Transportation

Newsom reneges on parking, but the MTA shouldn’t

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By Steven T. Jones
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The Guardian explored the politics of parking in our July 1 cover package.

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, which will soon consider a long-awaited study into how to generate more than $1 million in additional parking meter revenue that was part of a May budget deal, faces another test of whether it is truly an independent agency or merely Mayor Gavin Newsom’s puppet.

As the backlash over extended meter hours in Oakland caused the City Council there to cave in to driver and merchant demands, Newsom – who likes to dress in green but has never really challenged the dominant car culture’s sense of entitlement – has signaled that he now wants to break the deal he helped broker and stop meter hours from being extended.

But under 2007’s Proposition A, which Newsom supported, this isn’t a decision for either the mayor or the Board of Supervisors, but instead for the theoretically independent MTA board. In fact, the whole argument for that change was based on giving that body the power to do the right thing even when craven, conflict-averse politicians get cold feet.

“Any decision on whether to extend meter hours is under the SFMTA Board of Directors,” confirmed SFMTA spokesperson Judson True, who also said the study is almost complete and could be released as soon as next week. He said it is a “study of parking with a variety of factors that will determine whether extended hours is a good idea.”

Drivers and merchants may squawk over extending meters into the evening hours, but with the city failing to put general revenue measures on the ballot and motorists not even coming close to paying for their full impacts and use of public spaces, this is a basic equity issue.

Muni riders took the biggest hit in the May budget deal, with their fares doubling since Newsom took office. Unlike in Oakland, San Francisco is well-served by public transportation, so there’s no good reason why motorists need such fiscal coddling. Newsom may be afraid, but the MTA board shouldn’t be.

After the peak

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After the peak

news@sfbg.com

To prepare for the inevitable decline in fossil fuel production, San Francisco’s Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force (see "Running on Empty," 1/30/08) has concluded the city needs to rapidly implement the community choice aggregation and its related renewable energy projects, beef up "buy local" programs, convert unused land (including some park and golf course property) into public food gardens, and consider implementing city carbon, gas, vehicle, and fast food taxes.

The task force presented its findings, contained in a 125-page report, to the Board of Supervisors’ Government Audit and Oversight Committee on Sept. 24. It notes the city’s weak current position with respect to the economy, food security, and transportation, yet it remains to be seen how the Board of Supervisors will answer the task force’s call. Sup. Ross Mirkarimi says he will look for ways to initiate some of the short- and long-term recommendations "to legitimize its most salient parts."

San Francisco is the largest U.S. city to produce a sweeping report on the potential impacts of peak oil, a term that refers to the point of maximum oil production, after which extracting dwindling supplies gets steadily more difficult and expensive. Although there isn’t consensus on when the peak will come, the task force’s message is clear: action must be taken now. "The transition cannot be done quickly; the city faces a limited window of opportunity to begin, after which adaptation will become enormously difficult, painful, and expensive," concludes the report. Without sufficient preparation, dwindling supplies of oil and fossil fuel could have dire impacts on San Francisco’s economy, food supply, and security.

Many actions recommended by the task force focus on developing local sustainability. For example, disaster planning needs to cover peak oil phenomena. If delivery of food is delayed or reduced due to fuel shortage, food prices could soar, creating a great need for local options, particularly for low-income families. So the report recommends maximizing the amount of time San Francisco can sustain itself locally.

Specifically, implementing an aggressive "Buy Local First" program that prompts public institutions to purchase regionally produced food when possible would encourage more local food production. A fast food tax could further support this goal. Other recommendations include establishing food production education programs and conducting a comprehensive evaluation of which public lands could be converted to food production. Although the Bay Area is capable of producing enough food to sustain itself, food currently being produced is not diverse enough, and much of it is exported.

The report also warns of the social unrest that could result from improper preparation. San Francisco’s economy depends heavily on travel and visitors, with about 18 percent of city revenue coming from tourism. Escautf8g energy costs and its myriad impacts could send the economy into a prolonged downward spiral.

"With food becoming increasingly expensive, travel and the distribution of goods significantly affected, and unemployment climbing, economically vulnerable populations — including a high percentage of people of color — could experience increasing malnutrition, and some may not be able to maintain health without government intervention," the report reads.

Such future scenarios should affect today’s decisions in all realms, including transportation. Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable Cities and an elected BART board member, said at the Sept. 24 hearing that it doesn’t make sense to fund highway expansions when future resources might not be able to support even the current number of automobiles on the roads.

