Development, parking tickets and "revenue"

Mike Kepka

A letter to the editor in today's Chronicle:

Transfer the cost

I read with some bemusement “Battling the sins of S.F.’s errant drivers” (Dec. 26). So let’s break this problem down. Start with our “development at all cost” political climate, which brings in the huge increase in people and traffic which are the basis of the problem. Add a construction boom, including housing, commercial and associated infra-structure expansion, with attendant heavy vehicle traffic, street repairs and closures. Tear down a few freeways to make way for yet more development. Increase housing density while providing insufficient parking. Now, when the victims of this godawful mess become angry and rude, act sanctimonious and decide it’s an “enforcement problem.” Never mind that the Department of Parking and Traffic is one of the few city agencies that performs (too) effectively, because...it’s a revenue center. And yes, the cost of development here is astronomical, and “affordable housing” is a euphemism for transferring its cost to someone else.

Randy Broman

San Francisco

Rob's comment:

Broman is right about the "revenue" from parking tickets. The last Transportation Fact Sheet says the city made $88,889,809 from parking tickets (page 11) in FY 2012/2013.

Graffiti/tagging: A "progressive" art genre

Justin Bieber himself is a vandal 

In a story in this morning's Chronicle (City wants label to pay for graffiti Bieber ads):

[City Attorney] Herrera has been working with city leaders, and San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin has legislation in the works, to crank up penalties for those engaged in unlawful guerilla marketing tactics, the city attorney's office said Monday.

Maybe Peskin is forgetting that graffiti is considered an art form by his "progressive" comrades, Matt Gonzalez and Tim Redmond.

Vision Zero mumbo jumbo

From Randal O'Toole at the Antiplanner (The Vision Zero Cult):

The Vision Zero Initiative seeks to reduce traffic deaths to zero–--certainly a worthy goal. However, I looked throughout its web site and couldn’t find anything about how they propose to achieve that goal. Instead, there is a lot of mumbo jumbo along with a few poorly chosen statistics about how safe roads are in Sweden. The lack of specific recommendations combined with the misuse of data leads me to believe that this initiative is no better than a cult trying to get money out of gullible government officials with the promise that, if they pay enough, they’ll get a magic formula to safer streets.

The statistic they most commonly use is number of traffic deaths per 100,000 residents. The problem with this is that this number is bound to be higher in countries where people drive the most...

Only by searching other web sites, including Wikipedia, do we learn Vision Zero’s secret: they make streets safer by slowing traffic down to a crawl...

See also this, this and this.