Anti-car in the Examiner: Driving will be the new smoking
“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.”
“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.
Labels: Anti-Car, City Government, Examiner, Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez, London Breed, Masonic Avenue, Media, Muni, Parking, Streetsblog
posted by Rob Anderson @ 2:42 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Parking should be free. You already pay for it with gas taxes, but the government steals it to fund the MUNI boondoggle. Self driving cars are around the corner, spend the taxes on more parking.
Whether they are self-driving or are electric, cars are here to stay. Making it hard for people to park is dumb and bad for the environment, since that will mean drivers of the more than 400,000 cars registered in SF circle around looking for a scarce parking space.
Cars are here to stay, so why waste money on MUNI, a failed concept, that could go for more parking?
Muni normally carries hundreds of thousands of passengers every day. Can't blame the system for being abandoned during a pandemic. Part of the system's political problem is its bloated payroll. Still waiting to learn what all those people do besides drive buses.
Biden and Democrats of course have a soft spot for public transportation, which does need to be subsidized by the taxpayers. Alas, the Democrats' Covid relief package contains money to keep subsidizing transit agencies that should have trimmed their payrolls long before the pandemic.
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