By willfully ignoring most of San Francisco’s residents, the Board of Supervisors and the MTA have created a master plan that makes no sense at all. It demands that people ride bicycles or use a transit system that doesn’t work. All the changes required will be paid for by extending parking meter hours, raising parking rates, raising parking fines, installing tolls into San Francisco, plus an assortment of added fees for everything from paying on line to doing what the MTA wants you to do, ride the bus.
Like so many other plans hatched by our insulated administrators, this one is based on a demonstrably false set of beliefs about who we are and how we live.
The enduring fiction is that cars and their drivers are evil, but bicyclists are holy. We impose fees on auto ownership, order police to prioritize bike theft and design streets to serve bicyclists needs, but do not enact fees for bike registration or instigate safe riding exams for bicyclists. Bicycles, the myth goes, are good for the environment.
The idea that bike riding is an environmentally sound transit solution, one that we should repave our streets to accommodate, is ridiculous. According to the League of American Bicyclists, only 2.1 percent of San Franciscans who work ride bikes to work. Those who do bike, often take their bikes on buses and BART.
The number and type of bicyclists remains constant because people do not convert to bike riding, but move into, then away from it. As people move into their professional lives, age and have children, bike riding becomes a recreational activity, not a commuting choice. Yet, we have developed an urban plan around the loud but short-sighted desires of 15,000 people in our population of 800,000.
Buses, streetcars and BART trains are dirty, dangerous and don’t run to places or at times that people need to use them. If you live anywhere except along a BART or Metro corridor, it is safer and more expedient to drive than to take public transportation, especially on weekends and at night. MTA director Ford thinks that a 51% disapproval rate is somewhat satisfying, yet keeps his job, so there’s no hope things will get better.
Residents of our largest neighborhoods, on the far side of Twin Peaks, are stifled by the loud voices of Mission district hipsters and downtown developers. Older adults, people with children, people who have long term investments in public schools and public parks, must compete for attention and funding with people demanding we save the planet by banning grocery bags while developers get tax breaks to build huge “luxury” condo complexes without parking spaces in our densest areas.
It’s become fashionable to proclaim grand concepts – Transit First! - without asking what the slogan really means or how it’s supposed to work. It should be easy to have clean buses and reliable schedules. Bicycles and cars have shared roads since the invention of the combustion engine.
The idea of San Francisco becoming a "green" city is ill served by this foolish transit plan. Taking care of our parks, our largest tree filled areas, would add more oxygen to the atmosphere than thousands of huffing bicyclists. Changing - and enforcing - building and noise abatement codes to encourage accessible open space, tree filled yards, reduce house size and making it illegal to cannibalize backyards, will add oxygen creating, sound baffling swaths of green that migratory and native birds rely upon.
Our plans have become so small, our political will so stunted that we spend money on petty personal projects and on demonizing particular people rather than on responsible, long-term development. There are sensible solutions that require foresight and forego identity politics. Unfortunately, this town has institutionalized incompetence and wrapped itself in social issues to hide the decay of practical administration of government functions.
