The World of Google Bike

Not far from Google’s headquarters in California, there is a building. If you walk into the front door, you’ll find a secret bike shop. If you slip into the back room, you’ll see 1,300 green, blue, red and yellow Google bikes. This building is the nervous system for a remarkable bike-sharing program that is a mirror of the search giant’s corporate culture. Every day, you can find about 700 of the bikes here and there like toys across Google’s campus. All morning long, Google’s private buses drop off employees in front of lots of bikes. More than 7% of the employees bike to work each day at Google’s main campus. Google puts lots of money and energy into bicycling. There, Google has on-site showers with lockers and a towel service, secure parking areas, an on-site bike repair service, and bike-friendly buses for employees who want to bike just the last few miles of their commute. Dating back to 2007, Google bought about 100 blue bikes as an experiment. “We’re spread out in a number of different buildings to foster that collaboration in the most efficient way possible. The bikes really became a way for us to do that,” said Brendon Harrington, Google’s transportation operations manager. There are a handful of bikes around the campus. Employees can book bikes using Google’s conference room scheduling app, seemingly for meetings. It’s a fun way to tool around the parking lot on a sunny day. On campus, it is easy to spot a few dozen cyclists any time you’re there. If that doesn’t appeal, you can try the more serious side of the Google bike culture: the 42-mile commute from San Francisco. “Each bike runs about 1,000 miles per year. Because they’re not locked or tracked, they end up all over San Francisco. Apple locks its bikes in parking garage cages and forces its riders to pass written safety tests. We just want to make it as easy as possible to get between buildings,” said Harrington.