Commuting to work in San Francisco
posted by Rob Anderson @ 3:13 PM
8 comments
District 5 Diary
Rob Anderson's commentary on San Francisco politics from District 5
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
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8 Comments:
Your title is incorrect.
These stats are commuting to work "starting" in San Francisco, not commuting TO work in San Francisco. The majority of drive alone commuters in the survey work outside San Francisco.
The majority of people working in San Francisco take public transit. 100,000 plus take BART to SF for work daily, before you even count MUNI or Caltrain riders.
The number of people driving alone to work in SF is much lower, because real estate in the primary job centers is far too expensive to provide parking, and because the roadways to what is effectively an island will not accommodate that many cars.
"These stats are commuting to work 'starting' in San Francisco, not commuting TO work in San Francisco. The majority of drive alone commuters in the survey work outside San Francisco."
Seems like a pedantic distinction, since the numbers in the graphic are about how people who live in San Francisco get to work ("440,000residents commuting to work").
If you have a source showing exactly where all these "driving alone" and carpools starting in SF are going, I'd like to see it. The SF Transportation Fact Sheet used to provide numbers on vehicles coming in and out SF, with a gain of 35,500 vehicles on a typical workday(see page 3).
But the graphic shows the insignificance of bicycles in the context of the other "modes" of getting to work in SF. The city is redesigning our streets on behalf of a small minority of cyclists based on nothing but the hope that that will result in a significant increase in people ridng bikes in the city.
Redesigning a small minority of streets on behalf of a small minority of cyclists...
A small minority of streets impact most of the car traffic unfortunately. The efficiency of a given route from A to B is only as good as its smallest bottleneck. Cars can't just pass each other by squeezing through small holes in between each other like motorcycles or bicyclists or pedestrians on a sidewalk. So the one bottleneck cascades into a long line of traffic, and suddenly the whole commute is drastically altered. Much like the mysterious slowdowns on the freeway with no apparent accident or reason for the slowing, small slowdowns can have great ripple effects. For example, if you travel eastbound on Lincoln and then enter the park to get to Oak Street, the roadway narrows to one lane to cross the small pedestrian underpass. Then it immediately widens back to two lanes after 100 feet or so. A very small percentage of the road, but the backup stretches 6-8 times as long behind the initial narrowing. Same thing happens with small percentages of roads being restriped into bike lanes.
So really it is correct to say that we are "affecting a large majority of drivers" on behalf of a small minority of cyclists.
Cars can't just pass each other by squeezing through small holes in between each other like motorcycles or bicyclists or pedestrians on a sidewalk. So the one bottleneck cascades into a long line of traffic, and suddenly the whole commute is drastically altered.
This is pretty much an ironclad case for "it's good to get people to go from point A to point B in something other than a car"
Yes, exactly. And the city calls this policy "transit first," because it's rewritten the City Charter to include cycling as part of the official definition of "transit first." Hence, anything the city wants to do to screw up traffic they can now call "transit first."
Wait, so your complaint is that the striping of a road-- mind you, no bike lanes or anything here-- that doesn't pack as many auto lanes in as you think are necessary? Well, maybe that "pedestrian underpass" should be rebuilt! I mean, it is of course the earliest surviving example of a rebar structure in the entire united states, built by the actual inventor of the technology which is used by every single bridge, skyscraper, and major engineering project in the last eighty years-- but what does that matter when it comes to getting cars through a minute faster? Bulldoze it!
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