City Hall is deliberately screwing up city traffic
Letter to the editor in today's SF Chronicle:
Untangle S.F.'s streets
The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is pinching down Van Ness Avenue, a construction zone for many years. Market Street is all but closed to autos and covered in unsightly red paint. City streets all over town are closed, making travel confusing. Conflicting bicycle lanes and traffic calming devices make intersections more dangerous.
There are many giant barriers that are graffiti magnets blocking transportation through Golden Gate Park. High-occupancy vehicle lanes will soon restrict auto traffic on already-clogged 19th Avenue-Park Presidio. Extensive attempts to reduce pedestrian fatalities have changed numbers very little.
Is this the urban environment we want, controlled by the ideological whims of the unelected MTA?
San Francisco Mayor London Breed and the Board of Supervisors need to assert the jurisdiction of local elected officials over city streets. Changes to city streets must be necessary, sensible, effective, beautiful and an improvement over what has existed before.
Traffic calming? Let's open up all closed streets to normal traffic.
William Klingelhoffer
San Francisco
Rob's comment:
Alas, screwing up city streets is supported by Mayor Breed and the board of supervisors. They apparently think that making it difficult to drive in the city will encourage people to stop driving those wicked motor vehicles and start riding bikes.
When she was District 5 Supervisor, London Breed screwed up traffic on busy Masonic Avenue in my district based on bogus safety claims.
The Chronicle has been running with the anti-car lemmings in San Francisco for years. See for example its stories on Masonic Avenue: The Chronicle story on Masonic Avenue #1 and The Chronicle story on Masonic Avenue #2.
Labels: Anti-Car, Bicycle Coalition, City Government, District 5, Golden Gate Park, Graffiti/Tagging, London Breed, Pedestrian Safety, SF Chronicle, Traffic in the City
posted by Rob Anderson @ 10:11 AM
8 comments
8 Comments:
We need your voice and stance re the MTA, CTA, BOS, in particular D4 Gordon Mar plans to permanently close the Upper Great Highway, as well no as make many of the 22+ Slow Streets permanent.
You flatter me. I've been using my voice with this blog for more than 15 years but to little effect. You folks need to talk to your district supervisors about the issues. The anti-car zealots and their enablers in City Hall have had very little political resistance until now. Maybe a "critical mass" of public opinion has formed to support realistic political opposition to this foolishness.
We've heard Rob's voice complain about the City's efforts to curtail private auto use for many years. Unfortunately we haven't heard a peep about the the fact that car use contributes 1/3 of San Francisoco's carbon emissions. What should the City do about that Rob? When are these posts going to start getting an Anti-Environment tag?
"The City's efforts to curtail private auto use" has been dumb from the start, as if making it harder to drive in the city can somehow make it more livable. Instead, it has just made traffic worse than it has to be with no corresponding benefit.
Making it harder to drive and park in the city only forces motorists to circle around looking for increasingly scarce parking spaces, thus in practice making air pollution worse.
Linking this stupidity with a goofy overselling of bicycles---while downplaying the obvious dangers involved in that fashionable activity---has been nothing but an elaborate, years-long version of anti-car virtue-signaling.
Dumb? What's dumb is driving somewhere when there are better options. Decreasing auto use by making it driving a less desirable option and making public transportation, biking, etc. an easier option isn't rocket science. If it's easy to drive, people will drive.
There's a finite amount of space in the City. Allowing for unlimited driving is what's dumb. And still you offer no solutions for 1/3 of the city's pollution coming from cars.
And biking is dangerous? Based on your oft-repeated "OMG the UC Study"? Maybe the reason no one is paying much attention to it is because... it's insignificant? 2500 injuries needing the ER over 10 years? That's less than one a day when there are tens of thousands of daily bike trips. Hardly dangerous.
People with families are "dumb" because they have to drive? People who have to commute to jobs are dumb when they have to drive to work?
Let me guess, Justin: you're a single guy with no children and don't have to commute out of town to a job. There is no "solution" to driving in the city without a state and national solution.
That's a lot of "have to"s. Rob thinks we'll just "have to" let the planet burn because everyone "has to" drive. Dumb.
Tags: Anti-Environment
If the planet is going to burn, nothing San Francisco can do is going to do right now will make any difference. You are just posturing self-righteously. Interesting that you didn't bother to address any of the issues I cited in my response.
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