Cars

Get yer bike on: Gas-Free Fridays start tomorrow

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By Amanda Witherell

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I’ve become a happier person since I sold my Jetta and started traveling almost exclusively by bicycle. Every time I’ve driven a car in San Francisco the experience has left me frustrated, annoyed, and feeling like I didn’t get where I was going any faster than I would have on my bicycle. I’m not alone — car sales statewide are down, the big three automakers are crying poverty and just got a $25 billion loan from President George W. Bush, and according to a recent national survey by Bikes Belong, of 150 bike stores polled, 73 percent said they’re selling more bikes this year.

So, it’s fantastic to see this new initiative designed to get people out of their cars at least once a week. Launched by the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, they make the case for picking the bike over the car by pointing out that 50 percent of the city’s emissions come from transportation and half of all car trips within the city are less than two miles — an easy pedal on a bicycle. Furthermore, cars emit the most pollution during the first few minutes they’re running, which means that short car trips are the worst for the environment.

“Bicyclists will also be rewarded by knowing that riding a bicycle 10-miles a day versus owning and driving will save them $8,000/year, will burn an average of 110,250 calories (that’s 35lbs of fat!), and save our city 3,500 lbs. of greenhouse gas emissions every year,” states a press release from the SFBC.

They’ll be hosting warm-up stations at various locations where cyclists can grab free snacks and cups of fair-trade coffee and tea. Look for them tomorrow at:

Oct. 3rd: Market and 12th Streets, 7:30-9:30am
Oct. 10th: Valencia and 17th Streets, 7:30-9:30am
Oct. 17th: Embarcadero (between the Ferry Building and Justin Herman Plaza), 7:30-9:30am
Oct. 24th: City Hall, Polk and Grove Streets, 7:30-9:30am
Oct. 31st: Folsom and 7th Streets, 7:30-9:30am

All American Rejects

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In a world populated entirely by curfewless teenagers, where seemingly nobody is checking IDs at the door, the amount of high-pitched drama that can go down on a Friday night between dusk and dawn is virtually limitless. At least an entire teen-movie subgenre has been constructed upon this premise, and Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist is the latest entry to put its sturdiness to the test.

Somewhat reprising his role in Juno (2007), Michael Cera plays Nick, a soft-hearted indie boy who’s the bassist in a queercore band with his two best friends (Aaron Yoo and Rafi Gavron). Nick (straight) is in mourning over his six-month relationship with a vapid über-bitch named Tris (Alexis Dziena), who happens to be school frenemies with Norah (Kat Dennings), who happens to have made a habit of rescuing Nick’s lovelorn mix CDs from the succession of trashcans into which Tris has callously tossed them.

We know that Tris is all wrong for this emo boy — her hair salon highlights alone scream, "I would never have gone out with this guy in the first place, so why did you cast me in this role?" Regardless, the film further underscores her unsuitability by painting her as an outsider to the world of true indie rock fandom, a poseur who doesn’t appreciate a good breakup mix and, worse, fumbles the name of the coolest underground band in town.

Said band, Where’s Fluffy, famed for its secret shows, is the engine that drives our awkward hero and heroine and their cohorts out into the night, and the film is basically a tour of young indie rock New York City, with pit stops all over lower Manhattan and Brooklyn and a cameo by freak folker Devendra Banhart. But all the madcap piling in and out of cars and motoring around in search of Fluffy begins to look like work, and so, at times, does Nick and Norah’s inch-by-inch romantic progression. A soundtrack packed with signifiers like Vampire Weekend and Band of Horses might not be enough to keep us in the mood, leaving us wishing they would find Fluffy already and let us go home. (Lynn Rapoport)

NICK AND NORAH’S INFINITE PLAYLIST

Opens Fri/3 in Bay Area theaters.

An economic locavore policy

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EDITORIAL Local food is all the rage in San Francisco these days. The locavores and the slow-food people held a conference at Fort Mason a couple of weeks ago that drew huge crowds. Mayor Gavin Newsom is on board, and he loves to talk about creating a sustainable San Francisco. There are people in town who talk about energy independence, who talk about shopping locally, about building a city where people can live and work without using private cars.

We’re all for it — but in the wake of the wrenching meltdown in the financial markets, San Francisco needs to take a broad approach to the city economy. It’s time to develop a comprehensive plan to turn San Franciscans (and their government, businesses, and institutions) into economic locavores.

There are three basic reasons why the housing, credit, and financial markets are in the worst crisis since the Great Depression. The first two are related: The complexity of the financial instruments and securities being traded has increased so dramatically that even the heads of big investment banks didn’t know exactly what they were buying and selling. And the regulatory system under the George W. Bush administration has been unable and unwilling to keep up.

There’s not a lot San Franciscans can do locally to fix either of those problems (other than work to elect Barack Obama in November).

But the third factor in the current crisis is the globalization of money — and that’s something San Francisco can address.

For years, most famously in Seattle in 1999, protesters in this country have clashed with major institutions like the World Trade Organization over globalization issues. For the most part, they’ve focused on trade — on America losing jobs to low-wage companies, on big American chain stores selling goods made in third-world sweatshops, and on American money going to multinational corporations that prey on impoverished people and foul the environment. All of those are crucial issues — but so is the globalization of finance, which has received less attention.

And we’re not just talking about the stock market. The money San Franciscans deposit every day in local banks, the payments on mortgages and credit cards, the insurance premiums … all that cash goes into a financial system that instead of reinvesting in communities is buying and selling complex international securities like credit default swaps and derivatives. The traders and top executives who make these markets get colossal paychecks and bonuses — and most of us get nothing. Now that the whole house of cards is starting to topple, the small businesses and the people who need credit to buy cars or washing machines or bicycles or a house — the ordinary residents of cities like San Francisco — are the biggest losers.

The plan the White House has put forward is one of the grossest examples of corporate welfare in a generation — and even the Democrats in Congress are hesitant to oppose it.

But if San Francisco is serious about building a sustainable city, the mayor and the supervisors ought to start working, now, to create a citywide policy for economic localism. Among the elements:

•Banks that do business with the city should be required to set aside a significant amount of their loan portfolio for local small-business and housing loans. (The Treasurer’s Office can start with Bank of America, which currently holds the city’s deposit and payroll accounts.) The Community Reinvestment Act is far too weak and rarely enforced; San Francisco, with the leverage of a $6 billion city budget, can do much better.

•Most city contracts go to companies outside of San Francisco. Local businesses need to get a strong preference.

•The San Francisco controller needs to start looking at the city’s balance of trade — what do we import, what do we export, and how can we use more local products?

•The city needs to use tax policy to encourage local enterprise and discourage the out-of-town chains that use San Francisco as a strip mine.

There’s much more on the agenda, and there are plenty of people with good ideas. The crisis will define our political era; the city ought to be moving now to be in the lead.

A walk in the PARK

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Think metered parking spaces can only be used for cars? Think again. The forward-thinking, public space-obsessed art collective REBAR has been exploiting a legal loophole that allows just about any use of those car-sized spots – as long as the meter’s being fed – since 2005.

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Back then, the small Bay Area-based collective started by building miniature public parks in places where private SUVs usually live. The result was so surprising and delightful that the idea’s caught on worldwide – and now, on Friday, September 19, in 600 cities globally, metered spaces will be used for everything from extended sidewalk seating outside a café to, in one Bay Area case, a marriage locale. (Watch the two men wed on Friday at 137 Scott, from 3 to 5pm.)

Even if you don’t have time to build your own park, take a walking tour and join in the fun as businesses, individuals, and arts groups all over the city transform gutters into gardens. For more info on PARK(ing) Day, visit www.parkingday.org. Or, for maps of the day’s haps, check out the Trust for Public Land’s national info at their website.

For more information on REBAR, including other projects such as a commission for the City of Amsterdam and a presentation at the world-renowned Venice Architecture Biennale, check out their website at www.rebargroup.org.

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Sure beats a carpool. Flickr photo by Plaid Iguana.

Democracy in St. Paul

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› news@sfbg.com

ST. PAUL, Minn. — The bright white light of flash bombs can be seen everywhere among the scattering crowd. Loud explosions of concussion grenades mix with the lighter, metallic tinkling of tear gas canisters bouncing along the pavement. Lines of police dressed in full riot gear stretch beyond the sulfur-green clouds of smoke bombs. Shouts come from all directions in the darkness, suddenly lit up like a war zone.

"What are you doing? We’re peaceful!" some people scream.

"Turn around! Go back!" police shout.

People are scattering now despite cries from some protesters to stay together. As they retreat, demonstrators bump into police lines blocking off escape routes. The police — on horses, motorcycles and bicycles, in squad cars, even driving dump trucks with lowered snowplow blades — attempt to herd the crowd.

"No more tear gas!" some people yell as they try to escape, their eyes red and watery as medics attempt to help amid the chaos. Others scream, "Where do you want us to go?" as officers plug them with mace.

Still others are getting angry. "Fuck you, pigs!" they shout in defiance, attempting to hold their ground, at times hurling projectiles at the police as the explosions continue.

Despite attempts by police to herd the crowd, people are running wild through the neighborhoods surrounding the Minnesota Capitol Building in St. Paul. They dart through parking lots and unblocked streets, trying to escape and hoping to regroup. Cars screech to a stop and bystanders are swept into the mass as they, too, attempt to sidestep the onslaught of police firing from all directions.

Beginning with nearly 1,000 people, this demonstration has been reduced to around 200. It started earlier as an antiwar rally on the Capitol lawn, the latest in a week of protests and civil disobedience, a citizen response to the Republican National Convention taking place at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul. It is Sept. 4, which means John McCain would soon be inside, offering his version of the next four years of America.

By the end of the convention, more than 800 people, including journalists, street medics and legal observers, will have been arrested in RNC-related protests, many having experienced a similar use of force by police.

There had been showdowns between zealous police and protesters all week.

On Aug. 29, police raided the headquarters of the RNC Welcoming Committee, an anarchist organization that says it was here to provide assistance to people who wanted to disrupt the convention through direct action and civil disobedience.

Police said the raid was the culmination of an undercover operation that began a year ago, in which officers claim to have heard discussions about plots to disrupt the convention. During that raid and subsequent raids of the homes of some local activists, police said they found caltrops for popping tires, buckets of urine to throw on police, and hand links for creating human barricades, among other items that could potentially be used to disrupt the convention.

The RNC Welcoming Committee refuted the police claims. "The raid was an effort to derail RNC protest organizing efforts and to intimidate and terrorize individuals and groups converging in the Twin Cities to exercise what are supposed to be their basic civil rights," said Tony Jones, a member of the group.

"We are not the terrorists," another spokesperson later said. "The terrorists are inside the Xcel Center."

Among some 10,000 protesters in St. Paul last week — far more than the contingent that protested at the Democratic National Convention the week before — was a strong contingent of self-proclaimed anarchists, whose direct-action style of protesting led to a near-continuous conflict with police. This became the focus of local and national media coverage, and while to some degree it represented the vibe on the streets, there were also thousands who came to engage in peaceful civil disobedience.

Despite last-minute revisions to the RNC schedule, thousands gathered on Sept. 1 for the March on the RNC protest — the largest of the week — to kick off the opening day of the convention. Throughout the day, confrontations broke out between police and autonomous groups of protesters attempting to block roads and bridges around the city. Some became violent, and there were mass arrests.

Tuesday night, the Poor People’s March For Our Lives" protest provoked confrontation, when several hundred people who marched to the free speech "cage" — a barricaded area outside the Xcel Energy Center reserved for protesting — refused to disband after police issued three dispersal orders. Like the previous day, police began firing tear gas into the crowd, eventually pushing the people to a park, where some 60 were arrested.

The Sept. 4 rally was permitted, but the march was not. The Twin Cities Anti-War Committee, which organized the event, made clear from the beginning it intended to march to the Xcel Energy Center to try to disrupt McCain’s acceptance speech.