In fact, he said, there is a cultural shift already underway in which people want to move away from the car-dependant suburbs and into more pedestrian-friendly urban areas, although policymakers haven’t caught up with this trend yet. While BART and Muni fight uphill battles to expand public transit service with dwindling resources, Radulovich pointed out that the Bay Area Metropolitan Transport Commission (MTC) is proposing to direct $6.4 billion toward highway expansion, despite a decline in vehicle miles traveled. Livable Cities coauthored a resolution, recently approved by the Board of Supervisors, urging the MTC to redirect these funds toward improving transit.

As oil becomes scarcer, the need to create and improve communities where people can safely get around by foot or bicycle will be paramount. Ben Lowe, a task force member specializing in transportation security, noted how important it is to look for regional solutions that go beyond individual cities. There is no magic single solution, but dealing with limited-supply and cost-prohibitive oil requires numerous small solutions as we make this transition.

The main obstacle, as Mirkarimi sees it, is that the sense of urgency is not there. Public officials need to educate the public and "to find something, key pieces of legislation, to rally around," he said. He plans to look into formal ways to keep the seven task force members involved in this process, for example, by matching them with policy experts who can facilitate creation of pertinent legislation.

The task force’s mantra for dealing with forthcoming shortages in oil is to integrate peak oil consideration into government planning and all the decisions made by the mayor and Board of Supervisors. Mirkarimi warns that it would be myopic for San Franciscans not to deliberate on the dangers and opportunities outlined in this report.

Read the report at www.sfenvironment.org/our_policies/overview.html?ssi=20.

Remaking Market Street

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steve@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Market Street is a mess that doesn’t work well for any of its users. In famously fractious San Francisco, that’s something politicians and citizens of all political stripes can agree on — and it’s now something that a wide variety of city agencies and interest groups have finally started to work on improving, experiment by experiment.

Mayor Gavin Newsom’s Sept. 10 announcement of a series of pilot projects on Market Street — including a plan to divert many automobiles from Market Street that begins Sept. 29, followed by creation of more sidewalk seating areas and art projects in the coming months — drew from work started a year ago by his arch-rival, Sup. Chris Daly, who in turn was furthering plans for an eventually carfree Market Street initiated by former Mayor Willie Brown.

"I’m glad that it’s going to get done and we’re going to take cars off of Market Street," Daly told the Guardian after Newsom’s announcement. Newsom presented the changes in grander terms, saying in a prepared statement, "The new and improved Market Street will rival main streets around the world."

Among the streets Newsom cited as an example is Broadway in New York City, "for piloting ways to use streets as open space," according to the Mayor’s Office statement. But while many San Franciscans like Broadway’s new separated bike lanes and street-level open space, others covet Broadway’s flashy electronic signs and billboards, which this November’s Proposition D would bring to the mid-Market area.

"The next thing is going to happen whether Prop. D passes or not," said David Addington, the Warfield Theater owner who proposed the measure to allow more commercial signage on Market between Fifth and Seventh streets as a source of revenue to improve mid-Market. "This area could be fantastic."

Indeed, it appears that Market Street is bound for some big changes. And unlike efforts in the past, which involved long studies of ideas that were never implemented, there’s a sense of experimentation and immediacy that marks the latest push.

"I’m very excited about the Market Street changes and I think it’s good for San Francisco to be in a mode where we give ourselves permission to experiment with our streets," said Gabriel Metcalf, executive director of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, which is supporting Prop. D and Newsom’s Market plans.

"I really appreciative that the city is willing to start things in Market Street in trial phases so we can wade in," said Leah Shahum, executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. "Reducing the number of cars on Market Street will definitely be a benefit for those walking and biking, as well as speeding up transit."

Plans call for signs encouraging eastbound motorists on Market to turn right at 10th Street before requiring them to do so at Eighth Street and again at Sixth Street.

The San Francisco Transportation Authority (governed by the Board of Supervisors), which prepared the study on diverting cars from Market Street, was also poised to approve (on Sept. 22, after Guardian press time) some complementary measures to "calm the safety zone" on Market Street.

That plan is to create better markings on the street to delineate the spaces used by motorists, pedestrians, and bicyclists, including colored pavement and moving back the points where cars stop at intersections to create safer access to transit stops.

