Sunday, January 27, 2008

Leave Geary alone 2

The Geary Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) is a dumb idea, a solution to a non-existent problem, since traffic on the city's primary East-West traffic corridor is already moving quite well, thank you. But of course that won't stop the city's meddlesome "planners" and "progressives" from pushing the expensive ($200 million) and destructive (digging up Geary for years) project, which is now undergoing environmental review.

The latest dumb idea---proposed, naturally, by Supervisor Mirkarimi---for Geary Blvd: eliminate the underpass at Fillmore Street and return all that traffic to the surface of that intersection, supposedly to make crossing Geary more "pedestrian-friendly." The SF Examiner rightly dubbed this moronic proposal as the worst idea of the still-young year.

Supervisor Mirkarimi, with the help of his "progressive" colleagues on the Board of Supervisors, has already done a lot of damage to San Francisco by okaying the Rincon Hill highrises. And he/they are striving to do still more damage with the Market/Octavia Plan (more highrises at Market/Van Ness), and by negotiating the city's surrender to a predatory UC at the old extension site on lower Haight Street. And recall that Mirkarimi and the BOS tried to rush through a plan to redesign city streets with the ambitious, anti-car Bicycle Plan and were only stopped by successful litigation, to which I was proud to be a party.

Since Mirkarimi got the endorsement of the SF Bicycle Coalition in the last election and supports Critical Mass, making traffic worse in the city is clearly of little concern to him.

The Murk had this to say about the Fillmore Street underpass: "Geary Boulevard has been the invisible Berlin Wall that's separated Japantown from the Fillmore...Now it's time to correct that...You have to break the wall feeling down."

Coming from our meddlesome District 5 Supervisor, these are ominous words for that part of town. Of course the idea to snarl traffic at Geary and Fillmore is presented under the Better Neighborhoods Project: "Hi, I'm from city government, and I'm here to make your neighborhood better."

Once again I propose my Leave the Neighborhoods Alone program, which city neighborhoods desperately need to defend themselves against a meddlesome city government seemingly determined to "better" our city to death.

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