Local architect Judy Van Soldt has an interesting analysis of the SFCTA shuttle report:
To get an idea of the public transportation revenue lost to the private shuttles, a monthly Caltrain pass from San Francisco to Mountain View, a destination in Zone 3, costs $159; a 4 Zone pass to San Jose costs $205.50. Add in the cost of a monthly FastPass for each employee to get to the train and it adds up quickly. If each bus can carry 45 passengers and we assume an efficiency rate of 70%, each round trip route is then worth between $84,096 and $101,952 per year in revenue lost to the public transportation agencies!
Travelling by single-occupant vehicle provides another perspective on the market value of transportation. A trip from the Marina neighborhood to Adobe Systems HQ in San Jose, for example – 59 miles each way at 50 cents a mile – works out to over $14,000 per year per employee!
A more equitable fee structure is based on number of stops and number of trips per route per year. Additionally, each shuttle vehicle would be required to register with the city, similar to the taxi medallion concept. In exchange, the shuttle operators could opt to sell tickets to non-employees during non-peak hours to help offset their costs while offering another car-free choice to the general public. Net income is allocated to improving Muni service, acknowledging the negative impact a supplemental service has on local public transit. This free market approach lets the value of access set the price of the service.
The companies have discovered the value of something transportation planners have long touted: high-quality, car-free transportation. Commissioner Dufty should not be willing to part with our shared resources so easily.
Hi, Richard! Thanks for the post but my analysis isn’t on the practicality of the shuttle bus service, it addresses the market value. Heather has pulled a quote from a larger paper I wrote and posted here: judyvansoldt.wordpress.com. If you’re interested, please take a look; I’d appreciate your reaction to the paper as a whole. Regards, Judy
Hi, this is completely lunatic.
I speak as somebody who commuted (via bike+Caltrain+bike, and via a carpool at times) from SF to Silicon Sprawl Hell for nearly 20 years.
The employer shuttles are an UNALLOYED GOOD for both the worker bees and for their neighbors in San Francisco.
The fact — indisputable fact, based on real world interactions and observations of hundreds of SF-resident, suburb-working co-drones — is that only a eco-masochist, living close to the two (2) Caltrain stations in SF, willing to put up with unreliable and infrequent service with weekly total breakdowns, will or does or did put up with the pain of Caltrain and THE PAIN OF GETTING TO AND FROM CALTRAIN.
The alternative to the employee shuttles, and the result of increasing the costs of providing the employee shuttles and shovelling the funds into the TWU-250A Muni black hole of infinite inefficiency and indolence, is not that everybody starts riding Caltrain, it’s that the minority in the employer shuttle buses join the vast majority of their peers and DRIVE ALONE EVERY DAY, screwing up the streets of SF, the freeways on the Peninsula, and your and my environment 20 or 30 times more than the oh-so-evil Googlebuses do.
That’s reality. That’s real-world mode choice made by real people who have lives and value their time.
I have no horse in this race, not working now or in the past for any company that had or has a shuttle bus … but I wish to God I had, because it would have improved the quality of my life immensely.
And I live in Noe Valley, where the hysterics who moan about the evil Googlebuses are perfectly happy to drive to Whole Foods, regard public street parking as their private property, own multiple cars per household, and generally (like any rational person) treat riding Muni purely as a last resort measure of desperation. (For my part I ride a bike or walk everywhere.)
Frankly, this whole economic claptrap “analysis” smacks of resentment that SOMEbody SOMEwhere is Getting Away With Something. Substitute “Google Employee” for “Welfare Queen” (both Somehow Getting Away with Something that honest Native Born San Franciscans aren’t) and you can recreate a lot of national political rhetoric.
Hooray for buses, even if I don’t ride them.
— Richard