Once the court injunction against bike projects is lifted — for which a hearing is set Nov. 2 — the plan would also create colored "bike boxes" at Market intersections and a buffer zone between the bike lanes and cars between Eighth Street and Van Ness. "It would be the city’s first separated bike lane, with very little work," Shahum said.

The Mayor’s Office says various city agencies will monitor and evaluate the Market Street pilot projects being implemented over the next year, with full implementation of a designed Market Street coming in 2013 after taking community input.

"We’re excited about it. There’s a long history of ideas about what to do about Market," said Judson True, spokesperson for the Municipal Transportation Agency, which is guiding the improvements. "This is the start of the next phase on Market Street."

Crunch time

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sarah@sfbg.com

The proposal by city officials and Lennar Corp. to build more than 10,000 new housing units at Hunters Point Shipyard/Candlestick Point is entering a critical phase, particularly for Bayview-Hunters Point residents who want greater oversight and scrutiny of the project.

Candidates are lining up to replace termed-out District 10 Sup. Sophie Maxwell next year; the project’s draft environmental impact report will be released, considered for approval and potentially challenged; and Lennar officials will seek to get the final development agreement with the city signed before Mayor Gavin Newsom leaves office in 2011, or earlier.

The 770-acre redevelopment plan, which the Mayor’s Office is touting as a shining example of a public-private partnership, has come under repeated attack from community advocates after Lennar’s failures to monitor and control toxic asbestos dust at the shipyard. The crash of the housing market and plunge in the company’s stock price also triggered concerns about the project.

And in light of the U.S. Navy’s recent decision to dissolve the Hunters Point Shipyard Restoration Advisory Board (RAB), the community is concerned that decisions about radiologically-affected dumps and the shipyard’s early transfer from the Navy to the city could occur without important public oversight.

Another aspect of the project — a proposal to build condos on 42 acres of Candlestick Point State Recreation Area — was criticized by the Sierra Club, Arc Ecology, and Friends of Candlestick Park. Lennar argued it was necessary for the project to pencil out and this sale of state land was to be authorized by Senate Bill 792, sponsored by Sen. Mark Leno.

In August, Leno secured the neutrality of the environmental groups and the support of the California Assembly (but not Assembly Member Tom Ammiano, the lone dissenting vote) for an amended version of his bill, arguing that selling 23 acres for $50 million would spare the rest of Candlestick Point SRA from being closed by budget cuts. The legislation now awaits Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s signature.

Now, with the project’s EIR due to be released Sept. 28, people have the chance to register concerns about plans for such a massive development project, which includes condos on the Bayview’s only major park and a controversial bridge over Yosemite Slough.

On Sept. 15, community members packed the Board of Supervisors’ meeting to demand an investigation into their concerns, which also include the apparent inability of Newsom’s African American Out Migration task force to issue its overdue final report about the ongoing exodus of the city’s black population, which this project could exacerbate.

Sup. John Avalos told us he is now gathering information on the issue and hopes to schedule Land Use Committee hearings on the shipyard cleanup and Lennar’s economic health. "The documentation gives real strength and power to the community’s contentions," Avalos said.

He also noted that Maxwell is scheduling a hearing into the dissolution of the RAB, while Sup. Ross Mirkarimi is resurrecting legislation that seeks to put the San Francisco Redevelopment Authority under the control of the Board of Supervisors.

Arc Ecology director Saul Bloom said his group will study the project’s EIR to see if it accurately assesses the effects of Lennar’s development.

"We are concerned about the impact of truck traffic, the bridge over Yosemite Slough, and whether the transportation plan is going to effectively put the Bayview between three freeways," Bloom said. "But we’re going to be even-handed. If the EIR does a good job, we plan to say so."

Jaron Browne of the Bayview advocacy group POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights) told the Guardian that her group wants the shipyard cleaned up and the community respected.

"This is not just a Bayview issue," Browne said. "The whole city will be affected by the decisions that take place in terms of the future of affordable housing and environmental protection."

Golden Gate suicide barrier lacks funding

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By Sarah Morrison
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The 2006 film The Bridge documented suicides from the iconic span.

It was almost a year ago that local officials decided that the Golden Gate Bridge needed a net constructed to prevent potential suicide jumpers, but with its projected price tag of $50 million, a lack of state funds threatens to delay the project indefinitely.