At the rally, which preceded the march, a speaker commenting on the mass arrests of protesters asked the crowd, "Are the people responsible for the criminal war on Iraq and the war at home on the poor ever held accountable for their actions?"

"No!" came the reply.

Police had the rally surrounded and intermittently plucked people from the crowd, placing them under arrest for unknown reasons — the most common charges were unlawful assembly, felony property damage, and felony riot. Large clusters left the main body of the rally and surrounded the police, prompting tense stand-offs as the police removed those under arrest.

"Stay together," Katrina Plotz, an organizer with the Anti-War Committee, screamed from the stage. "They’re trying to steal our protest — we have to ignore the police intimidation."

What became a battlefield here in the streets of St. Paul began with a series of sit-ins, as impenetrable police lines continually stifled marchers not looking for a serious fight with police. Frustrated with repeatedly being halted — a slow process in which police used horses to divide groups and arrest only some protesters — demonstrators engaged in an improvised maverick march that went wherever it could, for as long as it could.

Now, in the quieter moments between concussion bomb blasts that pushed the group toward its ultimate fate in the Ramsey County Jail, a small debate broke out among some of the protesters about how effective their direct action was at this RNC.

"It makes sense at a WTO conference like Seattle in 1999, where policymaking can actually be halted," one said of the police presence. "But more than anything else the RNC is ceremonial."

Still, as the police ultimately herded this crowd onto a bridge that police then blocked on both sides before placing everyone under arrest, it was clear those here tonight were angry. Judging from chants throughout the week, most felt they could not meaningfully participate in the political system in any other way. They obviously wanted to be heard.

"The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!" they shouted as police shot pepper spray into the crowd, forcing its last few steps onto the bridge.

This report first appeared in the Louisville Eccentric Observer. Sam Stoker is a freelance reporter based in Chicago. Like many journalists covering the protests — including Amy Goodman and two of her DemocracyNow! producers — Stoker was arrested and charged with "presence at an unlawful assembly." Police confiscated his notes and camera gear.

Man in the middle

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>>More: For the Guardian’s live coverage of the Democratic National Convention 2008, visit our Politics Blog

› steve@sfbg.com

As the Democratic National Convention was drawing to an explosive close Aug. 28, Barack Obama finally took center stage. In an address to more than 70,000 people, he presented his credentials, his proposals, and his vision. Most in the partisan crowd thought he gave a great speech and left smiling and enthused; some bloggers quickly called it the greatest convention speech ever.

I liked it too — but there were moments when I cringed.

Obama played nicely to the middle, talking about "safe" nuclear energy, tapping natural gas reserves, and ending the war "responsibly." He stayed away from anything that might sound too progressive, while reaching out to Republicans, churchgoers, and conservatives.

He also made a statement that should (and must) shape American politics in the coming years: "All across America something is stirring. What the naysayers don’t understand is this isn’t about me — it’s about you."

Well, if this is really about me and the people I spend time with — those of us in the streets protesting war and the two-party system, people at Burning Man creating art and community — then it appears that electing Obama is just the beginning of the work we need to do.

As Tom Hayden wrote recently in an essay in the Guardian, Obama needs to be pushed by people’s movements to speed his proposed 16-month Iraq withdrawal timeline and pledge not to leave a small, provocative force of soldiers there indefinitely.

After a 5,000 mile, 10-day trip starting and ending at Black Rock City in the Nevada desert with Denver and the convention in between, I’ve decided that Obama is a Man in the Middle.

That creature is essential to both Burning Man and the Democratic National Convention, a figure of great significance — but also great insignificance. Because ultimately, both events are about the movements that surround and define the man.

THE BIG TENT


Nominating Obama was a historic moment, but the experience of spending four days at the convention was more like a cross between attending a big party and watching an infomercial for the Democratic Party. It was days of speeches followed by drinking — both exclusive affairs requiring credentials and connections for the biggest moments.

This year’s convention saw a new constituency come into full bloom. It was called the Big Tent — the literal name for the headquarters of bloggers and progressive activists at the Denver convention, but it also embodied the reality that the vast blogosphere has come of age and now commands the attention of the most powerful elected Democrats.

The tent was in the parking lot of the Alliance Building, where many Denver nonprofits have their offices. It consisted of a simple wood-frame structure two stories high, covered with a tent.

In the tent were free beer, food, massages, smoothies, and Internet access. But there was also the amplified voice of grassroots democracy, something finding an audience not just with millions of citizens on the Internet, but among leaders of the Democratic Party.

New media powerhouses, including Daily Kos, MoveOn, and Digg (a Guardian tenant in San Francisco that sponsors the main stage in the Big Tent) spent the last year working on the Big Tent project. It was a coming together of disparate, ground-level forces on the left into something like a real institution, something with the power to potentially influence the positions and political dialogue of the Democratic Party.

"When we started doing this in 2001, there just wasn’t this kind of movement," MoveOn founder Eli Pariser told me as we rode down the Alliance Building elevator together. "The left wing conspiracy is finally vast."

The Big Tent constituency is a step more engaged with mainstream politics than Burning Man’s Black Rock City, an outsider movement that sent only a smattering of representatives to the convention, including me and my travel mates from San Francisco, musician Kid Beyond and Democratic Party strategist Donnie Fowler, as well as the Philadelphia Experiment’s artistic outreach contingent.

It’s an open question whether either constituency, the Big Tent bloggers and activists or the Black Rock City artists and radicals, are influencing country’s political dialogue enough to reach the Democratic Party’s man in the middle. Obama didn’t mention the decommodification of culture or a major reform of American democracy in his big speech, let alone such progressive bedrock issues as ending capital punishment and the war on drugs, downsizing the military, or the redistribution of wealth.

But those without floor passes to the convention represent, if not a movement, at least a large and varied constituency with many shared values and frustrations, and one with a sense that the American Dream is something that has slipped out of its reach, if it ever really existed at all.

These people represent the other America, the one Obama and the Democratic Party paid little heed to during their many convention speeches, which seemed mostly focused on bashing the Republican Party and assuring heartland voters that they’re a trustworthy replacement. But that’s hardly burning the man.

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Photo by Mirissa Neff

AMERICAN DREAM


It’s been almost a year since Burning Man founder Larry Harvey announced that the art theme for the 2008 event would be "American Dream." I hated it and said so publicly, objecting to such an overt celebration of patriotism, or for setting up a prime opportunity for creative flag burning, neither a seemingly good option.

But I later came to see a bit of method behind Harvey’s madness. After announcing the theme, Harvey told me, "There was a cascade of denunciations and maybe that wasn’t a bad thing. It pricked people where they should be stimulated." He asks critics to read his essay on the Burning Man Web site explaining the theme: "It says that America has lost its way."

But he also said that the disaffected left and other critics of what America has become need to find a vision of America to fight for, something to believe in, whether it’s our Bill of Rights (pictured on Burning Man tickets this year) or some emerging manifestation of the country. "Americans need to find our pride again," Harvey told me. "We can’t face our shame unless we find our pride."

I was still dubious, since I tend toward Tolstoy’s view of patriotism: that it’s a bane to be abolished, not a virtue to be celebrated. Harvey and I have talked a lot of politics as I’ve covered Burning Man over the past four years, and those discussions have sharpened as he has subtly prodded participants to become more political, and as burners have reached out into the world through ventures such as Black Rock Arts Foundation, Burners Without Borders, and Black Rock Solar.

I’ve become friends with many of the event’s key staffers (some, like BWB’s Tom Price, through reporting their stories). This year, one employee (not a board member) I’m particularly close to even gave me one of the few gift tickets they have to hand out each year, ending my five-event run of paying full freight (and then some). I’m also friends with my two travel mates, Kid Beyond, a.k.a. Andrew Chaikin, and Fowler, who handled field organizing for Al Gore in 2000, ran John Kerry’s Michigan campaign four years later, and was attending his sixth presidential convention.

Kid Beyond and I arrived at Black Rock City late Friday night, Aug. 22, and found the playa thick with deep drifts of dust, making it a difficult and tiring bicycle trek into the deep playa where San Francisco artist Peter Hudson and his crew were building Tantalus. But it was worth the ride, particularly if seeking a great take on the American Dream theme.

Like most creations at that early stage of the event, it wasn’t up and running yet, but it would be by Aug. 24, when the event officially began. Still, even in its static state, it was an art piece that already resonated with my exploration of how the counterculture sees the national political culture.

Tantalus looks like a red, white, and blue top hat, with golden arms and bodies around it. And when it spins around, totally powered by the manual labor of visitors working four pumper rail cars, the man — a modern American Tantalus — reaches for the golden apple being dangled just out of his reach and falls back empty-handed.

It’s a telling metaphor for such a big week in American politics.

There were plenty of political junkies on the playa, including two friends who let me crash in their RV for two nights and who left the playa for Denver after a couple of days. Fowler’s sweetie, Heather Stephenson, is with Ideal Bite (their logo is an apple minus one bite) and was on an alternative energy panel with Mayor Gavin Newsom, Denver’s mayor, John W. Hickenlooper, and Gov. Bill Ritter of Colorado.

"The American Dream to me is not having barriers to achievement," Stephenson told me. It is Tantalus getting some apple if he really reaches for it. Fowler said that it is "the freedom to pursue your own dream without interference by government or social interests." But, he added, "the American Dream is more a collective dream than an individual dream."

Bay Area artist Eric Oberthaler, who used to choreograph San Francisco artist Pepe Ozan’s fire operas on the playa, hooked up with the Philadelphia Experiment performers years ago at Burning Man — including Philly resident Glenn Weikert, who directs the dance troupe Archedream. This year they created "Archedream for America," which they performed at Burning Man and the Democratic National Convention. Weikert told me the artistic and collaborative forces that Burning Man is unleashing could play a big role in creating a transformative political shift in America.

"These are two amazing events that are kind of shaping the world right now," Weikert said. "A lot of the ideas and views are similar, but people are working in different realms."

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Tantalus. a Burning Man installation
Photo by Steven T. Jones

MEDIA, 15,002 STRONG


Kid Beyond and I arrived in Denver around 8 a.m., Aug. 25, after a 16-hour drive from Black Rock City, cruising through Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado, a couple of which Obama will probably need to win in November if he’s to take the White House.

We headed into the city just as a gorgeous dawn was breaking, arriving with a few hours to spare before our Democratic National Convention press credential would have been redistributed to other journalists, who reportedly numbered more than 15,000. After arriving at my cousin Gina Brooks’ house, we showered, got settled, and jumped on our bikes to pick up our press credentials.

All week, we and others who rented or borrowed the thousands of bicycles made available to visitors used the beautiful and efficient Cherry Creek Bike Trail to get around. It cut through the heart of Denver, passing the convention and performing arts centers, which boasted a great sculpture of a dancing couple, and ran close to the Big Tent in downtown on one side and the convention hall, the Pepsi Center, on the other.

It was a great way to travel and a marked contrast to the long car trip, which felt as if we were firing through tank after tank of gas. Bike travel also proved a smart move — most of the streets around the convention were closed off and patrolled by police in riot gear riding trucks with extended running boards, with military helicopters circling overhead.

The massive Pepsi Center was less than half full a couple hours after the gavel fell to open the convention, but it filled quickly.

The broadcast media had it good, with prime floor space that made it all the more congested for the delegates and others with floor passes. Most journalists were tucked behind the stage or up in the cheap seats, and we couldn’t even get free Internet access in the hall. But journalists could get online in the nearby media tents, which also offered free booze and food.

Even though Hillary Clinton announced she was releasing her delegates to vote for Obama, those I spoke to in San Francisco’s delegation — Laura Spanjian, Mirian Saez, and Clay Doherty — were still planning to vote for Clinton on that Wednesday, although all said they would enthusiastically support Obama after that.

"It’s important for me to respect all the people who voted for her and to honor the historic nature of her candidacy," Spanjian said. "And most of all, to respect her."

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi tried to rally the faithful for the "historic choice between two paths for our country." She belittled the view that John McCain is the most experienced presidential candidate. "John McCain has the experience of being wrong," she said, emphasizing his economic views and his instigation of the "catastrophic" Iraq War.

