Edward Mason has alone filed nearly a quarter of the city’s complaints about the shuttles. Anti-gentrification protests have surrounded the buses since 2013.

It is 7.33 in the morning, and Edward Mason has spotted his first prey of the day.

One of San Francisco’s notorious tech shuttles is idling at a bus stop. A gaggle of commuters – mostly men, mostly wearing the tech worker uniform of hoodie plus earbuds – crowd the sidewalk in front of a donut shop, waiting for their rides to jobs at Google, Facebook, Apple, YouTube, Amazon and Genentech.

Traffic is backing up – there are two more shuttle buses waiting to load on this narrow street, in addition to the normal Friday morning traffic – and a delivery truck veers into the opposite lane to get by.



“He’s supposed to be actively loading,” Mason says of the bus, as he writes down its information on a folded-up piece of paper. “You get him for staging.”

Later today, Mason will head to the public library to send an email detailing the violation to the San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency (SFMTA), copying a few members of staff, the citizens advisory council and a member of the board of supervisors, as well as about 65 “interested people”.

Mason has filed 282 such complaints, according to the San Francisco Examiner. His efforts account for more than a quarter of the total complaints the agency has received about the shuttles.

A 2015 report by the SFMTA referenced his fervor, reading, “One particularly active community member, a resident of Noe Valley, provided 69 of the 296 comments, or 23% of the total.” Mason says that those figures actually underestimate the number of complaints he has filed.

“I get them for every infraction,” he said. “You have to keep the pressure on.”

The tech industry’s practice of ferrying its employees from their San Francisco apartments to their Silicon Valley campuses (about 40 miles south) in private charter buses that use public bus stops began drawing protests and blockades from anti-gentrification activists in 2013.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers a keynote address during a 2011 conference in San Francisco. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The luxury buses – with their tinted windows and high carriage – were blamed for bringing unwanted traffic into residential neighborhoods, creating havoc at bus stops and generally alienating the population of San Francisco consigned to travel on the city’s crowded and decidedly non-luxurious public transit system.

Proponents of the shuttles argue that it is more environmental for the commuters to take the buses than drive, a message that Genentech has emblazoned on the shuttles themselves, with ads reading: “This bus removes 120 cars from your commute everyday.”

As one of the Genentech buses passes by, Mason offers a rebuke: “You can also say it removed 120 working class families from the neighborhood. That’s the tug and pull.”

The shuttles program was formalized and regulated by the SFMTA beginning in 2014, but many buses violate the rules – not displaying the correct placards, idling at stops, blocking public Muni buses, double parking – and they continue to draw the ire of San Franciscans like Mason.

Today, Mason lives in the same Noe Valley house where he was raised. He attended local public schools and served in the US navy. After he was discharged, he got a job managing logistics for a defense contractor in San Jose. For the first few months, he drove, carpooled, or took the train south to his job, but he soon relocated to the South Bay.

“I had a moral obligation,” he says. He estimates that by moving, he saved about two gallons of gasoline each day. “You just live where you work.”

Despite his aversion to some aspects of the tech industry (he sends his emails at the library because he does not have internet service at his house), Mason’s mindset bears certain similarities to that of the software engineers who take the tech shuttles. He has a keen mind for detail, a strong concept of how systems work, and a thirst for data.

When he returned to San Francisco several years ago to care for his elderly mother and got drawn into the debate over the tech shuttles, he decided that he needed more information.

“There was so much controversy in the neighborhood, and I said I wanted to see for myself.” He cut back on his jogging to protect his knees, and he began walking instead, tracking the activities of the tech shuttles as he went. He uses a digital camera to snap pictures of violations, and has grown familiar with the bus routes and individual drivers.

“The question is: should I be upset or not upset?” Mason says. “The powers that be say I should not be upset.”

“I’m probably an annoyance to them, but if I wasn’t, they wouldn’t know what’s going on.”