To avoid besieged buses in San Francisco and Oakland, Google begins transporting employees by boat.

While Google sorts out the permit issues with regards to the barge-borne showroom it hopes to dock at a San Francisco pier, the corporate has launched a ferry service to hold workers between San Francisco and Redwood City, Calif., a connection point with a corporation bus path to its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

Google has recently come under fire for providing private buses to shuttle workers between San Francisco and Mountain View. Despite the ecological and traffic jam benefits of keeping workers out in their cars — eliminating a minimum of 45 million vehicle miles traveled and 761,000 metric a whole lot carbon annually — Google buses have drawn the ire of a few San Francisco residents for using public bus stops without compensating the town and for providing free parking that may cost private residents a $274 fine.

Some of these who object to Google buses see Google as a proxy for rising Bay Area housing prices, which were driven up by tech-industry salaries and stock options. Yet such anti-gentrification sentiment has helped sustain high housing prices by limiting one of these real estate development that can help San Francisco’s housing supply meet demand.

Twice last month there have been small demonstrations at bus stops where Google’s coaches were picking up passengers, one in San Francisco and one in Oakland, Calif. In the course of the protest near the West Oakland BART Station, some protesters became violent, breaking a Google bus window and slashing its tires.

[Google isn’t giving up on motorcars. Read Google Android Heads For Cars.]

A photo of a protest letter, posted to Twitter by Google employee Craig Frost, who also posted an image of the broken bus window, argues Google employees deserve such treatment. “You are not innocent victims,” the letter asserts. “Without you, the housing prices wouldn’t be rising and we’d not be facing eviction and foreclosure.”

Google seems to be quite desperate to appease such sentiment by traveling over the waves rather than streets to perform that goal. In a press release alluding to the continued controversy over Google’s worker transit arrangements, a corporation spokeswoman said in an email, “We certainly don’t need to cause any inconvenience to SF residents and we’re trying different ways to get Googlers to work.”

Anger on the successful isn’t directed only at Google. An Apple bus was also surrounded by protesters last month. Genentech was busing workers to South San Francisco for no less than seven years, but recently the selection of employee shuttles has skyrocketed. The amount of corporate buses traveling city streets has become a top quality of life issue.

On Monday, in keeping with such objections, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), joined with Genentech, Google, Apple, Facebook, Bauer’s Intelligent Transportation, and the Bay Area Council to announce a plan to charge companies for using public bus stops.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, permits for participating companies are expected to be around $100,000 and usage fees may be $1 per day per stop. Some 200 of the bus stops out of two,500 would be used, the SFMTA said, to deal with over 35,000 boardings per day.

Peter Dailey, Deputy Director, Maritime, for the Port of San Francisco, said in a phone interview that the Port of San Francisco was approached by Multinational Logistic Services, based in Maine, for permission to run a personal ferry service for a consumer that turned out to be Google. The 30-day pilot program began on Monday. It requires a nominal fee of $25 per call of the vessel, he said. If the pilot program is successful, he said, the Port of San Francisco “will take a seat and negotiate a handle higher fees,” he said.

Dailey said he hoped this system will continue, since the Bay is an underutilized asset. Some three million passengers go through the port every year, he said, but there’s excess capacity. “From our standpoint, [Google’s ferry] is superb,” he said. “There is no interference with public transit.”

While Dailey had no knowledge of whether Google was exploring a water path to mollify protesters, he noted, “It is a pretty creative solution to get their employees all the way down to Mountain View.”

Thomas Claburn is editor-at-large for InformationWeek. He was writing about business and technology since 1996 for publications together with New Architect, PC Computing, InformationWeek, Salon, Wired, and Ziff Davis Smart Business. Before that, he worked in film and tv. He’s the writer of a science fiction novel, Reflecting Fires, and his mobile game Blocfall Free is accessible for iOS, Android, and Kindle Fire.

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