![]() ![]() The median income is more than $116,000 in Santa Clara County, where companies including Google and Apple are based, compared with just over $57,000 in Salida's Stanislaus County. There's a long way to go to be competitive with job offers "over the hill" in Silicon Valley. Others, including Stockton's young Mayor Michael Tubbs, aim to translate the new wave of interest and property investment into better local jobs. Some liken the sprawl to New York and New Jersey's bedroom community dynamic. The expansion of tech shuttles is part of what demographers call a budding "Northern California megaregion" that blurs the economic boundaries between the Bay Area and Sacramento. "Usually, they'll get like the Grand Slamwich or the Moons Over My Hammy, maybe a club sandwich." Waitress Marnie Jones has gotten used to new Tesla hires wandering in and asking where to catch the bus, or ordering a heaping sandwich before or after a long shift. In Salida, commuter traffic in and out of the Tesla lot is gridlock by 3:30 a.m., but the only thing open for workers is a Denny's. "The smallest buses that come in now are 54-seaters." "This thing is getting big, and it's only gonna get bigger," the driver said. Tesla started picking up workers in the Central Valley in 2016, but the company has more than doubled its fleet in the region and switched to mostly double-decker buses, he said. The driver, who also lives in the Central Valley, and asked to remain anonymous since he was not authorized to speak about his company or Tesla, said his company alone transports between 4,000 and 5,000 workers per day from the region. One private bus driver who works for a third-party contractor and picks up Tesla factory workers in the Central Valley said he is paid just shy of $30 an hour, plus benefits including health care and a 4% match on 401(k) contributions. These buses move employees to Tesla's 15,000-person Fremont factory, where pay starts at around $19 an hour - not enough to afford Fremont's average $2,500 rent.ĭriving the shuttles pays better. Tesla did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but visits to shuttle stops and interviews on the ground show its network of buses stretches to the eastern limits of a new megaregion. One-third of the employees at Google's main Silicon Valley campuses take a shuttle each day, Appel said, penciling out to about 4 million rides per year. Google's shuttles go more than 90 miles north and south, roughly equal to the distance between Philadelphia and New York, and as far inland as the Central Valley, according to spokesman Michael Appel. That includes buses to the garlic capital of Gilroy southeast of San Jose, the outer limits of the East Bay in Livermore, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco's northern suburbs in Marin County. "We transport more than 6,000 people on 80 routes each day," Facebook spokesman Anthony Harrison confirmed, a sharp increase since the last time the company released numbers. Their longest routes now stretch north across the Golden Gate Bridge, south to the surf town of Santa Cruz, and east to the Central Valley - a total service area approaching 3,000 square miles. ![]() ![]() ![]() They all now offer shuttle service to at least the extended suburbs of the East Bay, according to interviews and reports Protocol consulted. In the meantime, those companies - plus Tesla, Apple, Netflix, LinkedIn, Genentech and others - are trying to solve the problem with long-distance buses. The mismatch between jobs and housing has become so extreme that Google and Facebook have proposed building thousands of apartments or condos on their own campuses. The crisis is compounded by anti-development politics that make it hard to build new housing and patchwork public transit systems that make it difficult for commuters to get to work without driving. High tech salaries have driven up housing prices in Silicon Valley, San Francisco and the East Bay, forcing white- and blue-collar workers alike to move farther away from their jobs. Tech shuttle sprawl speaks to the unique pressures that the industry has put on the region. "We're going to be in these farther-flung places, and that's our reality because we're not going to be able to create affordable housing." "That just tells you the story of the Bay Area," said Russell Hancock, president and CEO of regional think tank Joint Venture Silicon Valley. ![]()
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