Heather Knight comes unglued

Scott Wiener

Last month the SF Chronicle's Heather Knight wrote a typical Chronicle piece in support of City Hall's bogus---and illegal---attempt to use the pandemic to rush through citywide anti-car bicycle projects, taking away street parking and traffic lanes to supposedly make our streets safer.

This paragraph toward the end of that column had Knight tumbling over the top:

San Francisco finally has some European-style outdoor plazas, like the shuttered blocks of Valencia Street and some roadways where kids can safely learn how to ride their bikes, skateboarders can do tricks, and families can walk their dogs right up the middle...We’d be crazy to give them up. Here’s hoping San Franciscans can gather in big numbers again someday soon on these streets to bike, jog, walk — and yes, hug our friends...

Yes, what a waste of space to allow cars to clutter up traffic lanes on city streets! How does that leave us enough space to "hug our friends" or walk our dogs? 

People are already walking their dogs everywhere. They often crap on sidewalks and in city parks. (In my neighborhood, the west side of Alamo Square is now called "Dogshit Park" by local residents.)

Knight implies that in days of yore people in the city were gathering "in big numbers...to bike, jog, walk---and yes, hug our friends" in the streets now cluttered up with cars, trucks, and buses. I've lived in San Francisco off and on since 1960, but I must have missed those days.

Her column today---posted online and presumably in tomorrow's hard copy of the Chronicle---follows that unglued logic. 

After a reference to the fires raging across the state, we get this:

And yet in supposedly environmentally conscious San Francisco, we’re fighting over bike lanes and prohibiting through traffic on a tiny percentage of our streets. Even though making it easier and more appealing for people to leave their cars at home to walk, bike, carpool or take public transit instead is one of the main ways cities can fight climate change.

But the MTA isn't invoking climate change to justify their bogus emergency; instead it's the pandemic, which she finally mentions:

Because of them, the next phase of the Slow Streets program is on hold. That program shuts some streets to through traffic so people can walk and bike safely while social distancing. Temporary emergency changes to streets to make way for coronavirus testing sites and pop-up food pantries are also on hold. Emergency transit lanes for buses operating at reduced capacity for social distancing to whisk essential workers to their jobs without getting stuck in traffic are on hold.

There's no evidence that these bogus emergency projects will have any impact on safety---and no evidence that people can't now walk or ride a bike more or less safely on city streets.

I was tested for the virus earlier this year at a nearby testing site that took up very little space. Of course the city could allow testing sites and food pantries anywhere it wants without taking away all those traffic lanes and that street parking.

As the name of the project suggests, the point of the "Slow Streets" project is to make traffic worse by taking away traffic lanes. How exactly that helps make anyone safer is unexplained.

As I pointed out the other day, the MTA's "emergency transit lanes" project has now listed Masonic Avenue as a street to be "improved" somehow, even though the city has already eliminated a parking lane on both sides of that street---167 parking spaces between Fell St. and Geary Blvd.---to make its little-used bike lanes. (Those parking lanes used to be changed into traffic lanes during the busy morning and afternoon commute.)

Masonic is the busiest north/south street in this part of the city. It normally carries more than 32,000 vehicles a day, a volume that it seems to be maintaining even during the pandemic. 

But apparently the city is getting ready to take away another traffic lane on Masonic under its bogus emergency, even though the only bus line on the street---the #43 line---now moves well between Fell and Geary.

Knight finally gets around to mentioning what critics are saying:

The crux of the argument...comes down to whether these measures taken by the transit agency constitute actual emergencies or whether they deserve regular review under the California Environmental Quality Act...[critics] argue that the city is trying to make these measures permanent, though the city has said that if it does move to keep them, it will follow the regular review process.

People can't rely on what the city says. The city lied in court about the Bicycle Plan and has continued to implement its anti-car/bicycle projects using the safety lie as justification. The bogus pandemic justification is just the latest in City Hall's history of disinformation on behalf of this goofy pro-bike ideology.

Knight repeats misinformation about CEQA:

CEQA was signed in 1970 by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan to require state and local agencies to disclose the environmental impacts of planned projects and try to mitigate them. It’s a great idea in theory, but it’s often used to fight transit and housing projects that actually help the environment. It’s become a cudgel used by NIMBYs to block any project they don’t like...

The opposite is the reality: developers and sponsors of projects hate to do the required environmental studies before their projects are approved, like the city lied to the court about the Bicycle Plan even as it was implementing it on the streets of the city. See also this and this.

Knight invokes State Senator Scott Wiener, who I've busted more than once for lying about CEQA, here and here. Like Knight the Chronicle's editorial department has been consistently poorly-informed on CEQA.

More from Knight:

CEQA allows government agencies to bypass the regular review process in an emergency, and that’s how the Municipal Transportation Agency got so much done so quickly during the COVID-19 pandemic.

As the documents sent to Knight argue, these projects don't qualify as an emergency under CEQA, which is clearly defined as “a sudden, unexpected occurrence, involving a clear and imminent danger, demanding immediate action to prevent or mitigate loss of, or damage to, life, health, property, or essential public services...includ[ing] such occurrences as fire, flood, earthquake...riot, accident, or sabotage.” (Pub. Res. Code, sec. 21060.3.)

Knight of course gets a soundbite from Jeffrey Tumlin, the bike guy who's now the MTA's director, who also irrelevantly invokes climate change, not the phony pandemic rationale for these projects.

Interesting that Knight quotes Supervisor Peskin who apparently doesn't agree with her unhinged views:

Supervisor Aaron Peskin acknowledged that “due process is messy and time-consuming,” but said it’s there for a reason and that he doesn’t have a big problem with the way CEQA works. He also said appeals of exempt projects are rare and don’t pose a major problem. “It’s been a remarkably helpful law writ large,” he said of CEQA, adding that it’s helped protect the Sierra Nevada and kept some bad projects from being built in San Francisco.

Just so. Interesting that Knight has no response to Peskin's sensible statement.

Knight's soundbite from the agency's planning director is good for a laugh:

"The projects themselves are delayed, and it has a ripple effect on all of our other work,” said Sarah Jones, the transit agency’s planning director. She’s in charge of figuring out the fate of the currently closed-to-cars JFK Drive, Twin Peaks Boulevard and Great Highway — but that’s all on the back burner now. Her staff also had to push off other important projects...

Since the MTA itself now has a "staff" of more than 7,000 employees, here's a story idea for Knight: Find out for your readers what the hell all those people actually do all day besides making it harder to drive those wicked motor vehicles in San Francisco.

Some of those employees actually drive buses and streetcars, but it would be interesting to know what the rest of them do for city taxpayers to justify that bloated payroll.

The credibility---and integrity of the Chronicle itself---is questionable on this issue. 

Another story idea for Knight: on that UC study about how San Francisco has been counting---and not counting---serious cycling accidents. The New York Times thought it was newsworthy but nothing but silence on the subject from the Voice of the West.