The Google Bus Didn't Cause San Francisco to Become Super Expensive, But It May Be Accelerating the Process

The shuttle buses that ferry tech workers from San Francisco to Silicon Valley are accused of causing all kinds of secondary ills: They encourage people to live far from their workplaces. Those people move into neighborhoods where they otherwise might not live, driving up local rents. Then as neighborhoods evolve to cater to relatively wealthy young professionals, others are squeezed out.

It's possible, though, to think about this process a little more critically, to consider actual data. Last week, we wrote about some research from graduate students at Berkeley who tried to study how these shuttles influence employees' decisions on where to live and how to commute (bottom line: tech shuttles probably do take cars off the road, but they also contribute to the region's imbalance between jobs and housing).