Illustration by Danny Hellman
Click here for the Clean Slate: Our printout guide to the Nov. 6 election
San Francisco is at a crossroads. The streets are congested, Muni has slowed to a crawl, greenhouse gas emissions are at all-time highs, and the towers of new housing now being built threaten to make all of these transportation-related problems worse.
The problems are complicated and defy simply sloganeering — but they aren't unsolvable. In fact, there's remarkable consensus in San Francisco about what needs to be done. The people with advanced degrees in transportation and city planning, the mayor and almost all of the supervisors, the labor and environmental movements, the urban planning organizations, the radical left and the mainstream Democrats — everyone without an ideological aversion to government is on the same page here.
The city planners and transportation experts, who have the full support of the grass roots on this issue, are pushing a wide range of solutions: administrative and technical changes to make Muni more efficient, innovative congestion management programs, high-tech meters that use market principles to free up needed parking spaces, creative incentives to discourage solo car trips, capital projects from new bike and rapid-transit lanes to the Central Subway and high-speed rail, and many more ideas.
In fact, the coming year promises a plethora of fresh transportation initiatives. The long-awaited Transit Effectiveness Project recommendations come out in early 2008, followed by those from the San Francisco County Transportation Authority's Mobility, Access, and Pricing Study (an unprecedented, federally funded effort to reduce congestion here and in four other big cities), an end to the court injunction against new bicycle projects, and a November bond measure that would fund high-speed rail service between downtown San Francisco and Los Angeles.
But first, San Franciscans have to get past a few downtown developers and power brokers who have a simplistic, populist-sounding campaign that could totally undermine smart transportation planning.
On Nov. 6, San Franciscans will vote on propositions A and H, two competing transportation measures that could greatly help or hinder the quest for smart solutions to the current problems. Prop. A would give more money and authority to the San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Agency while demanding it improve Muni and meet climate change goals.
Prop. H, which was placed on the ballot by a few powerful Republicans, most notably Gap founder Don Fisher (who has contributed $180,000 to the Yes on H campaign), would invalidate current city policies to allow essentially unrestricted construction of new parking lots.
New parking turns into more cars, more cars create congestion, congestion slows down bus service, slow buses frustrate riders, who get back into their cars — and the cycle continues. It's transit against traffic, and the stakes couldn't be higher.
"If ...
Vote Yes on A because it is *real* Muni reform. It's comprehensive: it provides funding, labor reform, streamlines the city's transportation bureaucracy, and mandates the first ever practical department-level climate action plan. If you believe in transit, and want to avoid service cuts and fare increases in next year's budget, vote YES on Proposition A.
Now for the first real policy substance in these comments. Yes, Prop A shifts a lot of power and money around, and it's almost all good.
The money: all future revenue from parking garage and meter fees and fines will go to the MTA instead of the General Fund. This is $26 million now, and stands to be much more when the MTA figures out how to manage its garages better. It tightens up the allowable uses of those revenues, in fact, by specifying they must be used "to support the MTA's transit-related functions." Writing "this check" to the MTA is less of a blank check than allowing the money to stay in the general fund. You know that; you're just borrowing the whole "black check" rhetoric from Don Fisher's anti-Prop A mailer because it sounds good.
Labor: eliminating the cap on salaries provides management the chance to give the MTA's transit workforce the highest base wages in the country, in exchange for "giving back" some of the work rule bonus payments and impediments to discipline. (Muni workers get the highest portion of their pay in bonuses compared to other major transit agencies.) No work rule changes, no raise.
The power: Prop A puts the responsibility for transit and traffic fully into the MTA's hands where it belongs. Yes, the MTA isn't the nation's leader in transit-first planning and implementation, but neither is the Board of Supervisors or the Mayor. In one case I care about, bike lanes, the Board has been demonstrably better than the MTA so Prop A preserves the ability of the Board to institute bike lanes without MTA approval. Not speaking for SPUR, I would like to a different governance structure on the MTA Board, including some elections. I would also like to see a different governing structure at City Hall but that doesn't make me vote against improvements to the structure that fall short of my ideal (and that don't contradict it)!
Prop A is comprehensive, and therefore more complicated than a typical measure. Peskin deserves credit for being so thorough. Unfortunately that very thoroughness makes it easy for opponents to find something that some voter somewhere won't like, and pick at it a million times.
I hope voters appreciate comprehensive Muni reform and vote YES on A.
Comment on: Transit or traffic
In order to comment on an article, you must Log In.
