14 DAY TRIAL // Google is playing the role of good neighbor in the city that hosts its headquarters and a bunch of other offices. The company has decided to pay for four electric shuttle buses that will serve as public transport around Mountain View, in Silicon Valley.
According to an announcement made by city officials, Google has decided to make a large contribution to the town with the purpose of purchasing electric shuttles for public transportation. The tech giant will pay for the project for at least two years, writes the Mountain View Voice.
The shuttles should become available this fall and will serve neighborhoods that don’t have a lot of public transportation. They could run every 30 minutes on weekdays and once an hour on weekends.
“We're thrilled to be working with the City of Mountain View to provide neighbors a new -- and green -- way to get around town,” said Kevin Mathy, Google transportation manager. According to his statement, the concept was Google’s initiative and it was proposed to the Mountain View officials last year.
The shuttles are to have 16 seats, room for two wheelchairs, and will feature bike racks.
This is happening after the scandal with San Francisco, where Google was blamed for rising housing costs in the city. During the most troubling days, Google’s shuttles were stopped and attacked on the streets.
The company was accused of polluting the city, even though it was obviously more efficient for Google employees to travel by shuttle than to drive their own cars to work. The tech giant agreed to pay $1 per day for each bus stop used along the way to pick up employees, but not even that made people happy.
The company also donated $6.8 million (€5.02 million) to the city to fund low-income students’ transportation.
Now, its efforts to help city officials in Mountain View purchase electric shuttle buses indicates that there’s a desire to go green, something that Google has been doing within its company for years, including for its massive data centers.
Mountain View residents are also the lucky users of free Wi-Fi, which Google has helped implement in the entire city to make sure citizens can have easy Internet access wherever and whenever they want.
Over in San Francisco, the tech giant also invested over $600,000 (€443,200) to provide free Wi-Fi in parks a few months back.
The financial details of the deal have not been shared, but a report dating a few years back indicates that such a service would cost anywhere between $175,000 (€129,000) and $1.6 million (€1.18 million) per year, depending on the number of shuttles and routes.