There were only a smattering of protesters outside the convention center, the most disturbing being anti-abortion activists bearing signs that read, "God hates Obama," "God is your enemy," "The Siege is Here," and one, wielded by a boy who was maybe 12, that read "God hates fags." Family values indeed.

THE ROLL CALL


San Francisco Sup. Chris Daly was giddy when I joined him in the two-thirds full California delegation during the nominating speeches for Obama and Clinton. It was partly because he was finally an official delegate, having been called up from his role as alternate a couple of hours earlier. But an even bigger reason for his joy was that he’s a serious political wonk and just loves the roll call, the only official business of the convention.

"This is the best part of the convention, roll call. It’s cool," Daly, the consummate vote counter, told me as we watched the chair ask each state for their votes. "The speeches are OK, but this is what it’s about."

And pretty soon, this kid in the candy shop was losing his mind as we watched a series of genuinely newsworthy developments in an otherwise scripted convention: California Democratic Party Chair Art Torres was saying "California passes" rather than reporting our votes, states like New Jersey and Arkansas were awarding all their votes to Obama and causing the room to go nuts, and a series of states were yielding to others.

As the chair worked alphabetically through the states, Obama’s home state of Illinois became the second state to pass. Very interesting. Indiana gave 75 of its 85 votes to Obama. Minnesota gave 78 of its 88 votes to Obama, then erupted in a spirited cheer of "Yes we can." Daly and San Francisco delegate London Breed were on their feet, cheering, chanting, and pumped.

With Obama getting close to the number of delegates he needed to win the nomination (there was no tally on the floor and I later learned Obama had 1,550 of the 2,210 votes he needed), New Mexico’s representative announced that the state was "yielding to the land of Lincoln." Anticipation built that Illinois would be the state to put its junior senator over the top.

Then Illinois yielded to New York, and the screens showed Clinton entering the hall and joining the New York delegation. "In the spirit of unity and with the goal of victory," Clinton said, "let us declare right now that Barack Obama is our candidate."

She made the motion to suspend the vote count and have the whole hall nominate Barack Obama by acclamation. Pelosi took the podium and asked the crowd, "Is there a second?" And the room erupted in thousands of seconds to the motion on the floor. She asked all in favor to say "aye," and the room rumbled with ayes. To complete the process, Pelosi said those opposed could say no, but simultaneously gaveled the motion to completion, causing the room to erupt with cheers. I heard not a single nay.

The band broke out into "Love Train" and everyone danced.

NEWSOM’S STAGE


Mayor Gavin Newsom threw a big party Aug. 27, drawing a mix of young hipsters, youngish politicos, and a smattering of corporate types in suits and ties. Although he didn’t get a speaking slot at the convention, Newsom is widely seen as a rising star in the party, far cooler than most elected officials, and maybe even too cool for his own good.

Comedian Sarah Silverman did a funny bit to open the program at the Manifest Hope Gallery (which showcased artwork featuring Obama), then introduced Newsom by saying, "I’m honored to introduce a great public servant and a man I would like to discipline sexually, Gavin Newsom."

Apparently Newsom liked it because he grabbed Silverman and started to grope and nuzzle into her like they were making out, then acted surprised to see the crowd there and took the microphone. It was a strange and uncomfortable moment for those who know about his past sex scandal and recent marriage to Jennifer Siebel, who was watching the spectacle from the wings.

But it clearly showed that Newsom is his own biggest fan, someone who thinks he’s adorable and can do no wrong, which is a dangerous mindset in politics.

Another slightly shameless aspect of the event was how overtly Newsom is trying associate himself with Obama (the party was a salute to the "Obama Generation") after strongly backing Clinton in the primaries. And then, of course, there’s the fact that his party was sponsored by PG&E (a corrupting influence in San Francisco politics) and AT&T (facilitators of the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping policy).

I was able to interview Newsom about Clinton before the party. "People can criticize her, but I do think that you’ve never seen a runner-up do so much to support the party’s nominee," Newsom told me. "She’s done as much as she could do, privately as well as publicly."

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Clinton’s dramatic roll call moment
Photo by Mirissa Neff

OBAMA NIGHT


Amid all the excitement, there were scary moments for the progressives. For example, Joe Biden, accepting the vice-presidential nod, urged the nation to more aggressively confront Russia and send more troops into Afghanistan.

During one of the most high-profile points in the convention, halfway between the Gore and Obama speeches, a long line of military leaders (including Gen. Wesley Clark, who got the biggest cheers but didn’t speak) showed up to support Obama’s candidacy. They were followed by so-called average folk, heartland citizens — including two Republicans now backing Obama. One of the guys had a great line, though: "We need a president who puts Barney Smith before Smith Barney," said Barney Smith. "The heartland needs change, and with Barack Obama we’re going to get it," he added.

Of course, these are the concerns of a progressive whose big issues (from ending capital punishment and the war on drugs to creating a socialized medical system and fairly redistributing the nation’s wealth) have been largely ignored by the Democratic Party. I understand that I’m not Obama’s target audience in trying to win this election. And there is no doubt he is a historic candidate.

Bernice King, whose father, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech 45 years to the day before Obama’s acceptance speech, echoed her father by triumphantly announcing, "Tonight, freedom rings." She said the selection of Obama as the nominee was "decided not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character. This is one of our nation’s defining moments."

But there is still much work to do in convincing Obama to adopt a more progressive vision once he’s elected. "America needs more than just a great president to realize my father’s dream," said Martin Luther King III, the second King child to speak the final night of the convention. Or as Rep. John Lewis, who was with King during that historic speech, said in his remarks, "Democracy is not a state, but a series of actions."

BACK TO THE BURN


We left Denver around 1:30 a.m. Friday, a few hours after Obama’s speech and the parties that followed, driving through the night and listening first to media reports on Obama’s speech, then to discussions about McCain’s selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.

The Obama clips sounded forceful and resolute, directly answering in strong terms the main criticisms levied at him. Fowler said the Republicans made a very smart move by choosing a woman, but he was already getting the Democrats’ talking points by cell phone, most of which hammered her inexperience, a tactic that could serve to negate that same criticism of Obama.

We arrived back on the playa at 5:30 p.m. Friday, and a Black Rock Radio announcer said the official population count was 48,000 people, the largest number ever. The city has been steadily growing and creating a web of connections among its citizens.

"That city is connecting to itself faster that anyone knows. And if they can do that, they can connect to the world," Harvey told me earlier this year. "That’s why for three years, I’ve done these sociopolitical themes, so they know they can apply it. Because if it’s just a vacation, we’ve been on vacation long enough."

Yet when I toured the fully-built city, I saw few signs that this political awakening was happening. There weren’t even that many good manifestations of the American Dream theme, except for Tantalus, Bummer (a large wooden Hummer that burned on Saturday night), and an artsy version of the Capitol Dome.

Most of the people who attend Burning Man seem to have progressive values, and some of them are involved in politics, but the event is their vacation. It’s a big party, an escape from reality. It’s not a movement yet, and it’s not even about that Black Rock City effigy, the Man. Hell, this year, many of my friends who are longtime burners left on Saturday before they burned the Man, something most veterans consider an anticlimax.

It’s not about the man in the middle, either; it’s about the community around it. And if the community around Obama wants to expand into a comfortable electoral majority — let alone a movement that can transform this troubled country — it’s going to have to reach the citizens of Black Rock City and outsiders of all stripes, and convince them of the relevance of what happened in Denver and what’s happening in Washington, DC.

Larry Harvey can’t deliver burners to the Democratic Party, or even chide them toward any kind of political action. But the burners and the bloggers are out there, ready to engage — if they can be made to want to navigate the roads between their worlds and the seemingly insular, ineffective, immovable, platitude-heavy world of mainstream politics.

"As hard as it will be, the change we need is coming," Obama said during his speech.

Maybe. But for those who envision a new kind of world, one marked by the cooperation, freedom, and creativity that are at the heart of this temporary city in the desert, there’s a lot of work to be done. And that starts with individual efforts at outreach, like the one being done by a guy, standing alone in the heat and dust, passing out flyers to those leaving Black Rock City on Monday.

"Nevada Needs You!!!" began the small flyer. "In 2004, Nevada was going Blue until the 90 percent Republican northern counties of Elko and Humboldt tilted the state. You fabulous Burners time-share in our state for one week per year. This year, when you go home please don’t leave Nevada Progressives behind! ANY donation to our County Democratic Committee goes a long way; local media is cheap! Thanks!!!"

Change comes not from four days of political speeches or a week in an experimental city in the desert, but from the hard work of those with a vision and the energy to help others see that vision. To realize a progressive agenda for this conservative country is going to take more than just dreaming.

Ed Note: The Guardian would like to thank Kid Beyond, who traveled with Jones and helped contribute to this report.

MarketBar

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› paulr@sfbg.com

We have the other white meat and the other woman, and in the Ferry Building we have had, for the past five years, the other restaurant, the Not-Slanted Door. Of course I mean MarketBar, which is pretty wonderful and surprisingly not pricey, and how often do you find yourself thinking that when you’re in or near the Ferry Building?

The Slanted Door has held the pole position in the Ferry Building since that venerable structure’s rebirth as a food mecca and the restaurant’s arrival therein by a hop-skip-and-jump route that began at its birthplace on Valencia Street in the mid-1990s and continued to an interregnum spot at an Embarcadero location previously held by Embarko and, later, La Suite. Those were nice digs, but the Slanted Door’s Ferry Building set-up is nonpareil: it’s huge, with huge windows looking on the water and a reputation that draws the building’s flocks of food cognoscenti like ducks — perhaps roasted with five-spice powder — to june bugs.

If the Ferry Building is the manse of a grand food family, then MarketBar is the younger brother who got the bedroom over the garage with the smaller closet. The restaurant looks not onto the bay but the Embarcadero itself, a much-beautified roadway but a roadway nonetheless, a swirling parfait of cars and streetcars and pedestrians. Yet the trade-off isn’t a bad one. While the Slanted Door enjoys Zen-tranquil water views, it can be chaotic inside; MarketBar looks upon the urban circus but is just far enough removed from it to remain peaceable.

A large part of the restaurant’s magic has to do with its immense sidewalk-side patio, set with large umbrellas and discreetly but firmly fenced off from the madding crowd. The Parisians are masters of this arrangement, but you don’t see it much here, maybe because the weather is less favorable or because our city doesn’t have the sorts of public places, like the Place de la Bastille, that Paris does. Many of our al fresco efforts are impromptu: a few flimsy tables and chairs teetering at the brink of the curb. MarketBar, by contrast, is built around, and seems to exist for, its patio.

There’s an inside too, a mirror-backed bar flanked by dining rooms like the wings of a big house. The colors are the reassuring ones of the earth, the look is classic San Francisco, and although no one is whispering, the noise is not insane. But what is everyone whispering about — the prix-fixe menu? Probably, since MarketBar has a good one, three courses for $29.95.

Usually I find a prix-fixe option to be irresistible. But chef Rick Hackett’s regular menu, a Mediterranean-inflected mélange, is chockablock with temptation: lively dishes at competitive prices. Some are little more than nibbles: a bowl of spicy peanuts ($3.75), say, with a nice balance of salt and sweetness; and fresh-cured green olives ($4.75), large, round, and vivid green — if you’ve ever been curious about fresh olive fruit, these orbs are close — draped with shreds of pickled red onion.

Some are big and substantial enough to be called sides, such as a warm salad of chopped romaine leaves and fresh fava beans ($5.75), simply dressed with a little shallot, olive oil, and salt. It made a nice starter; my only criticism is that it was too green, nothing but green, like a Monet painting of a lawn, bordered by shrubbery and surrounded by leafy trees.

As a rule I don’t have pasta much in restaurants, since I make it so often at home, but I was curious about MarketBar’s meatballs and pasta in broth ($14.75). I expected, more or less, a plate of spaghetti and meatballs, with more than the usual amount of sauce, but what I got was basically an Italian version of pho: a deep bowl filled with an herbed broth in which bobbed a half-dozen or so meatballs (rather beefy, I thought), along with several ravioli discs stuffed with spinach.

