Google employee bicycle
"Many residents of Mountain View, a city of 80,000 that has effectively become Google's company town, see the employee perk as a community service", the Wall Street Journal reported on January 5. Up to 250 go missing per week - and that's rather ironic for a company that built its reputation on finding information.
58-year-old Mountain View marketer Joseph Zidarevich added everyone steals the bikes, "from whole families with their grandmothers - literally the grandpa and grandma and all their grandkids were riding Google bikes down the road - to the Sureño gang kids". From July to November, the company retrieved 70 to 190 bikes a week, roughly two-thirds of those reported missing from its campus, according to the newspaper. As a result, the bikes are found abandoned all across the city - from the Oracle campus to local schools, the roof of a sports pub and even at the bottom of a creek covered in muck.
The report also says that Google recently equipped about a third of the 1,100 bikes with Global Positioning System trackers, which revealed that the residents took the bikes out on an average 12 trips a day and travelled at least six miles a day. That's how they learned one had made it all the way to the Burning Man festival in Nevada.
The company tells the Wall Street Journal that about a third of its bikes have Global Positioning System trackers so far, and they're offering insight into just how far the two-wheelers will go.
The programme has now been adapted by more than 16 companies across the USA including biggies such as Facebook, Apple and Walmart.
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The company recently equipped about a third of its 1,100 bikes with Global Positioning System trackers, which revealed that the two-wheelers take an average 12 trips and travel six miles a day. They carry waders and grappling hooks for pulling bikes out of a creek. The Google buses have been the target of protests in San Francisco, as a kind of proxy for income inequality and rising rents that have been blamed on the tech boom.
When Google installed Global Positioning System devices on a third of the GBikes and tracked their movement, the internet giant found that thieves were taking them as far as Mexico and Fairbanks, Alaska, said the report. The company, though, has no concrete idea how many bikes it has lost outrightly.
Google is also testing versions that employees could unlock with their smartphones.
Google is well-known for offering free bikes on campus to help its employees get around, but those bikes frequently don't stay on campus.
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