According to Marin County Coroner Ken Holmes, more than 1300 people have died jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge since its construction, an estimate that does not include all bridge suicides or incidences when bodies have not been found.

The Bridge Rail Foundation has been campaigning for years to raise the pedestrian safety rail on the Golden Gate Bridge and stop the suicides. While the board of directors for the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District agreed to implement the net system almost a year ago, but it’s fate now seems to come down to funding.

The new taxi plan: Everyone hates it

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By Tim Redmond

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Municipal Transportation Agency officials have drafted a plan to overhaul the San Francisco taxi industry — and just about everyone hates it.

The proposal, outlined in a Sept. 8 memo from Christiane Hayashi, director of taxis and accessible services, would ultimately shift control of cab permits away from working drivers and give them to cab companies.

The process would be slow — the drivers who currently hold medallions would be allowed to keep them until they retire or die, and the 1,700 people who have been on the medallion waiting list for more than 10 years would retain their rights.

But in the future, as the valuable medallions get returned to the city, they would be auctioned off to cab companies. The companies wouldn’t technically own the permits, but would bid for long-term leases.

The idea runs directly counter to the landmark 1978 legislation known as Proposition K, which for the first time gave drivers the right to control their own permits. Under Prop. K, written by then-Supervisor Quentin Kopp, medallions are issued for a token annual fee to active, working drivers. No corporations are allowed to hold medallions. The only way to get a medallion is to put your name on the waiting list; it often takes as long as 15 years.

Of course, drivers who get the medallions see an immediate and substantial increase in their incomes. The medallions are valid 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, so medallion holders can driver a few shifts a week and lease them out to other drivers for the rest of the time. The lease fees can add up to about $3,000 a month.

And that income continues as long as the medallion holder is alive — and driving a cab. If he or she can’t drive a minimum number of hours, the medallion is returned to the city and goes to the next person on the waiting list.

Take warning

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

The forests are in flames, the desert is advancing, the glaciers have vanished, and in a solar-powered facility towering above the ice-free waters of the Arctic, some 800 miles north of Norway, a solitary older man (Pete Postlethwaite) roams the hallways of the Global Archive, a warehouse sheltering banks of data-storage servers, a civilization’s worth of art and invention, and a Noah’s ark of extinguished species. From this lonely outpost, he gravely explores a stomach-churning inquiry: "We could have saved ourselves. But we didn’t. It’s amazing. What state of mind were we in to face extinction and simply shrug it off?"

Good question, and one that Franny Armstrong’s The Age of Stupid, a hybrid merging documentary material and a fictional frame tale, forcefully suggests we start addressing like we mean it — immediately. That is to say, before runaway climate change makes its debut and some or all of its widely forecasted ecological consequences begin to manifest, along with resource shortages, food and water riots, and massive societal collapse.

Delineating the complex global network of climate-change causes and effects, The Age of Stupid interweaves real-life documentary footage from the lives of six present-day subjects in New Orleans, the French Alps, Jordan, southwest England, a small Nigerian fishing village, and Mumbai, India. Interspersed is real and faux (future) archival footage depicting and predicting the environmental consequences of humanity’s bad habits. And all of it is presented as the digital artifacts of a dying-off civilization, preserved for uncertain posterity in the Global Archive. While covering similar terrain to that of An Inconvenient Truth (2006), the film serves as a kind of "No, but really, folks …" in the face of frighteningly incremental gestures toward sustainability — and continued shortsighted resistance — at the levels of national, state, and local government as well as citizenry.

The film’s opening sequence begins with the big bang and hurtles via countdown clock through billions of years, flying past the earliest stages of evolution, past dinosaurs, past the industrial revolution, and past the present day, the titular Age of Stupid, so fast that we barely have time to notice ourselves on the screen before it’s 2055, the Age of Too Late. The message: in the grand scheme of things, we have about a nanosecond left to kid ourselves as we refill our metal water bottle and press the start button on our Energy Star-qualified washer-dryer or Prius — or to find a way, at the level of populace, not green-minded individual, to radically swerve from our current path. According to Armstrong and her cohorts in the Not Stupid Campaign, the film’s companion activist effort, our fate will pretty much be decided by December’s climate talks in Copenhagen. (The film, which premiered in the U.K. in March, has its 50-country "global premiere" Sept. 21-22.)