The prix-fixe menu includes first and main courses along with dessert, and there are choices within each of those categories. A simple salad of heirloom tomatoes and fresh mozzarella cheese reflected the lusciousness of this year’s tomato crop — the fruit has been intensely juicy and flavorful even in the early going — but while red tomatoes are handsome, so are the yellow, orange, green, and pink ones, and a little color play never hurts any salad.

Main dishes tend toward the straightforward and hearty: grilled veal rib eye with quartered new potatoes, morel mushrooms, and English peas; a swordfish filet striped with artichoke aioli and laid atop braised Swiss chard and spring onions. Desserts, as befits the restaurant’s name and location, are largely seasonal, and in berry season you naturally end up with marriages between berries and pastry, as galettes and little pies. But there are other sweet possibilities available, including an orange-soda float ($7.50) — "like a Dreamsicle," one of my companions said, except in liquid form and presented in a sundae glass. Creamy, but mighty sweet, as if Orange Crush and not Orangina was used.

The wine list is diverse and offers a fair number of choices by the glass, but these are pricier than the food would lead one to expect, with many costing well into double digits. Still, that’s a manageable splurge if you just plan to sit with a friend under the umbrella on the patio, sharing a bowl of spicy peanuts while watching others, many, many others, go about their business.

MARKETBAR

Dinner: nightly, 5–10 p.m.

Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–5 p.m.

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 9 a.m.–3 p.m.

One Ferry Building, Embarcadero at Market, SF

(415) 434-1100

www.marketbar.com

Full bar

AE/MC/V

Comfortable noise level

Wheelchair accessible

Reclaiming San Francisco — from cars

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY On Sunday, Aug. 31, the Mayor’s Office and several community groups join forces to bring San Francisco into an international movement to increase physical activity, break down invisible borders, and make scenic space available to all during the city’s first ciclovia.

More than 4.5 miles of streets will be closed to cars that day from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. for Sunday Streets, the first of two ciclovias scheduled this summer. The idea of the ciclovia — which is Spanish for "cycle way" or "bike path" — was conceived in Bogotá, Colombia, during the mid-1990s and has since spread throughout the world.

The concept is to take existing roads — the province of cars — and turn them into temporary paths for walking, jogging, cycling, and other physical activity.

"I think it really helps us re-imagine our city streets as places of safe, non-auto physical activity," said Wade Crowfoot, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s director of global climate change. "From an environmental perspective, it’s time we re-imagine our space and our streets, and to make streets accessible to everyone."

The route extends from Bayview Opera House, up Illinois Street to the Embarcadero, along the waterfront, and across Washington Street into Chinatown. Five activity pods will feature dance classes, yoga, hopscotch, jump rope, and more, and participants are encouraged to explore as much of the route as they can. The Giants’ stadium will be open to pedestrians and bikers who want to run the bases, and event facilitators say they hope this 4.5-mile stretch will grow into something bigger.

"We hope this is just the beginning, and that it succeeds all over the city," said Andy Thornley, program director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition.

The man largely credited with starting the ciclovia is Gil Penalosa, who implemented the idea as Bogotá’s commissioner of parks and recreation in 1995. Penalosa now runs a nonprofit called Walk and Bike for Life that promotes the ciclovia and other forms of active living.

San Francisco’s event is modest: Bogotá closes off more than 80 miles of looping streets every Sunday and on holidays. More than 1.5 million people turn out each week, according to the Walk and Bike for Life Web site. Ottawa closes more than 30 miles of space on Sundays from May to September, and events have taken place all over Europe in addition to the American continents.

The ciclovia is also part of the car-free movement, an international effort to promote alternatives to car dependence and automobile-based planning.

Besides saving energy and promoting fitness, event planners at ciclovias in Bogotá noticed the events were causing a cultural shift. The Christian Science Monitor reported in an Aug. 18 article that residents from different neighborhoods began interacting as never before. Indian residents of poorer neighborhoods used to halt at the imaginary dividing lines of the more affluent European neighborhoods, and vice versa, but now people mingle freely.

San Francisco organizers hope to use Sunday Streets to create a similar effect here.

"We deliberately chose the route that connects the Bayview to Chinatown, two communities that are historically disconnected," said Susan King, the event’s organizer. "We want people to go to Hunters Point and Chinatown and see what’s out there, with the hope that people will see things they want to come back to."

King also noted that these two neighborhoods lack adequate open space. "We want people in those communities to experience what people who live adjacent to Golden Gate Park and the Presidio get to experience on a regular basis — an opportunity to exercise and not worry about getting hit by cars," King said.

Another international trend that Sunday Streets continues is the reclaiming of waterfront space. Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City, said he recently visited Vancouver and experienced its 28 miles of bicycle and pedestrian paths along the water. Paris also has a ciclovia every summer that closes a major expressway and creates a beachfront and promenade along the Seine.

"[The Embarcadero] — that big, dangerous roadway — cuts the city off from the waterfront," Radulovich said. "We want to think about the possibility of reclaiming the water space more successfully for San Franciscans."

One of the few voices of opposition to Sunday Streets came from a group of Pier 39 merchants who worried about the economic impact.

The Board of Supervisors voted Aug. 5 not to delay the event until an economic impact report had been released, but Crowfoot said traffic impact analyses will be done this weekend so that there will be better understanding of the impact of any future events. But many ciclovias have actually increased business because people are more prone to stop and look in stores when they walk by instead of just driving past them.

American Dreamer: Reaching for the Golden Apple

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Bay Guardian City Editor Steven T. Jones is driving to the Democratic National Convention in Denver, stopping by Burning Man on the way there and back, reporting on the intersection of the counterculture and the national political culture.

By Steven T. Jones

Burning Man is thick with deep drifts of dust this year, making it a difficult and tiring bicycle trek to make it into the deep playa, where San Francisco artist Peter Hudson and his crew are building Tantalus. But it’s worth the ride, particularly if seeking a great take on the American Dream theme.
Like most creations out here, it isn’t up and running yet, but it will be by tomorrow when the event officially begins. Still, even in its static state, it is an art piece that already resonates with my exploration of how the counterculture sees the national political culture.
Tantalus looks like a red, white and blue top hat, with golden arms and bodies around it. And when it spins on Monday, powered totally by the manual labor of visitors working four pumper rail cars, they’ll see that man – a modern American Tantalus — reaching for the golden apple that is being dangled just out of his reach and falling back empty handed.
It’s a telling metaphor for such a big week in American politics.

My bike accident: The city’s fault?

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That was my first thought, sprawled on the pavement in the middle of a northbound lane on Van Ness Avenue: is this the city’s fault? Shouldn’t there be a goddamn bike lane here by now? And is the belated CEQA study that’s stalling the city Bike Plan the real antagonist here?

Here’s what happened: I was leaving a public meeting at 25 Van Ness and heading toward City Hall, just a few blocks north. The most expeditious route is to stay on Van Ness, which is horribly unfriendly to bikes, full of fast cars and funky pavement – but I was only going a couple blocks. I was riding in the far right line, but had to move out into the second lane to get around a bus stop. That left me straddling the white line between the two lanes. The pavement here, I’ll remind you, is full of potholes and cracks that like to grab the skinny, slick tires on my Univega. I swerved right, around one of these cracks, just as a car decided to accelerate past me in that right lane. The side of the car hit the side of me and we dragged along together for several yards until it passed me and I collapsed on the pavement. Fortunately, traffic behind us stopped, as did the driver of the car that hit me.

Despite exploding immediately into tears, which I’m prone to do when bitchslapped by death…

Oh snap!

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CELEBRITY PHOTOGRAPHY Before "stalkerazzi" was a word, before the first images of the Brangelina twins fetched a reported $14 million, and before the Internet spawned sites like tmz.com (stuffed with candid pictures of famous-ish trainwrecks like Kim Kardashian and Shauna Sand), there was a way of life that involved not knowing intimate details of every celebrity who dared to leave his or her house. Movie stars had a certain air of mystery and inaccessibility. But in 2008, there’s no privacy anymore. We now know that stars are "just like us." As in, Reese Witherspoon eats fro-yo with a spoon — just like me! Amy Winehouse falls down when she’s drunk — just like me! Uh, anyway. Hollywood studios used to stage advantageous photo ops of, like, Rock Hudson out on a date with his wife. These days celebrities have no choice but to put their entire lives on film, particularly if they’re given to the kind of Britney Spears-ish behavior that can make the operator of a well-placed camera exceedingly well-paid.

All this makes Gary Lee Boas’ Starstruck: Photographs from a Fan (Dilettante Press) all the more charming and understated. Boas has been touted as an outsider artist — and, at least when the book was released in 1999, he was working as a professional paparazzo — but first and foremost, the man is a fan. Starstruck collects Boas’ treasured snapshots (the oldest taken by a teenage Boas in 1966, the collection runs to 1980) of luminaries he encountered on the street, outside movie and stage premieres, at restaurants, waving from the backseats of cars, entering talk-show studios, on film locations, and in other spots he staked out in search of famous quarry. The photos are of variable quality — some are blurred, some have their subjects partially obscured by passersby. Some are clearly taken on the fly — outside the Mike Douglas Show in 1978, Ida Lupino (flanked by a pair of nuns) squints into the sunshine and seems to be just noticing the eager, camera-wielding man to her right. A Godfather-young Diane Keaton beams at Boas (who must’ve been a pretty engaging snapper, considering most of his photos feature smiles) as she stands, hands clasped, on a New York City sidewalk.

Some of the pictures demand extended captions, as when Boas shares the story behind a much sought-after 1978 photo of the elusive Greta Garbo. But most are accompanied by brief notations of who, where, and when. Boas himself appears in a handful of photos, posing stiffly beside the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Ingrid Bergman. His expression in each is, appropriately, Starstruck — reflecting a time when mystery and glitter and not just-like-us-ness suited stars just fine.

Going green requires cooperation

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EDITORIAL There are some clear and compelling things San Francisco needs to be doing to protect the environment and reduce its carbon footprint, such as converting to renewable electricity sources and promoting alternatives to the automobile. But as the past couple of weeks at City Hall have demonstrated, city officials are letting petty politics interfere with working together to do the right thing.

Obviously, the most important step toward combating climate change is to convert the power portfolio of city residents to renewable energy sources. Nobel laureate Al Gore challenged the entire country to move toward 100 percent renewable power sources within 10 years during a landmark speech July 17.

But days later, when Gore appeared at the Netroots Nation convention in Austin, Texas, to repeat the challenge to the assembled bloggers, fellow guest speaker Mayor Gavin Newsom came out against the San Francisco Clean Energy Act, which would set even more modest goals for conversion to green power sources.

Newsom’s reason, as Sarah Phelan and Janna Brancolini explain in this week’s Green City column, is fear of provisions in the legislation that call for studying — just studying — public power options for achieving these goals. Considering Newsom has repeatedly told the Guardian that he supports public power, it’s disgraceful that he’s so beholden to Pacific Gas and Electric and so mindlessly adversarial toward the Board of Supervisors that he would oppose setting high green power standards.

But Newsom isn’t the only one playing this game. Board president Aaron Peskin is trying to scuttle Sunday Streets, which would temporarily close six miles of roadway to cars as part of an international trend to promote carfree spaces, simply because it was Newsom who proposed it (see "Pedal power," 7/23/08).

True, Newsom is a newcomer to the carfree movement — having spent years blocking proposed street closures in Golden Gate Park — but his conversion was warmly embraced by progressive groups such as Livable City and the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition and should have been supported by Peskin and other supervisors.

Meanwhile, the city is doing little to fight the ongoing court injunction against bicycle projects even as required environmental work on the Bicycle Plan falls behind schedule. In connection with a July 21 hearing on that delay, both Planning Director John Rahaim and City Attorney Dennis Herrera have called for reform to the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and for changes in how the city interprets traffic impacts under the act.

