National and local writers have been all over the San Francisco Supervisors' April 1 decision to grant a Class 6 categorical exemption from CEQA to a pilot program for tech industry commuter shuttles, so instead of retelling the whole saga here we've gathered some links to CEQA and policy aspects of the story:
The city's pilot program has been allowing the "Google Bus" and other tech industry shuttles to pick up and drop off employees at public bus stops in exchange for a payment to the city of $1 every time a bus makes a stop.
While the shuttles reduce car trips by commuters between San Francisco homes and Silicon Valley tech campuses, they have been criticized for encouraging displacement of lower-paid San Francisco residents near the bus stops and inducing increased development to serve high-paid shuttle users -- which the CEQA appeal to the Supervisors described as having a discriminatory impact. Complaints are also made that the buses interfere with public transit service at the bus stops, are bad for roads, and themselves pollute the air. A related charge is that the buses relieve what might otherwise be pressure on Peninsula towns such as Mountain View to allow more housing closer to the campuses.
Environmental and social activists may appeal the Supervisors' decision.
Just some of the material on this locally symbolic issue:
- Board of Supervisors tracking page on the agenda item, with activists' appeal letter contesting the CEQA exemption and SFMTA transit agency's staff response: http://bit.ly/1g235oR
- San Francisco Chronicle account of the meeting: http://bit.ly/PhELs4
- League of Pissed-off Voters argument against the shuttles: https://medium.com/p/9765445ad685
- Pacific Legal Foundation objecting to the use of CEQA: http://blog.pacificlegal.org/2014/ceqa-special-interest-groups-favorite-toy/
- Exchange between two smart lefty writers, Julia Wong and Darwin Bond Graham, about the CEQA process and whether it aids or blunts activism: https://twitter.com/DarwinBondGraha/status/451190095131848705
- Critical artist and designer Alfred Twu's renderings of Silicon Valley tech campuses hypothetically rebuilt to hold high-rises, so that each campus would contain all of the housing needed by its thousands of workers. See https://sites.google.com/site/techcampushousing/.
- Stamen Design's unofficial maps of corporate shuttle routes as an unadvertised parallel transit system: http://stamen.com/zero1/
- Via NextCity, a speeded-up view of tech buses stopping and filling with riders at one public bus stop in San Francisco on one morning: http://nextcity.org/daily/entry/a-time-lapse-look-at-san-franciscos-commuter-buses
- SF Chron report, a few days after the vote, on a small company, "Bigcommerce", trying to scout talent away from tech companies by flyering the Eighth and Market tech bus stop: http://bit.ly/1lHElt6 One recruiter told the Chronicle: "We're just trying to get people off the bus... I mean, why have a three-hour commute to the valley?"