So then, do the canvas bags, travel mugs, energy-saving appliances, clotheslines, CSA memberships, cycling, recycling, composting, and other ecologically minded efforts of a smattering of well-intentioned individuals matter at all? Or matter enough — in the face of factories, factory farming, methane-emitting landfills, canyons of office towers lit up 24/7, a continent-sized constellation of plastic detritus in the Pacific, and millions of trips cross-country at an average elevation of 30,000 feet?

Colin Beavan, the subject of Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein’s No Impact Man, is banking on yes, being of the "be the change you wish to see in the world" school of thought (admittedly in good company, with Mahatma Gandhi). Taking its name from Beavan’s book project and blog, No Impact Man shadows the NYC-based writer; his wife, Michelle Conlin, a senior writer at BusinessWeek admitting to "an intense relationship with retail" and a high-fructose corn syrup addiction; and their toddler daughter, Isabella, during a year in which they try to achieve a net-neutral environmental impact.

This entails giving up, in successive stages, with varying degrees of exactitude, packaged food (hard on a family whose caloric mainstay is take-out), nonlocal food (hard on a woman who drinks multiple quadruple-shot espressos a day; impossible, as it turns out), paper products (magazine subscriptions, TP), fossil-fuel-dependent transit (airplanes, elevators, and even the subway), electricity (i.e., the refrigerator), and, to a large extent, trash. The idea is to learn empirically — and demonstrate — which behaviors might be permanently ditched and which are virtually hardwired.

There are, predictably, certain criticisms –- from irritated environmentalists, from semianonymous blog commenters, from the New York Times Home and Garden section. There is the matter of giving up public transportation rather than championing it, and the issue (raised by a community gardener who takes Beavan under his wing) of Conlin’s laboring for a high-circulation publication that trumpets capitalist virtues antithetical to the project of tapering off consumption and waste. And Beavan sometimes comes across, particularly in the book, as well-meaning but stubbornly myopic in his focus on self-improvement.

Then again, the guy and his family gave up toilet paper, electric light, motor vehicles, spontaneous slices of pizza, and many deeply ingrained habits of wastefulness for a year while most of the rest of the country got up each morning and brushed their teeth with the water running. What impact the No Impact project might have on, for instance, the mounds of trash-filled Heftys that line Manhattan’s sidewalks each week remains to be seen. But as the Age of Stupid winds down, it’s probably a waste of time to fault anyone’s attempts to forestall the Age of Too Late.

NO IMPACT MAN opens Fri/18 in Bay Area theaters.

THE AGE OF STUPID plays Mon/21, 8 p.m., SF Center. Visit www.ageofstupid.net for additional Bay Area screenings.

Bay Bridge reopens, here’s what new commute looks like

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Text and video by Sarah Phelan

If you have been missing your commute across the Bay Bridge, or are wondering what it looks like now that the tie-in is tied in, check out this video, which I shot this morning.

(I pressed the “record” button just before crossing the San Francisco County line on the bridge’s eastern span and didn’t have a chance to press “stop” until I was on the western span of the bridge, so feel free to fast-forward your way through. Or you could replay this video four or five times to catch up on all those missed commutes.)

I was one of the lucky commuters to hear that the Bay Bridge had reopened, while I still had time to change my travel plans and drive in, instead of BARTing or taking the ferry.

Now, some car-haters may fault my joy at driving again, but for me the bridge reopening represents a good and clear any-time-of-the day-and night connection to the city–one that my family desperately needs right now (we’d spent the long weekend finding creative ways to get from the East Bay to San Francisco where an ambulance took my sister-in-law, who is battling cancer, late Thursday night, after the bridge closed).

It was interesting to sometimes drive the San Mateo Bridge (the traffic wasn’t too bad on Saturday) and to take the Oakland-Alameda ferry on other days (pretty crowded Sunday), and obviously it was possible to get in and out. But today I am relieved to know that there is no longer a major obstacle between me and UCSF’s intensive care unit, where my sister-in-law is fighting for her life.

So, thanks to all the folks who busted their asses and made it possible for all us commuters, not to mention Bay Area ambulances, fire trucks, police cars and other emergency vehicles, to drive the Bridge again.

Today, the drive was super smooth, but judging from the speed limit signs on the new section, the commute will probably be a little slower as folks slow for the curve–and rubber neck to take a look at what’s changed.

