Inside Cycleplex: the weird, wild world of Google bikes
Not far from the headquarters of Google in Mountain View is an unremarkable building, similar to the shelter of an inconspicuous startup. But if you go inside, you will not find there is no office, no computers. You will find a secret bicycle workshop there, where Robert Jimenez and Terry Mack are busy with wrenches and tires all day long listening to AC / DC and Pink Floyd. Then, if you manage to slip into the back room, you will see them: 1,300 green, blue, red and yellow Google-bikes that fill the room for as long as you can see, as if in Santa's workshop.
This building is the center of an unusual bike exchange program that exists on campus and is a mirror image of the search giant’s corporate culture.
')
On any given day, you can see about 700 bicycles scattered like toys on a Google Mountain campus. All morning, special Google buses landed employees near these piles of bicycles. Googlers sit on them and go to work. Jimenez and Mack are part of a team of seven people that maintains bicycles in working condition seven days a week.
Over the past decade, corporate cycling parks have become commonplace on the campuses of Silicon Valley. Apple, Facebook, LinkedIn and many others have their bikes. But no one has anything similar to what Google has.
“Google has a unique approach to bicycles,” says Colin Hein, deputy head of the Bicycle Union of Silicon Valley. More than seven percent of Googlers go to work every day by bicycle to the company's main campus. There, Google has its own showers with changing rooms and towels, safe parking lots (with repair tools), as well as a bike-friendly workshop for employees who want to cycle only the last few miles of their journey.
And, of course, the famous Google bikes.
Their story goes back to 2007, when Google bought about 100 blue Huffy bikes as an experiment. “We distributed them across several buildings to improve communication between them in the most efficient way, and it turned out that bicycles are what we need,” says Brandon Harrington, Google's vehicle operations manager, who is also the Master of Bikes.
The headquarters of Google in Mountain View is a set of buildings scattered over a two-mile strip near the park and the Coastal Amphitheater, an open-air concert venue where you can see performances of Tim McGraw or Bob Dylan. For most of the day, the traffic around the Googleplex is not too busy - combined with bike paths and opening views, this place is perfect for cycling.
And this is exactly what Googlers are doing there: they ride Huffy blue bikes (almost six years later, about 25 of them are still in service), the first generation of multi-colored Google bikes (which are affectionately called “clown bikes”, they were presented in 2009), as well as on the new generation of larger and more stable bikes developed by Google engineers.
There are even several seven-seat bikes (Conference Bikes) scattered around campus. Employees can book them using a special Google conference planning application. This is a fun and insane way to go parking in a sunny day.
And if that’s not enough for you, you can touch the more serious side of Google’s bicycle culture: take the 42-mile route from San Francisco.
On campus at any time you can find dozens of cyclists. Harrington says that every bike pulls around 1,000 miles a year. And since no one wears them and does not track them, they can be found lying around the whole peninsula. And sometimes even on Craigslist. We found there one of the bikes selling for $ 85. When we reported this to Harrington a few days later, he said that he had already notified the police. It’s not a good idea to sell bikes stolen from an internet indexing company on the Internet.
At Apple, bicycles tack on the parking lot and force cyclists to take written safety tests, but this is somehow not “Google-style,” Harrington noted. “We just want to make moving between buildings as simple as possible,” he says. “We do not want to force employees to verify their identity or sign claims waivers.”
Google’s 42 mile cycle course
At Google, this two-wheeled impulse comes from the company's top management. Patrick Piechett’s chief financial officer is an avid cyclist himself - he once drove 50 miles from his home in South Bay, just to join a group of cyclists from San Francisco who met at a cafe in Target on their way through the peninsula. They call themselves SF2G, like “clown bikes”, they are the fruit of Google’s bicycle culture.
When Google bought Urchin Software in 2005, a web analytics company, Scott Crosby moved from San Diego to Mountain View. But he promised himself two things: he would live in San Francisco, and he would ride a bicycle to work. “I didn’t even know if it would be practical, given that this place is 42 miles away,” he said.
It turned out that in his new company, too, no one knew whether it was practical. Forty years ago, most of the peninsula was a continuous farm and pastoral landscapes, but a long technological boom brought with it a lot of cars and roads. In a strange way, the development of this infrastructure made life difficult for cyclists, who prefer smooth and calm roads.
So around 2005, Crosby and his friends started testing tracks for Google - sometimes even on weekends - in search of a simpler, faster and more beautiful route. As a result, they learned about the legendary cyclist from Google named Joe Gross, who made the route from San Francisco, including a detour through the racetrack parking. Gross left the company in favor of a startup called YouTube, but showed that such a route is possible.
At first, no one knew how Gross succeeded, but in the end, Crosby and his friends found a route map left by Gross on the company's internal web server.
When Google bought YouTube, Gross returned home. He was surprised to find a group of active cyclists who regularly ride the Joe Gross route. Almost ten years later, this track turned into Bayway - a route that an experienced cyclist will be able to overcome in a few hours. On any day in the coffee houses of the Mission, you can meet SF2G riders who are on their way through the peninsula. The history of SF2G began with five cyclists, and now, in the best days, there are up to 500, and the idea itself has gone beyond Google. Employees from various start-ups and even Google's competitors from Apple and Facebook regularly participate in the trips.
However, Googlers would not be Googleers, if the most hardcore SF2G participants were satisfied with the way to work 42 miles long. To do this, they have developed more complex routes. One of them, called Skyline, passes through the western hills of the peninsula, away from the highways, and offers a panoramic view of the Silicon Valley.
In the video below, you can take a Skyline ride with SF2G cyclists:
From the translator : Colleagues - IT in this story is certainly not enough, but it seemed to me that it is very indicative of the company's corporate culture. In addition, today and until the end of the week we are resting - it's time to get on the bike and take a ride, even if not the “Google route”. Have a nice weekend!
This building is the center of an unusual bike exchange program that exists on campus and is a mirror image of the search giant’s corporate culture.
')
On any given day, you can see about 700 bicycles scattered like toys on a Google Mountain campus. All morning, special Google buses landed employees near these piles of bicycles. Googlers sit on them and go to work. Jimenez and Mack are part of a team of seven people that maintains bicycles in working condition seven days a week.
Over the past decade, corporate cycling parks have become commonplace on the campuses of Silicon Valley. Apple, Facebook, LinkedIn and many others have their bikes. But no one has anything similar to what Google has.
“Google has a unique approach to bicycles,” says Colin Hein, deputy head of the Bicycle Union of Silicon Valley. More than seven percent of Googlers go to work every day by bicycle to the company's main campus. There, Google has its own showers with changing rooms and towels, safe parking lots (with repair tools), as well as a bike-friendly workshop for employees who want to cycle only the last few miles of their journey.
And, of course, the famous Google bikes.
Their story goes back to 2007, when Google bought about 100 blue Huffy bikes as an experiment. “We distributed them across several buildings to improve communication between them in the most efficient way, and it turned out that bicycles are what we need,” says Brandon Harrington, Google's vehicle operations manager, who is also the Master of Bikes.
The headquarters of Google in Mountain View is a set of buildings scattered over a two-mile strip near the park and the Coastal Amphitheater, an open-air concert venue where you can see performances of Tim McGraw or Bob Dylan. For most of the day, the traffic around the Googleplex is not too busy - combined with bike paths and opening views, this place is perfect for cycling.
And this is exactly what Googlers are doing there: they ride Huffy blue bikes (almost six years later, about 25 of them are still in service), the first generation of multi-colored Google bikes (which are affectionately called “clown bikes”, they were presented in 2009), as well as on the new generation of larger and more stable bikes developed by Google engineers.
There are even several seven-seat bikes (Conference Bikes) scattered around campus. Employees can book them using a special Google conference planning application. This is a fun and insane way to go parking in a sunny day.
And if that’s not enough for you, you can touch the more serious side of Google’s bicycle culture: take the 42-mile route from San Francisco.
On campus at any time you can find dozens of cyclists. Harrington says that every bike pulls around 1,000 miles a year. And since no one wears them and does not track them, they can be found lying around the whole peninsula. And sometimes even on Craigslist. We found there one of the bikes selling for $ 85. When we reported this to Harrington a few days later, he said that he had already notified the police. It’s not a good idea to sell bikes stolen from an internet indexing company on the Internet.
At Apple, bicycles tack on the parking lot and force cyclists to take written safety tests, but this is somehow not “Google-style,” Harrington noted. “We just want to make moving between buildings as simple as possible,” he says. “We do not want to force employees to verify their identity or sign claims waivers.”
Google’s 42 mile cycle course
At Google, this two-wheeled impulse comes from the company's top management. Patrick Piechett’s chief financial officer is an avid cyclist himself - he once drove 50 miles from his home in South Bay, just to join a group of cyclists from San Francisco who met at a cafe in Target on their way through the peninsula. They call themselves SF2G, like “clown bikes”, they are the fruit of Google’s bicycle culture.
When Google bought Urchin Software in 2005, a web analytics company, Scott Crosby moved from San Diego to Mountain View. But he promised himself two things: he would live in San Francisco, and he would ride a bicycle to work. “I didn’t even know if it would be practical, given that this place is 42 miles away,” he said.
It turned out that in his new company, too, no one knew whether it was practical. Forty years ago, most of the peninsula was a continuous farm and pastoral landscapes, but a long technological boom brought with it a lot of cars and roads. In a strange way, the development of this infrastructure made life difficult for cyclists, who prefer smooth and calm roads.
So around 2005, Crosby and his friends started testing tracks for Google - sometimes even on weekends - in search of a simpler, faster and more beautiful route. As a result, they learned about the legendary cyclist from Google named Joe Gross, who made the route from San Francisco, including a detour through the racetrack parking. Gross left the company in favor of a startup called YouTube, but showed that such a route is possible.
At first, no one knew how Gross succeeded, but in the end, Crosby and his friends found a route map left by Gross on the company's internal web server.
When Google bought YouTube, Gross returned home. He was surprised to find a group of active cyclists who regularly ride the Joe Gross route. Almost ten years later, this track turned into Bayway - a route that an experienced cyclist will be able to overcome in a few hours. On any day in the coffee houses of the Mission, you can meet SF2G riders who are on their way through the peninsula. The history of SF2G began with five cyclists, and now, in the best days, there are up to 500, and the idea itself has gone beyond Google. Employees from various start-ups and even Google's competitors from Apple and Facebook regularly participate in the trips.
However, Googlers would not be Googleers, if the most hardcore SF2G participants were satisfied with the way to work 42 miles long. To do this, they have developed more complex routes. One of them, called Skyline, passes through the western hills of the peninsula, away from the highways, and offers a panoramic view of the Silicon Valley.
In the video below, you can take a Skyline ride with SF2G cyclists:
From the translator : Colleagues - IT in this story is certainly not enough, but it seemed to me that it is very indicative of the company's corporate culture. In addition, today and until the end of the week we are resting - it's time to get on the bike and take a ride, even if not the “Google route”. Have a nice weekend!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/178543/
All Articles