Jeffrey Tumlin and Octavia Boulevard 2

Jeffrey Tumlin

From the Wired story on Jeffrey Tumlin, the new Executive Director of the SFMTA:

The Parisian version of Octavia, it turns out, isn't all he[Tumlin] hoped. “We screwed this one up,” Tumlin says. “The island is too narrow, so the outside lanes are too wide.” Traffic pours off the still extant part of the old freeway toward the park, and some cars use the outside lanes to bypass the center...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.

Not surprising that the anti-car Tumlin was involved in planning the Octavia Boulevard fiasco. 

The "we" referred to supporting that fiasco included not only City Hall but every right-thinking San Francisco progressive and organization: the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, the San Francisco Green Party, San Francisco Tomorrow, Calvin Welch and the Haight-Ashbury Neighborhood Council, Jane Morrison, SPUR, John Burton, Art Agnos, Carole Migden, Tom Radulovich, the San Francisco Democratic Party, the Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association, Robin Levitt, the Harvey Milk Club, Walk San Francisco, and even the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce.

Tumlin's notion that the problem with Octavia Blvd. is the island and the frontage lanes is laughable, as if all that freeway traffic now on Octavia and other surface streets in the neighborhood isn't the real problem. 

Shortly after the new and unimproved Octavia Blvd. opened to traffic, 45,000 cars a day were coming through the heart of that neighborhood.

Tumlin evidently has an expansive idea of his new job, as he told Curbed:

“We in transportation have to clean up the mess of bad housing policy.” Taking it one step further, Tumlin says, “If we want better Muni service, we have to build more housing. We need more housing everywhere.” He even suggests that aggressive NIMBY enclaves, like the one he calls home, have to concede, saying, “At the risk of offending my Noe Valley neighbors, there’s no excuse for single-family zoning anymore.”

Tumlin is a True Believer in what he and City Hall misinterpret---the transit corridors theory---and mistakenly try to apply to San Francisco neighborhoods, of which Octavia Blvd. is a bastardized and botched version. 

The notion that a larger city population will somehow lead to better Muni service is counter-intuitive, to put it mildly. Instead, that will more likely only mean more traffic congestion, since a relentlessly gentrifying San Francisco means more cars and traffic (Smart Growth in San Francisco?). People with money, not surprisingly, often own cars.

Much of the Wired article is devoted to the usual anti-car bullshit. Europe of course is lauded as opposed to the US, where cars are the most popular means of transportation, though in reality most Europeans also drive.

From Tumlin:

Driving a car is "literally the only place you can get away with murdering someone by calling it an accident." Which means Tumlin of course subscribes to the Vision Zero slogan that pretends to be a safety policy---a belief that's a qualification for his job---that there's no such thing as an accident, that all traffic accidents are supposedly preventable.

And this from the writer:

"Cars are also terrible. They kill about 40,000 people every year in the US and injure millions more."

That's a favorite trope of the anti-car movement, but at best it's a half-truth, since people in the US---before the pandemic, that is---were driving a lot more and traffic fatalities per miles driven are way down since the historical peak in the 20th Century.

And this from anti-car guru Janette Sadik-Khan:

“Change is difficult. A lot of cities are debating whether to build more roads and highways. They need to stop repeating the failures of the last century.”

Not even a half-truth. Cities by definition are already developed population centers. I'd like to learn which American cities are planning "to build more roads." How could they do that? Make room by razing housing and businesses in the neighborhoods?

The real issue in San Francisco and other cities is how much space on existing city streets will be allowed for cyclists by taking away scarce street parking and traffic lanes to make bike lanes.

Maybe Tumlin's next bike tour will be of the Masonic Avenue fiasco, the durable and gaudy legacy of his predecessor, where all the street parking---156 spaces---between Fell Street and Geary Blvd. was removed to make bike lanes that few cyclists are using.

Still waiting to learn what Tumlin's relationship is with the Nelson/Nygaard consulting firm that does a lot of traffic studies for San Francisco agencies, including the SFMTA and the SFCTA.

According to his Statement of Economic Interests form, he was recently paid more than $100,000 by Nelson/Nygaard. Is he still receiving income from that company or have an ownership interest?

If so it would be a clear conflict of interest.

See also John King's fantasy and the city's "best-laid plans" and Masonic Avenue and the media.