"It’s truly ironic that an activity that is inherently environmentally friendly is being challenged under an environmental law," Rahaim said of bicycling as he testified before the Land Use Committee. He’s right. City officials should aggressively move forward with the local reforms under consideration and push the bureaucracy to keep the Bike Plan on the fast track.

Meanwhile, our state legislators should work to amend CEQA to exempt pedestrian and bicycle improvements from costly and time-consuming environmental impact reports and our federal representatives should start laying the groundwork now to ensure next year’s big transportation bill reauthorization promotes alternatives to the automobile.

As a gesture of cooperation and goodwill, Newsom should come out and support Sup. Chris Daly’s latest proposal to close Market Street to automobiles, which would greatly speed up public transit, improve pedestrian safety, and create an attractive bicycle boulevard in the heart of the city.

The idea was first pitched by former mayor Willie Brown and has already been studied and vetted by the city bureaucracy. This could be the first big cooperative project between the board and the Mayor’s Office, a team effort against the forces of the status quo. And if it is successful, just imagine what they could take on after that.

I’ll see your Embarcadero and raise you Market Street

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Scene from last month’s ciclovia in Portland, Photo by Steven T. Jones

Sunday Streets, a proposal to bring to San Francisco’s Embarcadero the carfree ciclovias that have caught on in major cities around the world, became mired in the dysfunctional relations between Mayor Gavin Newsom and the Board of Supervisors after Fisherman’s Wharf merchants freaked out.

But even before the full board yesterday considered the resolution by Sups. Aaron Peskin, Michela Alioto-Pier, and Sean Elsbernd demanding the Aug. 31 and Sept. 14 events be postponed until a detailed economic impact analysis can be done, the Mayor’s Office had already announced the events would proceed as scheduled, critics be damned.

“The mayor’s position on Sunday Streets will not change. We will go ahead as scheduled,” Mike Farrah, head of the Office of Neighborhood Services and a longtime Newsom loyalist, told the Guardian on Monday.

In the face of that stand, and with Farrah and other event proponents promising to work with business community critics to massage the plan, Peskin opted to delayed consideration of his resolution until the Aug. 5 meeting. Yet Sup. Chris Daly (who supports Sunday Streets even though he calls it a Newsom publicity stunt) also decided to up the ante yesterday by introducing legislation to permanently ban cars from Market Street.

Pedal power

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›steve@sfbg.com

Hundreds of bicyclists invaded City Hall July 21 to demand safer bike routes and decry new bureaucratic delays in environmental review work on the Bicycle Plan, which a judge said the city must complete before it can make any improvements mentioned in the plan, from new lanes to simple racks (see "Stationary biking," 05/16/07).

But they arrived a couple hours too late to change the tenor of a hearing on another priority for car-free advocates: the Sunday Streets proposal by Mayor Gavin Newsom to close the Embarcadero to cars Aug. 31 and Sept. 14, which is being challenged on procedural and economic grounds by Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin and conservative supervisors.

Presentations to the board’s Government Audit and Oversight Committee in support of Sunday Streets were overshadowed by a big turnout of merchants from Pier 39 and Fisherman’s Wharf — who have vociferously opposed the proposal, citing concerns about lost business — and labor leaders, who unexpectedly lent their support to Peskin’s play.

"We just don’t want to have a beta test of a new program on one of the busiest days of the year," said Karen Bell, executive director of the Fisherman’s Wharf Community Benefits District. "People want to drive down the Embarcadero. They don’t want to take side streets."

Advocates of the program are resisting Peskin’s effort to postpone the events until after an economic study can be done.

"Every other city that’s tried this has found it has tremendous economic benefits, as well as tremendous health benefits and social benefits," said Andy Thornley, program director for the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition.

The committee moved Peskin’s resolution to the full board with no recommendation after Sups. Sophie Maxwell and Tom Ammiano voiced support for Sunday Streets. It was set to be heard July 22 after Guardian press time, but Mayor’s Office officials said they intend to hold the events as scheduled no matter what the outcome and work with opponents to ease their concerns.

But most cyclists were focused on the Bike Plan, which might not have final approval until late next year, as an afternoon Land Use Committee hearing called by Sup. Gerardo Sandoval revealed.

Bicycle Advisory Committee member Casey Allen called the delay unacceptable, and said he’s working with others to formally intervene in the case next month, arguing that unsafe conditions are a public health issue demanding immediate action.

"We have to take risks sometimes and challenge the status quo," Allen said. "That’s how we move forward as a society."

For more on both issues, visit www.sfbg.com

Bad news for SF bicyclists causes bad blood at City Hall

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Advocates for bicycling, walking, and the creation of more carfree spaces were already in full battle mode this week over challenges to Sunday Streets, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s plan to close the Embarcadero to cars for four hours each on Aug. 31 and Sept. 14. Then came word that the Bicycle Plan — which the city must complete in order to lift a two-year-old court injunction against any bike-related projects — is falling behind schedule once again.

The two unrelated setbacks will be the subjects of a pair of hearings at City Hall on Monday, events likely to fill their respective hearing rooms with angry bicyclists, angry business people, and angry political proxies of all stripes.
First up is a 10 a.m. hearing at the Board of Supervisors Government Audit and Oversight Committee on a pair of measures by Sup. Aaron Peskin: one a resolution calling for detailed economic studies before the Sunday Streets events, the other an ordinance that would require board approval for new athletic events that require street closure.

Then the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition has scheduled a 12:30 rally on City Hall steps before the 1 p.m. Land Use Committee hearing, which will include an update on the Bike Plan progress that was requested by Sup. Gerardo Sandoval after learning that work on the plan has fallen months behind schedule due consultants missing deadlines and other bureaucratic delays.

High speed rail on track

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› steve@sfbg.com

It’s crunch time for high speed rail in California, a project 12 years in the planning that will finally go before voters in November, following a controversial July 9 vote in San Francisco on the system’s Bay Area alignment and ongoing political struggles in Sacramento.

As envisioned by project proponents, riders would be able to board the sleek blue-and-gold trains in San Francisco’s remodeled Transbay Terminal and travel at speeds of up to 220 mph down the Peninsula, cutting over Pacheco Pass into the Central Valley, and arriving at Union Station in Los Angeles two hours and 38 minutes later — or continuing on to Anaheim and arriving 20 minutes after that.

The $9.95 billion bond measure, Proposition 1, would cover about a third of the costs for this initial phase (the plan would eventually extend the tracks to run from Sacramento to San Diego), with the balance borne almost equally by the federal government and private investors. With around 100 million passenger trips per year, and LA-SF tickets projected to cost around $60, fiscal studies show the project will more than pay for itself in less than 20 years, then generate about $1 billion a year in profits.

Perhaps most important in these times of heightened environmental concern, the system is now proposed to run entirely on renewable energy sources and would use about one–third of the energy of air travel and one-fifth that of driving, eliminating 18 billion pounds of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and reducing California’s oil dependence by 22 million barrels per year.

Yet there are still obstacles that could derail high speed rail, which was set in motion in 1996 by then–state senator Quentin Kopp, a San Franciscan and retired judge who chairs the California High Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA).

Critics of the CHSRA’s unanimous vote choosing Pacheco Pass over Altamont Pass are threatening to sue and now have about 30 days to do so. Union Pacific Railroad has complicated the right-of-way acquisition process by claiming it won’t allow the project on its property. And Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his allies have been inconsistent in their support for the project (see "Silver bullet train," 04/17/07).

On top of that, legislation to update the six-year-old language of the bond measure, Assembly Bill 3034, appeared at Guardian press time to have fallen short of winning needed support on the Senate floor before the July 15 deadline set by Secretary of State Debra Bowen. And there was a renewed effort by Republican legislators to try to push the bond measure back to 2010.

Yet for all the challenges the project continues to face, the recent hearings in San Francisco demonstrated that there is a consensus emerging among some of the most powerful political players in the state that California is finally ready to catch up to Europe and Asia and start building the first high speed rail system in the United States.

CHSRA met in San Francisco July 8-9 to take public comment and finalize its last critical decision before the November bond measure — selecting the train’s route through the Bay Area and making the legal and environmental findings to support that decision. The stakes were high as the board weighed whether to select Pacheco Pass or Altamont Pass as the route from the Bay Area to Central Valley.

CHSRA staff and consultants, along with most Bay Area politicians and civic groups, favored Pacheco Pass, which is the faster and cheaper option, and one that doesn’t require a logistically difficult crossing of the San Francisco Bay to reach the Peninsula.

Most environmental groups favored Altamont Pass, which avoids ecologically sensitive Henry Coe State Park and areas where activists feared the rail line might induce urban sprawl or threaten agricultural viability. The conflict seemed intractable just a few months ago, with South Bay politicians threatening to oppose the project if it used Altamont and organizations, including the Sierra Club, threatening litigation if Pacheco was chosen.

But it appears that project proponents have allayed many of the environmentalists’ concerns by eliminating a proposed rail station in Los Banos or Avenal and including strong preservation policies in the project.

"We have worked with as many of these individuals as we could to accommodate their concerns," CHSRA executive director Mehdi Morshed said at the hearing, noting that they’ve done all they could to make changes and still have a sound project. "We can’t deal with the dogma. Some people say you must do this or else, and we can’t deal with that."

After years of studying the options, Morshed said the choice is clear.

"Pacheco is the appropriate corridor for fast intercity rail service," Morshed told the CHSRA board. "Somewhere along the line, we have to decide we’ve studied enough and move on, and this is one of those circumstances."

Most of the dozens of people who spoke at the hearing agreed, including Tim Frank, who represented the Sierra Club of California and praised CHSRA staff for addressing most of the group’s concerns.

"The opportunity to get people out of cars and out of airplanes and get them into steel wheels running on steel track is very important," Frank said, noting that the project was essential to meeting the state’s goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Yet others are still threatening litigation, among them Oakland attorney Stuart Flashman, who addressed the hearing on behalf of clients that include the Planning and Conservation League, the California Rail Foundation, and the Mountain Lion Foundation. He made a number of technical points about the project’s environmental impact reports, such as the use of alignment corridors rather than more specific routes.

"We find your report completely inadequate," Daniel McNamara, project director for the California Rail Foundation (a train users group), told CHSRA.

After the vote didn’t go his way, Flashman told the Guardian that the coalition he represents will meet soon to decide what’s next. They have 30 days from when the notice of decision was entered July 9 to sue unless the Attorney General’s Office waives the statute of limitations. "We’re going to be considering what to do now, but litigation is certainly on the table," Flashman said.

Whether filed by this group or another entity, the CHSRA has been working closely with Deputy Attorney General Christine Sproul to create a project that will withstand a legal challenge.

"We wanted to make sure that if and when there is a lawsuit — and there probably will be a lawsuit — that we are capable of defending it," Morshed told the board, noting how Sproul was brought in because of her expertise in environmental law.

Before the authority voted, Sproul explained that the environmental documents are for the overall program to build the project and are therefore not as detailed as the specific project studies that will be performed after CHSRA secures specific property to build on.

"Today, before you is really a broad policy choice," she said.

Sproul also said that the project is likely to proceed even if a lawsuit is filed, noting that getting an injunction to stop the project would require the litigants to secure a bond against losses to the state as it pursues this high-dollar project, "which could be millions."

But recent CHSRA actions have appeased many of the would-be plaintiffs and created a project that was effusively praised by stakeholders.

Mayor Gavin Newsom said San Francisco is "very supportive" of the project and will work to make it a reality. "We stand behind your efforts to bring high speed rail to the state of California," Newsom told CHSRA, later adding, "We need to connect the state to itself."

Newsom said San Francisco International Airport officials support the project. While it might seem to be a competitor, Newsom said high speed rail will take some of the pressure off SFO, which would otherwise experience congestion at problematic levels by 2020. Current plans call for a high speed rail station at SFO, as well as one near Palo Alto.

