3,979 more motor vehicles in SF

DMV San Francisco: Get in line

This is a companion piece to yesterday's post on C.W. Nevius. Turns out that according to the DMV there are more motor vehicles than ever registered in San Francisco. 

Seems like City Hall's anti-car policy isn't working, mostly because it isn't reality-based, but also because of gentrification. Surprise! People of means own cars.

Compare the 2014 DMV numbers (481,787) to the 2015 numbers (485,766), and we learn that there were 3,979 more motor vehicles registered in the city in the last year. 

That's the pattern since 2000 (451,879) when I first began keeping score (I always subtract the number of trailers).

The breakdown: 407,656 cars, 54,768 trucks, and 23,342 motorcycles/motor scooters.

In yesterday's column, Nevius perpetuated a myth: "And look at the Millennials, choosing to live in the city and scorning car ownership."

Actually millennials drive just as much as previous generations---and they shop at Walmart!

"Shocking and shameful"

From the Chronicle's Letters to the Editor, April 12:

Incompetent SFPD

I find it disheartening that heavily armed and trained law officers were unable, without killing him in a rain of bullets, to disarm and subdue one possibly dazed and confused homeless man with a kitchen knife. It appears that the only force left willing to risk their own lives and safety to save human life is the fire department. The inability of police, often in numbers, here and around the country, to subdue men and boys, unarmed or with only a blade, without an over-the-top armed response, is shocking and shameful. We focus a lot on race issues, as we should, but we might also want to look at plain incompetence as well.

Jeremy Snitkin

Novato

When did cops become such cowards?

Thanks to SF1st.

Paul Ryan is a phony

Photos: Charlie Neibergall/AP, Oscar White/Corbis

From Paul Krugman:

Hype springs eternal — certainly when it comes to Paul Ryan, whose media image as a Serious, Honest Conservative and policy wonk seems utterly impervious to repeated demonstrations that he is neither serious nor honest, and that he actually knows very little about policy. And here we go again.

But what really amazes me about the latest set of stories is the promise that Ryan will finally deliver the Republican Obamacare alternative that his colleagues in Congress have somehow failed to produce after all these years. No, he won’t — because there is no alternative.

Or maybe I should say that there is no alternative to the right. Alternatives to the left do exist. True socialized medicine — an American NHS — would be feasible economically; so would single-payer, in the form of Medicare for all. The reasons we aren’t doing those are political.

But on the right, is there a more free-market, more privatized system that could replace the Affordable Care Act without causing the number of uninsured to soar? No, as some of us have tried to explain many times...