SF's crackpot, anti-car traffic/parking policy
My unpublished letter to the editor to the SF Chronicle:
Editor:
The ridiculous lengths to which city school teachers have to go just to park near their place of work ("Moving cars part of daily lesson plan," Jill Tucker, Feb. 1, 2008) shows what happens when the city allows the SF Bicycle Coalition---and its many enablers in City Hall---to make our parking and traffic policy. The city now deliberately makes it as difficult and expensive as possible to drive a car in San Francisco. Nevertheless, we will still get the periodic hand-wringing by the mayor and the board of supervisors about how/why the middleclass and people with families are leaving the city. The city can't wage a continuous jihad against auto drivers in the city and still make it a desirable place to live for middle-income families.
Rob Anderson
San Francisco
Labels: Anti-Car, Parking, Traffic in SF
posted by Rob Anderson @ 11:04 AM
5 comments
5 Comments:
Rob, read the comments on the SFGate Article, I think you'll find few people sympathize on this non-issue.
Owning a car in this city is a luxury, not a right. What the school ought to do is better organize car-pooling and let teaches expense taxis on occasion when they need to bring large amounts of stuff to school at odd hours.
I also think teachers should get paid more, but complaining about your salary in San Francisco while owning a car is hypocritical.
Rob - There's no way this has anything to do with the SFBC. If anything it has to do with the DPT who are, by anyone's account, a bunch of nazis. I know how much you hate the SFBC, but this is not related. Don't make shit up.
The problem could likely be solved if the school admin where not such a monstrous bureaucracy.
Rusty: Of course it has something to do with the SFBC, since that organization has opposed new parking in the city whenever/wherever it is proposed. The SFBC opposed the garage under the Concourse in Golden Gate Park, and the Hastings garage, and it of course opposed Prop. H on last November's ballot. And, as I showed on blog posts at the time, it supported taking away the street parking in front of small businesses between Van Ness and Octavia. The SFBC provides crucial political support for the city's anti-car policies.
Rob - so what if the SFBC opposed new parking? Did that have anything to do with the school(s) in the article?
Does the SFBC make the parking decisions? No it does not. As anyone who's ever been ticketed in this town knows, the DPT are a bunch of zealous nuts who make owning a car here a nightmare. It has nothing to do with bikes.
Secondly, why the hell do you want more parking? I own a car and keep it in a garage. I sure as shit wouldn't use it to commute to a job in the city, unless I was commuting to the far neighborhoods where Muni sucks and where there is plenty of parking.
I don't want there to be more parking in the Haight, or North Beach, or Buena Vista or many other neighborhoods because there are too many people driving there and it degrades our quality of life.
Screw bikes! This has nothing to do with bikes, it's about keeping the city livable, period.
As for the teachers, this was a scary, stupid article, that just stairs people up. There are plenty of solutions we could come up with for the issue that don't involve more parking.
Rusty:
The Bicycle Plan itself came out of DPT, which worked closely with the SF Bicycle Coalition on the Plan. Why more parking? Because most city households have cars (there are 460,150 registered motor vehicles in SF alone) and they use them to get to work---both inside and outside the city---and to shop. 35,000 people drive into SF every day to work. More than a million tourists drive rental cars in SF every year, and tourism is our main industry. If you make it harder to park in SF, you have more cars cruising the streets looking for scarce parking, which screws up traffic for everyone, including Muni. All of this of course has a lot to do with bikes, since the SFBC is leading the anti-car political movement in SF.
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