"We recognize that we need to have competitive modes of transportation," Newsom said. "Our airport is very supportive of this effort, and that’s very important."

Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin echoed the point, noting that he began his political career as an activist opposed to filling in more of the bay, something an airport expansion would probably require. He told the authority that his board has unanimously endorsed the project.

Jim Lazarus, vice president of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, also announced that group’s support for the project, telling the authority that Californians have long been ready for high speed rail: "I think the public is ahead of the politicians in Sacramento on this one."

Many of the speakers spoke knowledgably about high speed rail.

"I’ve ridden on the Japanese Shinkansen and I can’t wait to ride on the first high speed rail system in the United States," said Dean Chu, a commissioner with the Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission.

"I’ve been building high speed rail systems for 15 years in Asia and Europe, and I just want to say, ‘It’s about time’," said Robert Doty, the rail operations manager for Caltrain, who has worked in Germany, England, Taiwan, and China.

Echoing that sentiment was Eugene K. Skoropowski, who also worked on high speed rail projects in Europe before taking his current job as managing director for the Capital Corridor Joint Powers Authority: "It’s about time we bring our American firms that have expertise (on building high speed rail systems) back home to work here."

Enthusiastic supporters of the project urged the authority the move quickly.

"We feel a great deal of urgency over this project," said Emily Rusch, a San Francisco–based advocate with the California Public Interest Research Group.

"Everyone I talk to is very excited about the idea," said San Francisco resident Mary Renner. "It’s embarrassing that we’re so far behind the rest of the world, and I just want to tell you the public is supportive of this project."

"Our priority is to get this thing built and get it built quickly," said Dave Snyder, transportation policy director for the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association. "Let’s get rolling on high speed rail."

The final step in getting high speed rail ready for the November ballot was to be AB 3034, which sought to update the language and financial oversight provisions of Prop. 1, whose language was written for the election of 2004 before changes in the project.

"I feel good and I’ll feel better when AB 3034 is in appropriate condition," Kopp said after the vote on the Bay Area alignment.

Kopp was critical of Sen. Leland Yee for amending the bill to guarantee the bond money went to the San Francisco to Anaheim section, something Yee said he did to protect San Francisco’s interests but that Kopp felt hurt the measure’s statewide chances. Yet that tiff was overshadowed by the bill’s apparent and unexpected failure in the Senate.

Sen. Mike Machado (D-Stockton) was unhappy with the Pacheco choice and decided to oppose the project, meaning that proponents needed three Republican votes to win the two-thirds needed for passage and only Sen. Abel Maldonado (R-Santa Maria) was willing to cross party lines, Capitol sources told the Guardian.

Secretary of State Debra Bowen had set a deadline of July 15 for substituting the new language in Prop. 1, so at Guardian press time it appeared the old language would remain in place, which Kopp said was acceptable and probably wouldn’t hurt the project.

Meanwhile, a project opponent, Roy Ashburn (R-Bakersfield), sought to kill Prop. 1 by doing what’s known as a "gut and amend" to an unrelated bill, SB 298 by Senate Minority Leader Dave Codgill (R-Modesto), in an attempt to push the bond measure back to 2010.

If he can find the two-thirds vote in both houses — which most sources consider unlikely — it would be the fourth time the bond measure has been delayed. So barring any unusual political deals, the high speed bond measure is still up in November.

If a majority of voters approve Prop. 1, the CHSRA would begin negotiating rights-of-way and working on final technical studies. Construction could begin as early as 2010, although completion could take up to 10 years.

In the meantime, CHSRA unanimously voted to work with regional rail agencies such as BART to create a rail system over Altamont. As Morshed said, "We need to immediately start working on the Altamont corridor and find a solution to that."

Red ink stains green rhetoric

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Environmentalists are pondering the state’s seemingly schizophrenic approach to fighting climate change after a recent state report encouraging increased use of mass transit came out at the same time that the governor’s budget proposal denies the state’s public transportation fund more than $1 billion.

The California Air Resource Board’s June 26 Draft Scoping Plan to combat global warming, released pursuant to Assembly Bill 32, the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, is at least the second major report this year to recommend expanding public transit. But the governor’s latest spending plan redirects that sizeable chunk of money — gasoline tax revenue that voters who approved Prop. 42 in 2002 directed toward transportation projects and agencies — to help reduce the state’s $17 billion budget deficit.

"There’s a lot of misallocation of resources going on," said Tom Radulovich, executive director of the San Francisco nonprofit Livable Cities. "The governor on the one hand wants to say, ‘You should all ride mass transit.’ But on the other hand, he is taking away [transit] support from the state budget."

The governor’s press secretary, Aaron McLear, said the budget proposal spares transit from cuts faced by other programs during these tough economic times.

"Funding for public transportation stays level in the governor’s budget proposal. That’s in the face of a $17 billion deficit. The fact that it remains level is better than a lot of cuts we’ve had to make," McLear said. "We wish we could increase it, because it certainly is something the governor believes in. But again, the state is facing a $17 billion shortfall. We can only spend the money that we have. There will have to be some tough decisions to be made."

The CARB plan calls for California to lead by example by encouraging state employees to take advantage of public transportation during their commutes. It notes that transportation accounts for 38 percent of California’s greenhouse gas emissions, most of which comes from cars and trucks, and that curbing these emissions is critical to reaching California’s goal of reducing total emissions by 30 percent over the next 12 years.

"Overall I think this is headed in the right direction. For better or worse, this really does put California ahead of any other state if we fully implement this plan. Of course, having a good plan does not guarantee that it will be implemented, but this is a very serious attempt," said Gabriel Metcalf, executive director of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, of the state’s global warming plan.

Yet he also said that reaching the plan’s ambitious goals for reducing greenhouse gases means people will have to drive less and use transit more, and that local governments will need to stop approving urban sprawl projects.

"The easy answer that most Americans would rather have is to keep driving just as much as always, but have alternative fuels. And that just is not going to work. AB 32 has a major land use change component. Is it enough? No, it is not. But it is at least an acknowledgment of what we have to do," Metcalf said. "Overall I’m pretty impressed, but they’re not proposing enough land use change and they’re not proposing transit funding increases. They are still unwilling to face facts about the role of the automobile and climate change."

Yet instead of increasing funds for mass transit, the governor has redirected billions of public transportation dollars into the general fund, maintaining status quo transit funding in the face of increased gasoline prices and the new climate change mandate. At the same time, billions of dollars have been allocated to highway expansion programs, exacerbating the global warming problem.

"Anybody’s budget should be a reflection of their values, whether it’s an individual or an agency," said Carli Paine, transportation program director for the Transportation and Land Use Coalition. "The state is saying, ‘We value public transportation as a climate friendly choice.’ Yet when it comes to expressing those values in the budget, we say, ‘It doesn’t matter that much,’ so we’re actually undermining those original statements."

The governor’s revised state budget allocated $306 million to the State Transit Assistance Program, the state’s source of funding for mass transit operating costs such as maintenance, drivers, fuel, and mechanics.

This is the same amount that was allocated last year, even though transit ridership is the highest it has been in more than 50 years, according to a June report by the American Public Transportation Association. And factor in that crude oil is about $140 per barrel now compared to about $73 per barrel this time in 2007, according to the Energy Information Administration, a federal agency. "The budget is kicking transit in the teeth when it needs it [money] the most," Radulovich said.

The $306 million allocated to the State Transit Assistance Program comes from funds generated by Prop. 42, the voter-approved gasoline tax measure. But Paine said the STAP should also be entitled to what is called "spillover" money. Spillover refers to additional funds generated when the price of gas rises faster than inflation on other goods, leading to unusually high revenue from the tax.

The governor’s budget predicts $1.77 billion in spillover for the 2008–09 fiscal year, but he decided to put the money toward shrinking the deficit instead of funding public transportation. The current fiscal year was the first time since the proposition passed that the spillover did not go toward public transportation.

Radulovich said he believes the state is hesitant to fund mass transit — even though it recognizes the importance of reducing the number of cars on the road — because building more roads and freeways leads to more expansion and urban sprawl.

"Sprawl makes a lot of people a lot of money," he said, including oil companies, car companies, homebuilders, construction firms, and trucking companies. "These are political questions, not policy questions. The policy answers in many ways are very clear. The question is whether there is the political will to deal with it, and that’s what we’re going to find out."

Radulovich said this reality is why many California business groups support outward expansion and put pressure on the government to fund highways over mass transit. The Bay Area Council, for example, pushed aggressively for highway expansion during the last budget cycle.

Paine said she believes political pressure also comes from structural flaws in the state’s budget system.

"It’s the legacy of Prop. 13, which really froze the income our state received from [property] taxes," she said. "Public entities that are committed to social services, such as education, are still receiving property taxes at levels that are decades behind what they used to be." This puts a strain on the state’s general fund, and money has to be diverted from the mass transit account to relieve the burden generated by California’s low income tax levels, Paine explained.

Paine said a new budget proposal has been submitted to the California legislature that would restore hundreds of millions of dollars to the mass transit account for the 2008-09 fiscal year by generating additional revenue for the general fund. She said that since 2000, more than $3 billion of mass transit money has been redirected to the general fund, and the number will exceed $4 billion if the governor’s current proposal goes through.

"This isn’t just a problem this year — it’s a chronic problem. And public transportation is chronically being leaned on for relief," she said. "It’s just not a sustainable system."

TRANSIT FUNDING 101

Carli Paine of the Transportation and Land Use Coalition explained the finer points of California’s complicated system for funding — or not funding — improvements to the public transit system. Transit’s main account is called the State Transit Assistance Program. This money is flexible, but is mostly used for transit operations (maintenance, operations, fuel, mechanics, drivers, and so forth). Sometimes, though, it is used for capital projects (such as buying new tracks or replacement cars).

The STAP is the largest portion of the public transportation account, and the funding is critical. As Paine put it, "If you can’t even operate the system that you have, it doesn’t help much to have money to lay new tracks." The STAP is therefore often the focus of discussions about transit funding.

Prop. 42, which directs California’s gas tax to transportation projects, funds the STAP, although not all Prop. 42 money goes there. For example, 25 percent of Prop. 42 revenue goes to a special account for transit capital projects.

Prop. 1B is another big source of transit funding. It is the 2006 measure that allowed California to sell $19.9 billion worth of bonds to fund transportation programs. Only about $4 billion of that was allocated to public transportation, with the lion’s share of the money going toward new freeway projects.

This is where things get a little complicated.

California originally had a sales tax on all goods except gasoline. In the 1970s, voters passed Prop. 42, which decided that it would be more equitable to reduce the sales tax rate by a fraction of a percentage point, but expand the sales tax to include gasoline.

This was expected to be revenue-neutral for the state, so it wouldn’t cost people more. That was true unless gas prices rose quicker than the cost of all goods, which it eventually did.

Then-Gov. Ronald Reagan argued that it was important to return the extra revenue to public transportation because when gas prices rise, more people use public transit. As a result, this "spillover" has been set aside for transit expansion.

Last year was the first year in which the spillover was diverted to the general fund instead of being given to the STAP. It was redirected to help close the state deficit, and the 2008–09 budget proposes doing the same thing this fiscal year. (Janna Brancolini)

The street-sweeping non-scandal

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Warren Hickle over at the argonaut is all in a tizzy about the prospect that mayor’s budget reduces the regularity of mechanized street sweeping on the west side of town. But I have to agree with the commenters at sfist — most neighborhoods would be thrilled to have those damn street sweeping machines gone.

Street sweeping is a tax on people who own cars but don’t have enough money to have garages. That’s mostly tenants. I’m all for getting rid of cars, and I’m all for taxing them, but the tax ought to be fair: Charge everyone who owns a car in SF a set fee a year, or even better, charge a fee based on the value of the car, so the rich pay more. Or levy a tax based on the weight of the vehicle (hits SUVs) or the gas mileage (ditto).

The sweeping is mostly a regressive way to bring in revenue for the city. I live in a part of town where we don’t have any street cleaning program, and our streets are just fine.

