A Silicon Valley tech shuttle bus on San Jose Avenue in San Francisco. Today, there are an estimated 1,020 private commuter shuttle buses in the Bay Area. Photos: Mark Davis

Into the Valley

Inside a Secretive $250 Million Private Transit System Just for Techies

1,000 white-collar tech shuttles are stalling Bay Area public transit

This article is part of Into the Valley, a feature series from OneZero about Silicon Valley, the people who live there, and the technology they create.

In 2004, in the Glen Park neighborhood of San Francisco, an unmarked employee shuttle bus rolled up to the curb in front of a group of employees. The crowd was likely dressed in the uniform of tech workers: blue jeans and sneakers, with backpacks slung across their shoulders and headphone cables dangling from their ears. Onboard, the small group of tech workers would have settled down for their 80-minute journey to Google’s Mountain View headquarters, plugging cables into outlets and connecting their laptops to the in-bus Wi-Fi. The bus averaged 155 Googlers a day that year.

Thus began the era of the Silicon Valley tech shuttle bus. At the time, the BlackBerry was the hot handset, YouTube would soon be launched from a Menlo Park garage, and Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl” topped the Billboard 100. Google was the first of many tech giants to launch tech shuttles. The following year, Yahoo and Electronic Arts introduced their own shuttle bus services from San…