Interesting page 1 story in the Times yesterday about employees at Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters hopping the Google buses to go to work, complete with photo of lots of white people reading books and listening to iPods on the bus.

The Google thinking is, offering free chef-prepared food and on-site oil changes, haircuts and rock-climbing wall, not to mention W-Fi-equipped bus service, gets greater productivity out of its employees, and the cost of offering such fringe benefits (Editor’s Note: I thought the term was “French benefits” until I was 11), ultimately pays off in increased productivity.

So are these benefits the trappings of a dotcom with a ferociously bloated stock (one recalls dotcom CEOs in black pocket t-shirts playing hoops in their Tribeca loft offices not that long ago), or the model workplace of the future? We shall see.

The article notes that Yahoo and eBay also offer bus service, though neither can match Google’s 32 buses and 1,200 daily riders–about a quarter of the workforce at Googleplex.

There’s an interesting note about etiquette on board the Google bus: cellphone conversations are limited to work calls and must be sotto voce.

I think the buses are free, though the reporter failed to mention it.

It being California and all, you can bring your dog on board and strap your bicycle to the bus’s exterior. But one can’t help but wonder, especially if that one is me–can you pop a beer on the Google bus on a Friday after work?