Peter Hartlaub, the Chronicle, and the car-free fantasy

Peter Hartlaub provides the latest pro-bike, anti-car piece in the SF Chronicle (A map to make SF a bike and pedestrian utopia: 13 steps to becoming a car-free city).

The story features a Disney-like graphic fantasy (above) on the anti-car theme for SF. Women and people of color on bikes and skateboards! Heigh ho and whee! 

As I've pointed out over the years, the Chronicle has long supported the anti-car bike movement editorially and in its stories. 

Hartlaub stretches the anti-car argument to include picnicking on a city golf course and public transit projects, like the Central Subway and a second BART tunnel, as if transit is by definition anti-car.

Most people who use transit are people who can't afford cars.

The Central Subway, by the way, was a project born after the city tore down the Embarcadero freeway. Mayor Brown and Rose Pak agreed to the project to compensate Chinatown businesses for the loss of the freeway that delivered tourists on Broadway between Chinatown and North Beach. It was always a political deal more than a useful transportation project.

Like the high-speed rail project, the Central Subway project is favored by what I call Development Democrats who like big, expensive projects because they provide jobs for the unions. The second BART tunnel would be such a project, but it would at least be demonstrably useful, unlike both the Central Subway and the high-speed rail project.

But I digress. City Hall is rushing these anti-car "improvements" on city streets that don't provide the wider public any benefits. Except for the white men on bikes, the same demographic that's now making these decisions in City Hall (see this morning's NY Times story on that reality: The Pandemic Has Pushed Aside City Planning Rules. But for Whose Benefit?)

See also Why aren't women joining the bike revolution?

This push to implement anti-car projects---eliminating traffic lanes and street parking---have been on the Bicycle Coalition's and Walk SF's wish list for years. They are so significant and far-reaching they should be on the ballot and fully debated so city voters can understand and approve or reject them.

They won't have that opportunity like they never had a chance to vote on the Bicycle Plan fifteen years ago when the city began implementing it on the streets of San Francisco before our litigation made the city stop and at least do the legally required environmental study before it continued its anti-car jihad to remodel city streets on behalf of a small minority of cyclists.

Hartlaub's riffs on Vision Zero and a Bay Bridge bike lane are silly. No one but bike lobbyists think a bike lane on the Bay Bridge is remotely possible or financially feasible.

The notion that this city---or any city, for that matter---can completely eliminate traffic injuries and fatalities by 2024 has always been nothing but a political slogan, not a serious traffic safety proposal.

Typically for Chronicle stories on city traffic safety, Hartlaub features sound bites from the Bicycle Coalition and Walk SF, two anti-car special interest groups. 

He couldn't find a single critic of this undemocratic push to redesign city streets? Yours truly is available to provide at least some balance to the party line, but I've been considered an unperson by the local media ever since the Bicycle Plan litigation.

All I can do is my civic duty: keep floating an occasional turd in the city's anti-car punch bowl.

See also Anti-car, pro-bike propaganda in the NY Times.