> The buses are the only reason that the big South Bay tech companies can attract significant quantities of engineers from SF and the East Bay.

That's simply not true. According to this highly flawed study, 50% of people would still drive in the buses didn't run. http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2014/01/21/study-40-percent...

Also, SF has a Google office. I'm not quite sure where you're coming up with these unfounded conjectures from.