Flimsy argument for closing the Great Highway

From Streetsblog:

In a Tuesday open letter to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, more than 300 advocates decried Mayor London Breed’s decision to heed Supervisor Gordon Mar’s calls to re-open a roughly two-mile stretch of the Upper Great Highway to weekday motor-vehicle traffic. Breed’s decision, which is to take effect on August 16, would effectively end the city’s most popular “Open Streets” initiative (except on weekends and select holidays).

That letter is written by only two people who want to keep the Great Highway closed to traffic. The writers claim their letter is a CEQA appeal, but that's legally dubious, since Mayor Breed's decision on the Great Highway isn't even a city "project" by any legal definition.

(On the other hand, the mayor and Supervisor Mar probably considered a petition to open the Great Highway to traffic that has more than 11,000 signatures.)

Streetsblog also links a post on anti-car Walk San Francisco's site with numbers supposedly of visitors to the Great Highway while it was closed. In support Walk SF in turn cites the San Francisco County Transportation Authority (SFCTA) without providing a link to the numbers that can't be found on its site.

In short, Streetsblog's argument is nothing but a shell game of links that lead nowhere, least of all to any real evidence for its claims.

But I did find an SFCTA site on the Lower Great Highway, with a picture showing how roomy and accommodating it now is for pedestrians and cyclists. That is, there's clearly no good reason to allow the anti-car folks to hijack the Great Highway. 

Like all other anti-car efforts in San Francisco, the push to ban cars on the Great Highway is essentially based on anti-car ideology, not on actual conditions there. (see also Masonic Avenue and the pandemic)

The SFCTA's primary mission over the years, by the way, has been trying to impose Congestion Pricing on San Francisco. If/when the attempt is successful, it will be big victory for the Bicycle Coalition, Walk SF and their enablers in City Hall. 

Congestion Pricing would not only punish everyone who drives those wicked motor vehicles by imposing a fee when they drive downtown, but it would raise a lot of money to pay for the city's growing bureaucracy---especially the SFMTA, which now has more than 7,000 employees.

See also Great Highway or four-lane "walkway"?

 

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