coffee shops, dry cleaners and medical clinics, so employees don't have to leave during the day (so they don't need their cars). Different world!
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