Vote against Proposition A and for Proposition H

Don Fisher and his wife Doris open their first store
Photo by SF Chronicle

I'm voting against Proposition A and for Proposition H because of the parking poison pill Supervisor Peskin put in Proposition A. Don Fisher is right about the stupidity of not allowing developers to provide enough parking spaces for new housing units. It's all part of the anti-car bicycle baloney that has our lemming-like leaders in its PC grip. 20,000 more cars in SF over the next 20 years? Big deal. According to the Visitors Bureau, there are now more than one million tourists who stay in our hotels every year who drive rental cars in the city. According to the DMV, there are 460,150 motor vehicles now registered in the city. According to the 2000 Census, there are already 214,660 people inside the city who drive to work every day (page 40, Countywide Transportation Plan, July 2004, SF County Transportation Authority). There are 35,000 people who drive into the city every day to work, with thousands more coming to dine, shop, or visit.

Consider too that a lot of the traffic in cities consists of people cruising for a place to park. Hence, more available parking means less time spent looking for parking, which means less traffic, not more.

Interesting that both the Chronicle and the Examiner are now opposing Proposition A. It may be that the more city voters suspect that Proposition A is just another anti-car, anti-parking measure from our precious PC leadership in City Hall they are going to vote against it.

Peskin and the SF Bicycle Coalition and their fellow travelers better start worrying about this vote. They should see last year's Proposition E, the measure raising the parking tax, as a cautionary tale: The mayor nominally opposed it, while all the PC progressives supported it, though there wasn't much of a visible campaign for or against it. Even so Prop. E failed by more than 2-1: 151,628 to 73,922!

What I hope happens: city voters reject Proposition A and pass Proposition H, thus handing the crackpot anti-car forces in the city---particularly the SF Bicycle Coalition---a huge defeat.