Google’s Gbikes are routinely ‘stolen’; locals see it as CSR service

Google has an unexpected problem: between 100 and 250 company bicycles are stolen from Google's Mountain View, California campus every week, out of a fleet of around 1,100 so-called Gbikes.

But reports say 'borrowed' may be a better word than 'stolen' – it is not the work of hardened bike thieves but of locals who consider it as a sort of community service by the search giant.

Google maintains some 1,100 bikes with yellow frames, red baskets and green and blue wheels, known as Gbikes. Ttypically costing $100 to $300, they are free for its employees to get around the sprawling campus. However, according to company estimates, between 100 and 250 of them go missing every week.

The bikes have shown up at local schools, in neighbours' lawns, at the bottom of the town creek and on the roof of a sports pub.

Google may be a great place to work, ranking number one on Fortune's list of Great Places to Work in 2017. But this doesn't mean its bikes are free for all comers. Google has been trying to control its losses, using roving teams to collect the bikes from around town, and recently installing GPS trackers. That's how they learned one had made it all the way to the Burning Man festival in Nevada.

According to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the matter, 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.

A decade ago, Google started Silicon Valley's first corporate bike programme, which was adapted by at least 16 others across the US, including at Apple, Facebook and Walmart, the report said.

The company recently equipped about a third of its 1,100 bikes with GPS trackers, which revealed that the two-wheelers take an average 12 trips and travel six miles a day.

It now, also has a team of 30 Google contractors and five vans who are tasked with retrieving Gbikes. They carry waders and grappling hooks for pulling bikes out of a creek.

According to comments to the Journal from Mountain View residents, the deeper issue may be mixed feelings about the corporate giant. Some locals didn't realise the bikes were supposed to be for Google employees only, suggesting they regard Google as a benevolent part of the community.

But others – perhaps including a man who claimed to have an entire garage full of the bikes – regard their borrowing as a kind of retributive justice against the massive company. One woman specifically cited the annoyance of Google Buses, which bring employees to work from around the San Francisco Bay, saying she borrowed the bikes to ''balance it out''. 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.

The bike situation is subtler and more complex, as befitting lower-key Mountain View. But it still reflects, in the words of one local speaking to the Journal, a sense among residents that ''Google owes them somehow, someway''.

Google isn't entirely sure how many bikes it loses outright. From July to November, Google recovered between 70 and 190 bikes a week, or roughly two-thirds of the bikes reported off campus. The other third weren't there when contractors arrived to retrieve them.

Google is also testing versions that employees could unlock with their smartphones. But according to Google managers, reducing thefts is a struggle because they often cannot tell whether riders are among the company's employees or not.