Besides, it’s kind of environmentally dumb: If you use your car once a week or less, isn’t it better to leave it parked instead of starting it up every couple of days and driving it around to avoid the street sweepers?

I can see sweeping on Mission, 16th Street, Haight Street and other major commercial strips, but why would anybody on the west side be mad about losing a service that costs a lot, does little good and amounts to a bad tax?

Man with a plan

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Environmental groups have voiced cautious optimism about the California Air Resources Board’s new draft plan for fulfilling the legislative mandate of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent from 1990 levels by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050. It relies primarily on greater conservation and efficiency, and a push for new technology.

But skeptics await the forthcoming details behind the plan’s vague outlines and openly worry that the complex "cap and trade" system for selling the right to pollute, an approach favored by industry executives, could be counterproductive. Many experts say we need a more radical reevaluation of the current system, such as that proposed by California’s S. David Freeman in his book, Winning Our Energy Independence: An Energy Insider Shows How (Gibbs Smith, 2007).

Freeman has advised presidents and governors on energy policy, run the Tennessee Valley Authority and major municipal utility districts, and recently activated a fleet of all-electric vehicles as head of the commission overseeing the Port of Los Angeles.

His book lays out a plan to phase out Big Coal, Big Oil, and nuclear (which he dubs "the Three Poisons") over 30 years while meeting the needs of our high-energy society by implementing renewable technologies that already exist: sun, wind, and renewably generated hydrogen, supplemented by small hydroelectric, geothermal, and certain biofuels.

"[I]t is entirely practical and feasible to get all our energy from renewable resources and to do so with today’s technology," Freeman writes, contradicting energy industry spin that beginning the switch would take decades. Footnoted calculations and renewable resource maps show that renewables will cost the public less, with supply "over twice as large as what we may need," if used efficiently.

The transition he proposes could eliminate many of the physical, economic, and political risks of our current unsustainable oil addiction, but only if environmentally concerned Americans — which, he posits, are a majority — close ranks and demand a national renewable energy policy that started immediately.

Freeman’s plan also relies heavily on conservation: it recommends federal government-mandated efficiency programs for utilities, auto companies, manufacturers of energy-using equipment, and homebuilders to offset rising consumer demand. Increasing fuel mileage standards by 1 mpg per year for 24 years (to 48 mpg), for example, would push automakers to steadily improve their products.

His second step: retire aging, highly polluting coal and waste-generating nuclear plants, outlaw new ones, and phase in renewable power-generating alternatives using sun, wind, geothermal, biomass, and municipal waste (going from 9 percent renewable now to 60 percent in three decades, at five-year intervals). Forest, agricultural, and municipal waste are preferable to food-based ethanol.

Freeman encourages consumers to get vocal with manufacturers and demand flex-fuel and plug-in hybrid cars (with batteries you can recharge at home) and, ultimately, all-electric cars. Rechargeable types require less gasoline, freeing us from reliance on foreign oil, a militaristic foreign policy, and habitat destruction at home. An excess-profits tax can supply consumer and manufacturer incentives to speed production within a decade.

Because green cars mean more demand for electricity, Freeman looks beyond new thin-film solar rooftop panels, calling on the federal government to develop "Big Solar": desert installations capable of generating 500 MW of power (the largest US solar farm now generates 16). Such a facility could fuel the energy-intensive electrolysis process needed to free clean-burning hydrogen from water (to replace gasoline), which can then be piped and stored.

Sure, this kind of approach will be expensive. But it would be attainable when looked at against the high cost of oil wars and steadily rising gas prices; habitat and health benefits further tip the scales.

To supplement lulls in sun and wind, the "cleanest of the fossil fuels — natural gas plants — should be allowed to continue to generate power … to assure reliability during hours when the renewables are not available," Freeman writes.

Freeman incites a people-power surge to usher in the big transition: "A favorite trick of the energy establishment is to say our problems are so big that we have to try everything, which means drilling where oil companies want to drill, strip mining coal, and building prohibitively costly, high-risk, toxic nuclear reactors.

Freeman said we need that same strong commitment to transition away from the Three Poisons, because "coal, oil, and nuclear cause the problems while renewables are the solution."

The Fourth of July in Rock Rapids, Iowa, 1940-53

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The good old days in Rock Rapids, Iowa,
the Fourth of July, l940-53

By Bruce B. Brugmann

(Note: In July of l972, when the Guardian was short a Fourth of July story, I sat down and cranked out this one for the front page on my trusty Royal Typewriter. I now reprint it each year on the Bruce blog, with some San Francisco updates and postscripts.)

Back where I come from, a small town beneath a tall standpipe in northwestern Iowa, the Fourth of July was the best day of a long, hot summer.

The Fourth came after YMCA camp and Scout camp and church camp, but before the older boys had to worry about getting into shape for football. It was welcome relief from the scalding, 100-degree heat in a town without a swimming pool and whose swimming holes at Scout Island were usually dried up by early July. But best of all, it had the kind of excitement that began building weeks in advance.

The calm of the summer dawn and the cooing of the mourning doves on the telephone wires would be broken early on July Fourth: The Creglow boys would be up by 7 a.m. and out on the lawn shooting off their arsenal of firecrackers. They were older and had somehow sent their agents by car across the state line and into South Dakota where, not far above the highway curves of Larchwood, you could legally buy fireworks at roadside stands.

Ted Fisch, Jim Ramsey, Wiener Winters, the Cook boys, Hermie Casjens, Jerry Prahl, and the rest of the neighborhood would race of their houses to catch the action. Some of them had cajoled firecrackers from their parents or bartered from the older boys in the neighborhood: some torpedoes (the kind you smashed against the sidewalk); lots of 2 and 3-inchers, occasionally the granddaddy of them all, the cherry bomb (the really explosive firecracker, stubby, cherry red, with a wick sticking up menacingly from its middle; the kind of firecracker you’d gladly trade away your best set of Submariner comics for).

Ah, the cherry bomb. It was a microcosm of excitement and mischief and good fun. Bob Creglow, the most resourceful of the Creglow boys, would take a cherry bomb, set it beneath a tin can on a porch, light the fuse, then head for the lilac bushes behind the barn.

“The trick,” he would say, imparting wisdom of the highest order, “is to place the can on a wood porch with a wood roof. Then it will hit the top of the porch, bang, then the bottom of the porch, bang. That’s how you get the biggest clatter.”

So I trudged off to the Linkenheil house, the nearest front porch suitable for cherry bombing, to try my hand at small-town demolition. Bang went the firecracker. Bang went the can on the roof. Bang went the can on the floor. Bang went the screen door as Karl Linkenheil roared out in a sweat, and I lit out for the lilacs behind the barn with my dog, Oscar.

It was glorious stuff – not to be outdone for years, I found out later, until the Halloween eve in high school when Dave Dietz, Ted Fisch, Ken Roach, Bob Babl, and rest of the Hermie Casjens gang and I made the big time and twice pushed a boxcar loaded with lumber across Main Street and blocked it for hours. But that’s another story in my Halloween blog of last year.

Shooting off fireworks was, of course, illegal in Rock Rapids, but Chief of Police Del Woodburn and later Elmer “Shinny” Sheneberger used to lay low on the Fourth. I don’t recall ever seeing them about in our neighborhood and I don’t think they ever arrested anybody, although each year the Rock Rapids Reporter would carry vague warnings about everybody cooperating to have “a safe and sane Fourth of July.”

Perhaps it was just too dangerous for them to start making firecracker arrests on the Fourth – on the same principle, I guess, that it was dangerous to do too much about the swashbuckling on Halloween or start running down dogs without leashes (Mayor Earl Fisher used to run on the platform that, as long as he was in office, no dog in town would have to be leashed. The neighborhood consensus was that Fisher’s dog, a big, boisterous boxer, was one of the few that ought to be leashed).

We handled the cherry bombs and other fireworks in our possession with extreme care and cultivation; I can’t remember a single mishap. Yet, even then, the handwriting was on the wall. There was talk of cutting off the fireworks supply in South Dakota because it was dangerous for young boys. Pretty soon, they did cut off the cherry bomb traffic and about all that was left, when I came back from college and the Roger boys had replaced the Creglow boys next door, was little stuff appropriately called ladyfingers.

Fireworks are dangerous, our parents would say, and each year they would dust off the old chestnut about the drugstore in Spencer that had a big stock of fireworks and they caught fire one night and much of the downtown went up in a spectacular shower of roman candles and sparkling fountains.

The story was hard to pin down, and seemed to get more gruesome every year – but, we were told, this was why Iowa banned fireworks years before, why they were so dangerous and why little boys shouldn’t be setting them off. The story, of course, never made quite the intended impression; we just wished we’d been on the scene.
My grandfather was the town druggist (Brugmann’s Drugstore, “where drugs and gold are fairly sold,” since 1902) and he said he knew the Spencer druggist personally. Fireworks put him out of business and into the poorhouse, he’d say, and walk away shaking his head.

In any event, firecrackers weren’t much of an issue past noon – the Fourth celebration at the fairgrounds was getting underway and there was too much else to do. Appropriately, the celebration was sponsored by the Rex Strait post of the American Legion (Strait, so the story went, was the first boy from Rock Rapids to die on foreign soil during World War I); the legionnaires were a bunch of good guys from the cleaners and the feed store and the bank who sponsored the American Legion baseball team each summer.

There was always a big carnival, with a ferris wheel somewhere in the center for the kids, a bingo stand for the elders, a booth where the ladies from the Methodist Church sold homemade baked goods, sometimes a hootchy dancer or two, and a couple of dank watering holes beneath the grandstand where the VFW and the Legion sold Grainbelt and Hamms at 30¢ a bottle to anybody who looked of age.

Later on, when the farmboys came in from George and Alvord, there was lots of pushing and shoving, and a fist fight or two.

In front of the grandstand, out in the dust and the sun, would come a succession of shows that made the summer rounds of the little towns. One year it would be Joey Chitwood and his daredevil drivers. (The announcer always fascinated me: “Here he comes, folks, rounding the far turn…he is doing a great job out there tonight…let’s give him a big, big hand as he pulls up in front on the grandstand…”)

Another year it would be harness racing and Mr. Hardy, our local trainer from Doon, would be in his moment of glory. Another year it was tag team wrestling and a couple of barrel-chested goons from Omaha, playing the mean heavies and rabbit-punching their opponents from the back, would provoke roars of disgust from the grandstand. ( The biggest barrel-chest would lean back on the ropes, looking menacingly at the crowd and yell, “ Aw, you dumb farmers. What the hell do you know anyway?” And the grandstand would roar back in glee.)

One year, Cedric Adams, the Herb Caen of Minneapolis and the Star-Tribune, would tour the provinces as the emcee of a variety show. “It’s great to be in Rock Rapids,” he would say expansively, “because it’s always been known as the ‘Gateway to Magnolia.” (Magnolia, he didn’t need to say, was a little town just over the state line in Minnesota which was known throughout the territory for its liquor-by-the-drink roadhouses. It was also Cedric Adams’ hometown: his “Sackamenna.”) Adams kissed each girl (soundly) who came on the platform to perform and, at the end, hushed the crowd for his radio broadcast to the big city “direct from the stage of the Lyon County Fairgrounds in Rock Rapids, Iowa.”

For a couple of years, when Rock Rapids had a “town team,” and a couple of imported left-handed pitchers named Peewee Wenger and Karl Kletschke, we would have some rousing baseball games with the best semi-pro team around, Larchwood and its gang of Snyder brothers: Barney the eldest at shortstop, Jimmy the youngest at third base, John in center field, Paul in left field, another Snyder behind the plate and a couple on the bench. They were as tough as they came in Iowa baseball.

I can remember it as if it were yesterday at Candlestick, the 1948 game with the Snyders of Larchwood. Peewee Wenger, a gawky, 17-year-old kid right off a high school team, was pitching for Rock Rapids and holding down the Snyder artillery in splendid fashion. Inning after inning he went on, nursing a small lead, mastering one tough Larchwood batter after another, with a blistering fastball and a curve that sliced wickedly into the bat handles of the right-handed Larchwood line-up.

