How Silicon Valley Hacked #dawnpatrol
They geeked a bleak slog into the world’s coolest commute.
Scott Crosby and a pack of ambitious tech geeks re-programmed a bleak slog into one of the world’s coolest bike commutes.
Every weekday before dawn, teams of cyclists gather all over San Francisco, shivering at street corners and in parking lots. They synchronise their watches to leave precisely on time, often as early as 4:30am. When the appointed minute hits, they charge through the city streets, a pack of Lycra-clad, gearshifting machines, avoiding the despair faced by drivers on the highway. Who are these cyborgs who brave the long, harrowing 60km ride every morning? They’re a club, a band of techy bike commuters called SF2G, shorthand for San Francisco to Google. It began in 2005 as a way to avoid the 50-80km bumper-to-bumper car ride between San Francisco and Google HQ, but the participants now head variously to Facebook, Apple, LinkedIn and Nvidia. Most could drive, take the commuter train, or hop on one of the private, WiFi-enabled commuter buses that ply the highway between town and work. But they choose to ride. SF2G is the brainchild of former senior programme manager Scott Crosby, 48, and designer Brett Lider, 41, who met as young Googlers via rbike, the company’s internal mailing list for road bike aficionados. Part of their motivation for creating the ride was simple. “See, the food at Google is incredibly good,” says Crosby. The hellish commute up and down 101 meant that they weren’t spending much time on their bikes, and both found themselves bearing the dreaded Google-15 – the 15 extra pounds (7kg) new employees put on in their first year. “Within six months, we were like, ‘Shit! We’re getting kind of fat.’” But optimism was in the air. With their powers combined, they reckoned, they could solve their commute and fitness problems: they would bike to work. Their first attempt was less than a success. Six people – five guys and one woman – met on a cold morning. The ride was direct, about the same mileage cars cover, but it was also traffic-y, slow, unsafe, and ugly. “It kind of sucked,” says Lider. Cue months of research. Lider went to work on what, in Silicon Valley, is known as ‘a hairy multivariable optimisation problem’. The variables are thus: X = speed; Y = safety; Z = scenic appeal. It took obsessive mapping and weekend rides, but finally Lider solved for X, Y, and almost Z. He called his speedy, safe, 60km creation ‘Bayway’, and as expected, the route hugs the San Francisco Bay. On Friday 19 April 2006, after nine months of beta testing, Bayway went live. With the route set, they also wanted new cyclists to join. Their belief was that the group should be welcoming to riders of all levels in order for the movement to grow. They eventually initiated First Friday Friendly Frolic (FFFF), an event on the first Friday of every month for newbies. The only rule is that no one gets dropped. “It’s for the ‘bike-curious’,” explains Crosby. “A place where people could feel it out and see if we were too weird for them.” Peter Colijn, 34, took the plunge on his first FFFF in 2009. He’d never completed anything near 60km and was overweight, and had plenty of nerves on his first ride out. “I didn’t sleep the night before,” says the software engineer. “I didn’t
know what to expect. Halfway through, I was uncomfortable and starving. The route’s never obvious, so I was happy to have people waiting for me.” Along the way, experienced riders told Colijn that they did the ride two or three times a week. “I was wrecked all day afterward, so them doing it multiple times per week seemed wild at the time,” he says. “But I wanted to do it again.” He wanted to be part of the group’s elite, wanted to join in on the time trials and record-breaking attempts. Aside from that, the cheerfulness and camaraderie drew him in. Riders shared baked goods along the way, and that was a plus, too. Nowadays, Colijn likes to pedal double centuries on the weekend, and even 600km, no-sleep ‘days’. He’s something of a crazed bike commuter who has forgone air travel in lieu of his bike. “Work often takes me to Phoenix,” he says. “It’s a 1 280km commute, and it takes me about 49 hours.” More than 10 years in, SF2G is less a quirky, diehard movement, and just a normal way to get to work – part of the fabric of local life in San Fran. A multitude of new routes have been created, some as long as 100km with up to 1 200m of climbing. Despite the extremity of even the easiest commute, a typical ride might bring 30-odd people. Or it might be closer to 600, complete with news helicopter escorts, on Bay Area Bike to Work day. The group has seen steady growth, increasing by an average of 330 members per year. Based on Lider’s analytics, there are 3 743 people who’ve made the journey. The Google message board is alive with ride calls written in SF2G’s shorthand:
SEX Style 4 0630 PCR Bayway Style 3-3.5 RRR 0640 SEX Style 1-ish 0600 PPR
SEX stands for the ‘Skyline Express’ route. Style 4 is no-drop, Style 1 is no-mercy pace. The other
letters are abbreviations of meeting spots – mostly coffee shops. The numbers designate departure time. As a language goes, it’s pure data – the grammar of code – designed to be downloaded with caffeine and to get a few laughs: sex in the morning, anyone? On this particular morning, 30 riders meet at Ritual Roasters, coffees in hand. The sun is rising, the temperature mild. Two new faces stand in the group, shifting their weight from one foot to the other. At 6:30 exactly, the riders take off in a pack. They rumble through a back alley, to a parking lot, and eventually end up on a street. A different group starting at another coffee shop shows up and the ride swells to a pack of 40. The new riders have expert guides by their sides, and the pack waits for them when they fall behind. It’s complicated to make it through, with more than 90 separate turns, leading past four city rubbish dumps, five golf courses, seven city parks, and 12 water crossings. Finally, they reach a bike path along the bay. The leisurely pace continues, the group quiet and lowkey. The end of the ride is near, and the workday is about to begin. But first, breakfast. The commute by bike has become a bona fide, only-in-the-Bay-Area subculture. “We worked on it kind of obsessively,” says Crosby. “It went from being a small group of nutjobs to something that has a life of its own.” Even with the sizable growth SF2G has seen, the club members ensure it stays true to its start-up roots. It’s bike culture, sure. But in its infancy this group was designed to be open in the same manner that open-source software projects are open: everyone involved was encouraged to contribute and build something together and make it grow. Anyone can propose a ride and make a route, and – most importantly – anyone can ride. Their pitch is an easy sell: skip the traffic. Skip the gym. Add joy. Join us.