On any given day, more than 800 “tech buses” negotiate narrow city streets and congested freeways to cart employees to offices throughout the Bay Area, according to a first-of-its-kind survey released Wednesday by a regional transportation planning agency.
There are so many of the large, privately owned shuttles operating in the Bay Area that if they all fell under a single agency, they would be the seventh-largest transportation provider in the region in terms of ridership, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which released the study in conjunction with the Bay Area Council, a business-sponsored advocacy organization. All told, the 35 shuttle services included in the survey collectively carried some 34,000 passengers a day, or more than 9.6 million people in 2014, the last year for which data was available.
It’s the first study to look comprehensively at the growing practice which ignited protests in San Francisco and in the East Bay over the past few years. Demonstrators have argued the buses are a symbol of gentrification and the employees who ride them to high-paid jobs in the South Bay are responsible for hastening the widening inequities in housing and pay in cities such as San Francisco and Oakland.
But there’s never been any good data on just how many buses are operating in the area because there’s no single government agency tasked with collecting that data, said John Goodwin, a spokesman for the transportation commission.
“This clearly is a growing phenomenon around the region that has become an important part of our transportation landscape,” Goodwin said, “but it’s occupying a terrain that’s largely unmonitored.”
The study, called the Bay Area Shuttle Census, relied on self-reported data from Bay Area firms and looked at the number of vehicles, their passenger capacity, the total number of riders, and how far the vehicles were traveling in 2012, 2013 and 2014. The MTC and Bay Area Council defined shuttle services as “large multi-passenger vehicles” that either pick up passengers at a transit stop or other central location to carry them to the office, or that operate “longer routes between more distant parts of the Bay Area.”
The report does not detail where the buses are picking up passengers — whether at BART stations, bus stops, private lots or elsewhere — which was a bone of contention in San Francisco, where protesters surrounded large tech buses using MUNI bus stops. San Francisco responded by establishing a pilot program to regulate where the buses can stop and charge $3.67 for each stop in a marked bus zone.
Though Rick Ramacier, the general manager of County Connection, which serves Contra Costa County, said his staff has reported seeing the private buses parked in public spaces, the number of shuttles there aren’t interfering with the agency’s operations.
“We don’t have the issues they had in San Francisco with people saying … MUNI passengers couldn’t get to the bus stop,” Ramacier said. “No one is stepping on anyone’s toes.”
While organizations like the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project have detailed the increase in evictions in areas adjacent to tech bus stops in San Francisco, Adrian Covert, the Bay Area Council’s policy director, said the rise in private shuttles is a response to the housing shortage, not its cause. At the heart of the issue, Covert said, is the both the region’s booming economic success and its failure to build enough housing in areas where new jobs are being added.
“The private sector is responding by providing shuttles that go further distances to pick up employees,” Covert said. “The bad news is that we have to do this in the first place … because the housing stock is not keeping pace with demand.”
Representatives from the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project could not immediately be reached.
Covert touted the buses’ environmental benefits, which in San Francisco alone took 2 million single-passenger automobile trips off the road and reduced carbon emissions by 2,000 metric tons, he said.
Rather than replace traditional public transit, Ramacier said he sees the shuttles as complementing and perhaps even boosting local bus service.
“Generally, if the private sector finds a way to get something done, that’s a good thing, and they’re not using taxpayer money to do it,” he said. “It gives us the opportunity to look at doing something differently to complement rather than compete, or maybe we’re competing where we shouldn’t be.”
Ramacier said he would like to see even more detailed information about the routes so that public transportation agencies can better coordinate services, though Goodwin said more oversight isn’t needed.
“I’m not necessarily convinced that a larger public role at the regional level is needed,” Goodwin said. “This is an organic response to the challenges of a growing economy.”
Where the buses travel; round trips between and within counties:
San Francisco and Santa Clara: 308
Alameda and Santa Clara: 119
Santa Clara and Santa Clara: 81
San Mateo and San Mateo: 77
San Mateo and San Francisco: 65
San Mateo and Santa Clara: 44
Santa Cruz and Santa Clara: 31
Alameda and Alameda: 19
San Francisco and San Francisco: 18
Alameda and San Mateo: 11
Contra Costa and San Mateo 9
Marin and Santa Clara: 6
San Mateo and Solano: 4
Marin and San Mateo: 3
Contra Costa and Contra Costa: 2
Contra Costa and Santa Clara: 2
San Francisco and Marin: 2
Contra Costa and Alameda: 1
Contra Costa and San Francisco: 1
Sacramento and Santa Clara: 1
Total round trips: 804