Oh, and try not to think about cracks, tie-ins and earthquakes, while you are actually driving across. Otherwise, you really will be taking public transportation for ever!

p.s. in light of some amusingly catty feedback about the soundtrack, I guess it’s worth mentioning that my “car radio” consists of a boom box plugged into my cigarette lighter and balanced on my passenger seat. And that it would be virtually impossible and downright dangerouns to change stations while rounding a curve, changing gear (I drive a stick shift) AND filming the bridge. So yeah, ALICE was on. And maybe you don’t like that. In which case, turn down the volume on your computer. Better yet, watch the video again, only this time listening to your own music of choice.

Hacking meters

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news@sfbg.com

Joe Grand and his accomplices, Jacob Appelbaum of Noisebridge and Chris Tarnovsky of Flylogic Engineering, have had their way with San Francisco’s new "smart" parking meters, hacking their way into the systems, exposing how easily they are manipulated, and sharing the entire experience with whoever would listen.

The three men, all highly skilled computer programmers, built a smart card capable of fooling San Francisco’s parking meter system into giving up that sweet parking space for free, and right in front of our eyes. "You can do pretty much anything on the streets. No one in San Francisco cares," Grand, who also goes by Kingpin and is head of Grand Idea Studios, told the Guardian.

The three men shared their account in a PowerPoint presentation at Black Hat Conference, a security conference held in Las Vegas last month. "We found out through the media," said Judson True, spokesperson for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, which administers the city’s parking system.

In three days the trio managed to create a device that could infiltrate the meter and then, using an oscilloscope (a device used to translate electronic signals into readable data), they recorded the communication between the meter and card.

Grand was then able to analyze the communication and, by adjusting it, created a new card with a value of $999.99, the highest amount a meter can display.

San Francisco has spent $35 million to deploy 23,000 smart meters throughout the city and the hack was intended to get city officials to improve the system. "San Francisco has been grasping for straws for what to do with metered parking. We wanted to enlighten people to the potential problems," Grand told us.

Since the news about their findings has gone public, Grand has met with SFMTA officials. "They were very responsive, more so than many other security groups. They seemed to be more concerned with vandalism and money being skimmed during collection than with high-tech attack. They wanted to understand the mindset of the people perpetrating these attacks. They were already looking for similar types of fraud."

To defend against fraud, the SFMTA monitors the audit logs of all the meters. If a card has been used more than its possible value (cards are sold in denominations of $20 and $50) then the city can block the card and these crimes are avoided. "We have not found any fraud," says True.

This smart meter technology is used in cities across the country. In Massachusetts, several MIT students were able to find ways to manipulate smart meters in Boston. Two of the three men who found the vulnerabilities in SF’s meters live in the city. "We’re San Francisco residents and we want our money to be used well. We need a secure system that will protect its citizens. A system that is at risk trickles down to the taxpayers."

SFMTA met with J.J. MacKay, the vendor of these meters. "It was the best system for the time and the price," says True. "They are huge improvements over the mechanical machines."

San Francisco is currently planning with MacKay about next-generation meters that will be capable of processing credit cards. "As long as the credit card’s info is processed right away and not stored, then there is no real chance of fraud," Grand said. But plans for purchasing such meters are far in the future, and no decisions have been made about which model will be used.
The plan to replace all the old meters with smart meters by early next year. The smart meters are a key element to the SFMTA’s SF Park pilot program, which uses market pricing and other tools to control parking demand (see "The Politics of Parking" cover package, July 1).
The hackers’ PowerPoint presentation’s "Final Conclusions" offered a couple of hints into their worldview. They began with "Systems need to be fully tested before deployment" and ended with "Consider a world without parking meters. Ride a bicycle!"

Made in USA

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

DRUG LIT You can go to these places. Reading Righteous Dopefiend (University of California, 392 pages, $24.95), I kept trying to pinpoint, via clues in the text, where on "Edgewater Blvd." — Bayshore — the homeless heroin addicts whose lives the book chronicles were encamped. You want to know if you’ve walked by them. Because what pulls you through this often dense ethnography are finely drawn portraits of the brutal lives of individuals.

Philippe Bourgois, a professor of anthropology and medicine who taught for a while at UCSF (he’s now at the University of Pennsylvania) and Jeff Schonberg, a photographer, spent nearly 12 years with a core group of 10 homeless drug addicts in and around the Bayshore area. In Righteous Dopefiend they’ve created a devastating, blow-by-blow indictment of the countervailing forces that conspire to keep these people — Hank, Petey, Tina, Carter, