Not far from Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, there’s a nondescript building that looks like it might be home to stealth startup. But if you walk in the front door, you won’t find cubicles or computers. You’ll find a secret bike shop where people like Robert Jimenez and Terry Mac twist wrenches and true wheels all day long, rocking out to AC/DC and Pink Floyd. Then, if you slip into the back room, you’ll see them: 1,300 green, blue, red and yellow Google Bikes, stacked Santa’s workshop-style as far the eye can see.
This building is the nervous system for a remarkable campus-wide bike-sharing program that doubles as a mirror of the search giant’s corporate culture.
On any given day, you can find about 700 of the bikes scattered like toys across Google’s Mountain View campus. All morning long, Google’s private shuttle buses drop off employees in front of clumps of bikes. The Googlers mount up and ride to work. Jimenez and Mac are part of a seven-person army that keeps them up-and-running, seven days a week.
Corporate bike fleets have become commonplace on sprawling Silicon Valley campuses over the past decade. Apple has campus bikes, as do Facebook, LinkedIn and others. But there’s nothing quite like Google’s (see photos above).
“Google is certainly unique in their commitment to bicycling,” says Colin Heyne, deputy director of the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition. More than seven percent of Googlers bike into work each day at the company’s main campus. There, Google has on-site showers with lockers and a towel service, secure parking areas (complete with repair tools), an on-site bike repair service, and bike-friendly shuttle buses for employees who want to bike just the last few miles of their commute.
And then there are the famous Google bikes.
They date back to 2007, when Google bought about 100 blue Huffy bikes as an experiment. “We’re spread out in a number of different buildings, and so to foster that collaboration in the most efficient way possible, the bikes really became a way to do that,” says Brendon Harrington, Google’s transportation operations manager. He’s the Bike Master.
Google Mountain View is a mishmash of buildings spread over a two-mile swath of land right next to a park and the Shoreline Amphitheater, an outdoor concert pavilion where you’d go to see Tim McGraw or Bob Dylan. Most of the day, there’s not a lot of traffic around the Googleplex, and with bike lanes and rolling green spaces, it’s a nice place to ride.
And that’s what the Googlers do there: They ride the blue Huffys (nearly six years later, there are still about 25 of them in service), they ride the first generation of multicolored Google bikes (affectionately called “clown bikes,” they were introduced in 2009), and they ride a new generation of larger, sturdier bikes, designed by Google engineers.
There are even a handful of ConferenceBikes littered around the campus (see the video below). Staffers can book these using Google’s conference room scheduling app, ostensibly for meetings. In reality, they’re a fun — if slightly crazy — way to tool around the parking lot on a sunny day.
And if that doesn’t appeal, you can try the more serious side of the Google bike culture: the 42-mile commute from San Francisco (see next page).
On campus, it’s easy to spot a few dozen cyclists anytime you’re there. Harrington says that each bike racks up about 1,000 miles per year. And because they’re not locked or tracked, they end up all over the peninsula. Even, occasionally, on Craigslist. We found one listed for $85. When we mentioned it a few days later to Harrington, he said he’d already tipped off police. Going online to sell a hot bike swiped from the company that indexes the internet is not such a great idea.
Apple locks its bikes in parking garage cages and forces its riders to pass written safety tests, but that wouldn’t be very “Googly,” Harrington says. “We just want to make it as easy as possible to get between buildings,” he says. “We don’t want to have to swipe a badge or sign a waiver.”
At Google, the two-wheeled impulse stretches to the top echelon of the company. Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette describes himself as an avid cyclist, and he’s been known to travel 50 miles north from his South Bay home just to join in with a group of San Francisco bike riders who link up at coffee joints in the Mission and pedal down the peninsula. They’re called SF2G, and they’re a product of Google’s bike culture, just as much as the clown bike.
When Google bought his web analytics company, Urchin Software, back in 2005, Scott Crosby moved from San Diego to work in Mountain View. But he promised himself two things: he’d live in San Francisco, and he’d bike to work. “I didn’t really know if it was practical or not, considering it’s 42 miles from here,” he says.
A variation on the Bayway, one of several routes used by SF2G riders.
It turns out that nobody at his new company knew whether it was practical either. Forty years ago, much of the peninsula was farm country and bucolic suburbs, but the prolonged tech boom has crammed more cars and more roads into the Bay Area. And in a strange way, all of this transit development has made it trickier for cyclists, who prize flat, low-traffic, unimpeded thoroughfares.
So around 2005, Crosby and a few friends started testing routes to Google — sometimes on weekends — looking for an easier, faster, more beautiful route. Eventually, they heard about a legendary Google biker named Joe Gross, who’d mapped out a route from San Francisco that included a detour through the parking lot of a horse racing track. Gross had left for a startup called YouTube, but he’d showed that it could be done.
At first nobody seemed to know how Gross had made it to work, but Crosby and his buddies eventually got their hands on his route sheet, which Gross had left on an internal Web server at the company.
When Google bought YouTube, Gross came home. He was startled to find an active group of cyclists regularly doing the “Joe Gross” route. Nearly a decade later, that route has evolved into the Bayway — a 65-turn odyssey that a strong cyclist can finish in a couple of hours. On any given day, there’s a good chance that a group of SF2G riders will be meeting up at some Mission coffee house and shooting off down the peninsula. SF2G started with five riders, but now on its best days it can pull 500, and it’s become much more than a Google thing. The ride regularly pulls employees from startups and even Google rivals like Apple and Facebook.
But Googlers being Googlers, a 42-mile commute to work was not enough to satisfy the more hard-core SF2Gers. And so they’ve developed more challenging routes. One of them — called Skyline — climbs the peninsula’s western hills, skipping traffic and offering panoramic views of Silicon Valley.
You can take a trip on the Skyline route with SF2G rider Jason Thorpe below, whose GoPro mount gave out about 40 miles into his 55 mile ride.
