The Untold Story of the Google Buses That Took Over San Francisco
The Untold Story of the Google Buses That Took Over San Francisco
谷歌巴士接管旧金山背后的未竟故事
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.”
旧金山教会区（Mission District）的活动人士并没有轻易放弃。大卫·坎波斯（David Campos）从克里斯·戴利（Chris Daly）手中接过了接力棒，成为领导反士绅化倡导者的市议员，这些倡导者主要由少数几个非营利社区团体组成。在2015年五月五日节（Cinco de Mayo）的春季庆祝活动期间，坎波斯呼吁暂停教会区所有新的住房建设，称这是给该地区“一线生机”的唯一途径。
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.)
“新建公寓楼会推高租金”这一观点，过去是、现在依然是住房倡导者们无尽愤怒的源头。走中间派路线的斯科特·维纳（Scott Wiener）当时已是旧金山市议会成员，他带头反对教会区的暂停建设提案，该提案最终两次被投票否决。即使对于倾向进步派的市议会来说，这一步也走得太极端了。但在各种政治阻力下，该地区的开发速度大幅放缓：一个被活动人士称为“教会区怪兽”的10层公寓楼项目成为了这场斗争的象征，并最终被废弃。（截至本文撰写时，该项目正作为经济适用房项目重新启动，尽管反对声依然存在，且尚未动工。）
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.”
然而，关于士绅化的争论并不完全，甚至主要不是关于租金。没有什么比针对那些被普遍称为“谷歌巴士”——或者在许多圈子里更常见的称呼，“该死的谷歌巴士”——的戏剧性抗议更能说明这一点了。
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.
卡里·斯皮瓦克（Cari Spivack）是谷歌的一名中层员工，也是公司通勤班车项目的创始人。她从未想到自己会引发一场长达数年的政治争论，探讨科技是否正在摧毁旧金山的灵魂。她的动机既简单又私人：她厌倦了堵在路上。
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.
斯皮瓦克本职是一名设计师，21世纪初在网络公司3Com工作时，她看到了谷歌网站简洁的优雅：当时那只是一个带有谷歌标志的白色屏幕，一个输入查询的框，以及一个写着“手气不错”（I’m feeling lucky）的按钮。斯皮瓦克认为其纯粹的功能性非常鼓舞人心，通过朋友的朋友，她联系上了公司的一位招聘经理。她以产品经理的身份加入谷歌，那时正值谷歌发展的黄金时期，员工仅有几百人。这是一份梦寐以求的工作——除了从她位于伯纳尔高地（Bernal Heights）的家到山景城（Mountain View）谷歌大楼那段长达45分钟、令人心惊胆战的通勤路程。
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?
她尝试过乘坐加州火车（Caltrain），那是一条连接硅谷和旧金山的通勤铁路，当时还在使用吱吱作响的柴油列车。但由于车站位置不便，列车速度极慢且班次稀少，通勤时间长得离谱。她也尝试过拼车，效果好一些，但协调起来总是很麻烦。“我们都在同一时间出发，去同一个地方，走同一条路——我想一定有更好的办法，”她后来回忆道。一位在南旧金山工业城市工作的生物技术先驱基因泰克（Genentech）的朋友提到，公司有一辆巴士在格伦公园（Glen Park）BART车站接人，然后送到办公室。也许谷歌也可以这样做？
“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.
“谷歌就是那种当你发现问题模式时，就能直接提出解决方案的地方，”她说。事实上，公司聘用她正是看中了这种思维方式。她是工程团队的一名产品经理，却没有任何工程背景。但当时没人真正搞得清什么是产品管理，而且她可以自学编程。她具备了公司后来所称的“谷歌范儿”（Googley）特质。虽然名校计算机科学学位后来几乎成了许多职位的硬性要求，但在当时并非如此。员工被鼓励进行创造性思考，并利用20%的时间从事自己的项目，这几乎可以包括任何事情——甚至是通勤巴士。
“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.
“我在午餐时和大家谈论这件事，他们说，‘拉里（Larry）一定会喜欢这个主意，’”她回忆道，指的是联合创始人拉里·佩奇（Larry Page）。几天后，她在食堂排队时向他提到了这个想法——2004年的公司运作方式依然如此——他说没问题，去研究一下吧。于是她照做了，研究了巴士的成本、停靠点，并试图回答一个关键问题：是否真的有人会坐它。斯皮瓦克说，佩奇喜欢减少公司碳足迹的想法，尽管谢尔盖·布林（Sergey Brin）怀疑人们是否愿意放弃在城市里开车。
Spivack sent a company-wide email to gauge interest, and when almost every employee who lived in San Francisco responded, she figured she’d at least have enough people for one bus. It would pick up at Glen Park BART and at a parking lot near Candlestick Park, and it would make two trips a day in each direction. The company gave her a month to prove the concept.
斯皮瓦克发送了一封全公司范围的邮件来评估兴趣，当几乎所有住在旧金山的员工都回复时，她认为至少能凑够一辆巴士的人数。它将在格伦公园BART车站和烛台公园（Candlestick Park）附近的停车场接人，每天往返两趟。公司给了她一个月的时间来验证这个概念。
“I think we had 24 people at the start, and it just kept increasing and increasing and increasing, and we just kept going,” she recounts. Google liked to call everything a “beta test,” which Spivack saw as a wise way to avoid permanent commitments, but her initiative was clearly a winner.
“我想刚开始只有24个人，但人数一直在增加，一直在增加，我们就一直运营下去，”她叙述道。谷歌喜欢把一切都称为“测试版”（beta test），斯皮瓦克认为这是一种避免永久性承诺的明智方式，但她的倡议显然大获成功。
“People started complaining because they lived in a different part of the city, and they’re like, ‘We’d love a stop here, we’d love a stop there.’” She had never envisioned the buses serving the heart of the city, but she dug into her new role as a traffic planner with gusto, researching neighborhoods and streets and possible bus routes and stops, and developing rules on the fly. “I had some things that were really important to me like, number one, the bus should never take a left turn at a traffic light,” she says, lest they provoke delays and angry drivers.
“人们开始抱怨，因为他们住在城市的其他地方，他们说，‘我们希望这里有个站点，那里有个站点。’”她从未设想过巴士会覆盖到市中心，但她以极大的热情投入到交通规划师的新角色中，研究社区、街道和可能的巴士路线及站点，并即兴制定规则。“我有一些非常看重的原则，比如第一，巴士在红绿灯处绝不能左转，”她说，以免造成延误并激怒其他司机。
It wasn’t long before some Google engineers volunteered to put wireless on the buses—a novel idea at the time, when Wi-Fi was still emerging and didn’t exist on moving vehicles. Management liked the idea that everyone could keep working. The buses also chipped at the…
没过多久，一些谷歌工程师主动提出在巴士上安装无线网络——这在当时是一个新颖的想法，因为那时Wi-Fi还处于萌芽阶段，在移动车辆上并不存在。管理层很喜欢这个让每个人都能继续工作的想法。这些巴士也削弱了……