Reality check: the SF Transportation Fact Sheet

MTA's Transportation Fact Sheet is an annual reality-check that shows who actually uses the streets of San Francisco. The latest Fact Sheet, published last month and posted on MTA's website, tells us that there were 461,797 registered motor vehicles in San Francisco in 2008, a number they get from the DMV's website.

Since the city is an important job center for the Bay Area and Northern California, there are 35,400 additional vehicles driving into SF every day over the Bay Bridge, the Golden Gate Bridge, and from San Mateo County.

How SF residents get to work based on the US Census: 38.4% drive alone; 8.4% carpool; 31.9% take public transportation; 1.8% take taxis, a motorcycle or "other," whatever that means; 2.7% walk to work; 7.5% work at home; and only 2.7% ride bikes to work, which is up only .6% from 2.1% in 2000.

According to the city's Convention and Visitors Bureau, 16.4 million people visited San Francisco last year. There are no numbers on how many of these people drove to the city, but it's safe to assume most of them either drove their own cars or rented cars at the region's airports. The CVB did a survey of hotel guests in the city and found that 25.8% of them rented a car in SF, which puts more than a million rental cars on our streets driven by hotel guests alone (there were 4.74 million hotel guests in SF last year).

There are 1,021 Muni vehicles and 1500 taxis on city streets.

Which makes it nutty for the city to take away traffic lanes on our busy streets to make bike lanes for 2.7% of city commuters.