The MTA peddles a deceptive "vision"

Below is my comment to Pedaling Forward: A New Guide to Our Vision for a Bike-Friendly SF in the MTA's blog that it refused to post.[Later: My comment was finally posted many days---not sure how many---later. Maybe all those 6,345 employees were too busy cranking out that kind of bullshit to post it?]  

I more or less can see why I've been censored here in Progressive Land---again---not for obscenity or personal attacks but for opinions that are unacceptable to the groupthink about bicycles and traffic in general that dominates city institutions, like SF Streetsblog, the SF Examiner, and now the SFMTA. 

The author of the MTA blog post may see calling his analysis "deceptive" as a personal attack, but I can't think of a better way to describe it, except maybe "singing for his supper." Hard to believe he really thinks he's giving the subject a factual, straightforward treatment.

My comment:

This is a deceptive analysis, since the baseline percentage on bicycle commuters is the year 2000, not 2006, according to your own Transportation Fact Sheet (page 3): in 2000 2% of city commuters rode bikes, and in 2014 4% rode bikes. That's a 100% gain for sure, but it took 14 years to get there:

https://www.sfmta.com/about-sfmta/reports/2015-transportation-fact-sheet

According to your 2015 Bicycle Count Report, there was actually a 7% reduction in bike commuters from the previous count (page 9):

https://www.sfmta.com/about...

Your "Streetscape" site for Masonic Avenue is also deceptive about that street's safety and the impact that project will have on traffic on that busy regional traffic corridor. It's essentially a bike project tarted up with some landscaping:

http://district5diary.blogs...

This kind of sales pitch makes the MTA sound like a corporation selling the public a defective product, which undermines your credibility.

Daily Kos

Even Fox News questions tax cut for the rich

Paul Krugman on Paul Ryan:

...Ryan is not, in fact, a policy entrepreneur. He’s just a self-promoter, someone who has successfully sold a credulous media on a character he plays: Paul Ryan, Serious, Honest Conservative Policy Wonk. This is really his first test at real policymaking, which is a very different process. There’s nothing strange about his inability to pull off the real thing, as opposed to the act...In other words, maybe this looks like amateur hour because it is. Ryan isn’t a skilled politician inexplicably losing his touch, he’s a con artist who started to believe his own con; Republicans didn’t hammer out a workable plan because there is no such plan, and anyway they have no idea what that would involve.

Or to put it another way, this could just be more malevolence tempered by incompetence.