San Francisco: The "slow streets" and bus lane lie

Photo: Jim Herd

Randal O'Toole:

San Francisco Bay Area transit agencies are “struggling” as a result of the coronavirus, says one reporter. “Flailing about” would be a more accurate term. As noted yesterday, Bay Area transit agencies carried 86 percent fewer riders in May 2020 than May 2019. They basically have no idea how to cope with this other than to demand more subsidies from taxpayers and concessions from cities.

CalTrain, which offers commuter trains from San Francisco to San Jose, says it is carrying twice as many riders per day as at the low point of the pandemic. That means weekday ridership is up from 1,500 to 3,000. That’s still less than 5 percent of the usual number, which in 2018 was 64,000.

AC Transit, which serves Alameda and Contra Costa counties, warns that it may have to cut dozens of bus routes and reduce service on many more. But that’s an appropriate response when no one is riding transit.

People fleeing dense cities and substituting driving or working at home for transit hasn’t stopped BART and San Jose’s Valley Transportation Authority from continuing to subsidize high-density transit-oriented developments along their routes. Private developers are no doubt being cautious about spending their own money on new projects whose viability is rendered questionable by the pandemic, but BART and VTA don’t care because they’re spending someone else’s money.

San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (Muni) is creating bus-only lanes on streets. It’s not clear how that’s supposed to help when the buses are empty. The lanes are supposed to be “temporary,” but I wouldn’t be surprised if they stay bus-only after the pandemic is over....

Rob's comment:

Of course the bus lanes will be permanent, since those "improvements" are based on the shameless lie that they will somehow help the city recover from the pandemic recession: Fast-Tracking Transit Lanes to Help the City's Recovery.

Instead this is just opportunism by the city as part of its long-term anti-car policy: make it harder to drive in the city, and maybe more people will give up their cars and start riding bikes, which will be a cheap way for the city to mitigate its traffic congestion.

Before the pandemic/recession, the SFMTA was more like a jobs program with an attached transportation project. 

The jobs program was wagging the transit tail by 2018, with 6,348 employees annually paid $544,490,398 and $166,012,803 contributed to their retirement and health coverage.

Trump is rightly being hammered for risking the health of the country's school children to help his reelection campaign, while San Francisco risks the safety of city children by contracting with the Bicycle Coalition to get them to ride bikes to school: Children, bikes, and traumatic brain injury.

The health and safety of children are merely accessories to the city's anti-car policy, like the country's children are accessories to Trump's reelection campaign.