Jeffrey Tumlin and Octavia Boulevard

Photo: Jason Henderson

If Jeffrey Tumlin is half as smart as Adam Rogers thinks he is, he would be embarrassed by the recent story Rogers did about him in Wired ("Tumlin has a preternatural awareness of urban ectoplasm.") 

Rogers thinks Tumlin looks great:

Tumlin...cuts a natty figure in a sweater, jacket, and really nice shoes. At work he favors tailored suits; a local news outlet reported his new job with the headline “Mayor Appoints Stone Cold Fox Jeffrey Tumlin to Lead SFMTA.”...Tumlin—tall, lean, and bearded...

Rogers cites Tumlin's qualifications:

Tumlin has a degree in urban studies from Stanford, which didn't help him get a job when he graduated in 1991 and moved to San Francisco. He was poor, but that was OK. “I was having my perfect young, queer, new San Francisco arrival experience. Those were my formative years. I was finally having a life.”

From the SF Chronicle last November:

“We are in the process of hiring a star,” said SFMTA board chair Malcolm Heinicke. He noted the agency had conducted an international search to find Tumlin, who lives with his husband in Noe Valley, a short train ride from City Hall.

Gee, what a surprise. After searching the whole world---a mere national search is usually enough for City Hall---for someone qualified to manage its transportation system, the city found the perfect guy right here in Progressive Land! And he's gay and can ride a "train" to work. Actually, it's a streetcar, but it runs on tracks just like trains. (Trains are considered almost as good as bikes by other experts in "urban ectoplasm.")

After he was hired, Tumlin put himself in solid with City Hall by kissing Mayor Breed's ass:

“The mayor likes to get stuff done — she does not like dithering,” Tumlin said. “I like to get stuff done. I don’t like to dither. I think the mayor and I will get along very well.”

The occasion for the profile was ostensibly a tour of Octavia Boulevard, the planning fiasco implemented by Tumlin's predecessors in City Hall (I've blogged more than 100 times about Market/Octavia and Octavia over the years.)

More from Rogers:

For thirty years, a 40-foot-high section of US Route 101 wove like a blackberry vine through a low, old neighborhood of Edwardian and Georgian buildings in San Francisco's Hayes Valley. Then, in 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake, magnitude 6.9, fractured the elevated roadway. Some people wanted to repair it, but the city decided to tear it down—a rare unbuilding in a nation connected by highways.

What Rogers is talking about is part of the Central Freeway that went over Hayes Valley before the earthquake:

Today it's hard to imagine that anyone defended the spur. The highway formed a wall between neighborhoods, and the right-of-way beneath it was a dark, unloved space. With the freeway pruned away, the city styled the newly revealed surface street—Octavia—after a grand Parisian boulevard, with an inner couple of lanes separated from parallel side streets by tree-lined islands. Octavia now terminates in a long, grassy park with a geodesic children's play structure at one end.

Rogers seems uncertain about the name of the street he and Tumlin are touring: It's Octavia Boulevard (It turns into Octavia Street north of Hayes Street.) 

I don't know about Paris, but Octavia Blvd. is now bringing most of the traffic that used to go over Hayes Valley on the freeway overpass onto surface streets in the neighborhood, creating chronic traffic congestion in the area. 

City voters were in fact so worried about the consequences of not rebuilding the overpass it took three elections and four ballot measures to decide to not rebuild it:

Back when Jeff Tumlin was on staff at the urban planning consultancy Nelson\Nygaard, he worked on this remaking of Octavia Street[sic] and Hayes Valley. Now Tumlin—tall, lean, and bearded—is the new head of San Francisco's Municipal Transportation Agency. On a sunny winter morning, he and I head for that green space so he can show me the freeway's ghost, barely visible in the odd, polygonal footprints of newer buildings along Hayes Street...

The reference to Nelson/Nygaard raises questions about Tumlin's apparent conflict of interest. Since that firm for years has done traffic studies for the city, what exactly is his relationship with the company? Is he still on the staff? Does he have an ownership interest? 

From a post on this blog last November:

Mr. Tumlin's role as corporate principal of the global Nelson-Nygaard corporation presents an apparent conflict of interest, since that firm with Mr. Tumlin has been a paid private consultant on many City Projects, including the Market-Octavia, Balboa Park, Central Waterfront, Glen Park, Visitation Valley, and Ocean Beach Master Plan projects. These contracts on City Projects indicate a potential conflict of interest that MTA has failed to disclose and must publicly consider before the proposed appointment.

The fact that Mr. Tumlin is a principal in a large consulting corporation with millions in contracts from the City and County of San Francisco and the San Francisco County Transportation Authority should disqualify him from the $342,483-per year position as MTA Director.

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