Whither the Repugnant Party?

Center-right Republicans fear party headed for disaster.

That party is already a disaster: The Republican political base is crazy.

The Republican Party deserves to die.

Anti-car in the Examiner: Driving will be the new smoking

Mayor Breed

The hed on a recent SF Examiner story asked this question: Is it time to end free parking in San Francisco? The answer of course is "yes."

Reporter Carly Graf's anti-car, pro-bike bias puts her in the Examiner tradition with Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez and his stories on Masonic Avenue. (Like the SF Chronicle, the Examiner's bias on this issue goes back years: The Examiner "doubles down" on falsehoods about bikes in San Francisco.)

Two main sources for her anti-car parking story aren't identified as pro-bike and anti-car.

Like Matt Brezina:

“The pandemic and budget crisis is the moment to rethink everything,” Matt Brezina of local street safety advocacy group People Protected said of the opportunity to recast the agency’s priorities in the context of economic calamity...Metered [parking]spots are also free citywide on Sundays, a fact Brezina calls an “insane abdication of The City’s duty to manage our public resources.”

Click on the link I've plugged in above, and you see for Brezina it's all about bike lanes in San Francisco, though Graf describes him as just an "advocate" and a "street safety" guy.

And Marcel Moran, a Berkeley grad student who "focuses on transportation":

“This [free curbside parking] is a land subsidy for car ownership that works against The City’s goals of reducing air pollution, carbon emissions and pedestrian fatalities,” said Marcel Moran, a doctorate candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, where he focuses on transportation. Moran and other advocates believe the first step to increasing revenue through the parking program is charging for all curbside parking, a change that could also deter car ownership more broadly.

But his site shows that he actually focuses on bikes and scooters---and that he once wrote a paper entitled Driving will be the new smoking. That is, drivers of those wicked motor vehicles will be like smokers, and motor vehicles will be like cigarettes---and both will be widely seen as public health hazards!

Click on his CV and you learn that he is an "avid cyclist," who "has biked the entire California coast."

Of course Streetsblog agrees with the Examiner on parking as a source of "revenue." There are more than 400,000 cars registered in San Francisco, and most households in the city have a car.

See also Speed cameras for SF? We already have them.