Then the cagey Barney Snyder laid a slow bunt down the third base line. Wenger stumbled, lurched, almost fell getting to the ball, then toppled off balance again, stood helplessly holding the ball. He couldn’t make the throw to first. Barney was safe, cocky and firing insults like machine gun bullets at Peewee from first base.

Peewee, visibly shaken, went back to the mound. He pitched, the next Larchwood batter bunted, this time down the first base line. Peewee lurched for the ball, but couldn’t come up with it. A couple more bunts, a shot through the pitcher’s mound, more bunts and Peewee was out. He could pitch, but, alas, he was too clumsy to field. In came Bill Jammer, now in his late 30’s, but in his day the man who beat the University of Iowa while pitching at a small college called Simpson.

Now he was pitching on guts and beer, a combination good enough for many teams and on good days even to take on the Snyders. Jammer did well for a couple of innings, then he let two men on base, then came a close call at the plate. Jammer got mad. Both teams were off the bench and onto the field and, as Fred Roach wrote in the Rock Rapids Reporter, “fisticuffs erupted at home plate.” When the dust cleared, Jammer has a broken jaw, and for the next two weeks had to drink his soup through a straw at the Joy Lunch. John Snyder, it was said later, came all the way in from center field to throw the punch, but nobody knew for sure and he stayed in the game. I can’t remember the score or who won the game, but I remember it as the best Fourth ever.

At dusk, the people moved out on their porches or put up folding chairs on the lawn. Those who didn’t have a good view drove out to the New Addition or parked out near Mark Curtis’ place or along the river roads that snaked out to the five-mile bridge and Virgil Hasche’s place.

A hush came over the town. Fireflies started flickering in the river bottom and, along about 8:30, the first puff of smoke rose above the fairgrounds and an aerial bomb whistled into the heavens. BOOM! And the town shook as if hit by a clap of thunder.

Then the three-tiered sky bombs – pink, yellow, white, puff, puff, puff. The Niagara Falls and a gush of white sparks.

Then, in sudden fury, a dazzling display of sizzling comets and aerial bombs and star clusters that arched high, hung for a full breath and descended in a cascade of sparks that floated harmlessly over the meadows and cornfields. At the end, the flag – red, white and blue – would burst forth on the ground as the All-American finale in the darkest of the dark summer nights. On cue, the cheers rolled out from the grandstand and the cars honked from the high ground and the people trundled up their lawn chairs and everybody headed for home.

Well, I live in San Francisco now, and I drive to Daly City with my son, Danny, to buy some anemic stuff in gaudy yellow and blue wrapping and I try unsuccessfully each year to get through the fog or the traffic to see the fireworks at Candlestick. But I feel better knowing that, back where I come from, everybody in town will be on their porches and on the backroads on the evening of the Fourth to watch the fireworks and that, somewhere in town, a little boy will put a big firecracker under a tin can on a wood porch, then light out for the lilacs behind the barn.

P.S. Our family moved in l965 from Daly City to a house in the West Portal area of San Francisco. There are, I assure you, few visible fireworks in that neighborhood. However, down where we work at the Guardian building at the bottom of Potrero Hill, the professional and amateur action is spectacular.

From the roof of our building at 135 Mississippi, and from any Potrero Hill height, you can see the fireworks in several directions: the waterfront fireworks in the city, fireworks on the Marin side of the Golden Gate bridge, fireworks at several points in the East Bay, fireworks along the Peninsula coast line.

And for the amateur action, parents with kids, kids of all ages, spectators in cars and on foot, congregate after dusk along Terry Francois Boulevard in San Francisco along the shoreline between the Giants ballpark and Kellys Mission Rock restaurant.
The action is informal but fiery and furious: cherry bombs, clusters, spinning wheels, high flying arcs, whizzers of all shapes and sizes. The cops are quite civilized and patrol the perimeter but don’t bother anybody. I go every year. I think it’s the best show in town. B3.

The carfree challenge

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>>For our complete Towards Carfree Cities conference coverage, including video, interviews, and pics, click here.

› steve@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY A large group of San Francisco’s top alternative transportation advocates traveled to Portland, Ore., for the Towards Carfree Cities international conference June 16-20, marveling at a transportation system widely considered to be the most progressive in the United States.

"Portland is light-years ahead of everyone else in this country," said Leah Shahum, executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, who attended the conference along with representatives from the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, San Francisco State University, prominent urban design firms including Arup (which is designing the new Transbay Terminal project), architect David Baker, and other institutions.

Public transit in Portland is extensive, cheap, frequent, and easy to use, with the Max line — unlike Muni — allowing bicycles on the trains. Walking is encouraged by new design standards and public information campaigns. A riverside freeway was replaced by open space years ago. And the large network of bicycle paths and other improvements to promote cycling have made Portland the only large city to earn the putf8um designation from the League of American Bicyclists (San Francisco is one tier down at gold).

"But the reality is Portland is far from being great," was the sobering assessment from keynote speaker Gil Peñalosa, the former parks director of Bogotá, Colombia, who pioneered carfree policies there before pushing the issues internationally through the nonprofit Walk and Bike for Life.

Cities are facing multiple crises connected to over-reliance on the automobile — declining public health, environmental degradation, resource depletion, loss of community, and not enough space in US cities to handle the 100 million people they’ll need to accommodate in the next 35 years. And Peñalosa said most are responding with baby steps that deny the scope of the challenge.

"We’re not doing enough," he said, noting that even the best US cities are way too dependent on automobiles compared to cities that have made the biggest advances in reducing automobile use, such as Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, and Vancouver.

"That’s where Portland belongs, and that’s the challenge," Peñalosa said. "Under existing conditions, we have to make major leaps instead of baby steps."

It was the first time that this eighth annual conference has been held in the United States, and organizers said they hoped its message will resonate in a country that needs to change profoundly if it is to efficiently manage its growth while playing a positive role in dealing with global climate change.

Many of the ideas raised at the conference and pursued in Portland are beginning to spread. The conference opened with Depaving Day, a pavement-removal effort that has many adherents in the Bay Area, and closed with Sunday Parkways, during which a six-mile loop in North Portland was closed to cars. Such "Ciclovias," which Peñalosa started in Colombia, are planned this August in New York City and San Francisco.

"There are people from all over the world doing amazing work," said local conference coordinator Elly Blue of the Portland group Shift, which organized the conference to coincide with Portland’s annual Pedalpalooza, two weeks of fun bike events and other festivities.

Many attendees noted that global warming, high gasoline prices (and the specter of Peak Oil), worsening public health, and persistent traffic congestion have made many big city leaders more open to carfree concepts than they’re ever been.

"The climate is changing," League of American Bicyclists director Andy Clarke said. "This is our time. It’s our moment to seize the opportunity and change our communities."

Mia Birk, Portland’s former bicycle-policy coordinator, added, "We’re not anti-car, but we’re trying to create a system where walking and biking are viable transportation options." Birk now runs Alta Planning and Design, which is working on carfree and car-light projects with hundreds of cities around the world, including some in the Bay Area.

"What we’re talking about is a true cultural revolution to encourage that kind of shift," Birk said, inviting the crowd to "be a part of that revolution."

Towards Carfree Cities: Everybody into the streets!

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Steven T. Jones covered the Towards Carfree Cities conference, which closed yesterday with the first Sunday Parkways, and brought back these photos and words.
cic 1.jpg
Clear the streets of cars and they will fill with happy people riding their bikes, playing games or music, strolling with their families, communing with friends and strangers, teaching children to bike or skate, and generally building community across class, racial and regional lines.

That’s a lesson pioneered during the Sunday road closures known as Ciclovias in Bogota, Columbia and other foreign cities, events that made their U.S. debut yesterday in Portland, Oregon, drawing huge crowds and rave reviews. The city’s six-mile Sunday Parkways loop connected several North Portland parks and created a healthy, fun, communal atmosphere.

Next up are New York City, Baltimore, and San Francisco, which are all working on Ciclovias planned for later this year. SF’s version, dubbed Sunday Healthways, proposes to open up more than four miles of roadways from the Bayview Opera House to Portsmouth Square in Chinatown along the waterfront for three weekends starting in August (officials tell me more details are due for release after July 4 once current permitting discussions wrap up).

There’s bound to be a backlash among the cars-first set in San Francisco once the event is publicized and underway. But as Gil Peñalosa, who developed the concept as parks director in Bogota and now promotes it internationally, said at last week’s Towards Carfree Cities conference in Portland, “The educational benefits are huge.”

Simply having a community discussion about carfree concepts – even if it means arguing about the details and scale of Ciclovias — helps people understand the environmental and social imperatives behind reallocating urban spaces, he said. In many U.S. cities, more than half of all land goes to circulating automobiles, but as Peñalosa said, “The roads are big enough for people to do many things.”
cic 2.jpg

Daddy issues

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REVIEW Stuffy writer Blake Morrison (Colin Firth) struggles to come to terms with his father’s imminent death, hoping that, in their last days together, that they can finally make peace. A dying father? I know the premise is more than a little grim, but what When Did You Last See Your Father? lacks in levity it makes up for in heartfelt storytelling and powerful performances — trusty Jim Broadbent shines as Arthur, the overbearing, attention-seeking (possibly philandering) paterfamilias. We first encounter this force of nature as the film, set in the late 1950s, opens. Blake is eight, and his family is stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic. But not for long: Arthur breaks ranks and rides the shoulder, zooming past the long line of cars, waving a stethoscope in the air to justify the blatantly arrogant maneuver. This devil-may-care attitude inspires admiration in young Blake and animosity in slightly older Blake, when he grows into a surly, socially inept teenager. Adapted from an award-winning memoir and directed by Anand Tucker (Shopgirl, 2005), the film flows seamlessly in and out of flashbacks, fleshing out Blake and Arthur’s complex dynamic. Any film centered around a father-son relationship, especially when the father is terminally ill, pretty much lends itself to schmaltzy sentimentality. But When Did You Last See Your Father? avoids slipping down that syrupy slope. Instead, it is a poignant, sincere, occasionally funny — Arthur’s frank discussion of gonorrhea and masturbation during a camping trip had me chuckling — exploration of a man’s complicated history with his often uncouth but always larger-than-life father.

WHEN DID YOU LAST SEE YOUR FATHER? opens Fri/13 in Bay Area theaters.

The bicyclist vs. the oil industry’s best friend

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As I prepare to attend next week’s International Towards Carfree Cities Conference in Portland (from which I’ll be doing daily posts on this blog) — traveling up by train with a big group of bicyclists and alternative transportation activists from San Francisco — the newsgroups and carfree living websites have been abuzz over this simple image:
biking Obama.jpg
Why go gaga over a presidential candidate on a bike? After all, John Kerry rode one and President Bush reportedly takes regular mountain bike rides. The difference for those who promote bicycling as a viable urban transportation option is that Obama rode in a big city, in street clothes, on an inexpensive bike, and was even hauling something (probably his daughter, although that isn’t clear). And he chose to spend his downtime cycling through Chicago with his family shortly after saying this in Portland: “If we are going to solve our energy problems we’ve got to think long term. It’s time for us to be serious about investing in alternative energy. It’s time for us to get serious about raising fuel efficiency standards on cars. It’s time that the entire country learn from what’s happening right here in Portland with mass transit and bicycle lanes and funding alternative means of transportation.”
Contrast that with today’s news that Senate Republicans have blocked legislation that would have taxed the obscene profits now been reaped by the five big largest American oil companies, which took in a staggering $36 billion in just the first three months of this year. Just imagine how many bike lanes and transit improvements could be funded with the proposed 25 percent tax on unreasonably high profit levels? Or by getting out of Iraq, with its price tag of more than $250 million per day?
Forget the detailed analysis of their economic plans; the differing visions of these two men couldn’t be more clear. We either keep cooking the planet, fighting the world, and begging the rich for crumbs and spare change, or we try something different.

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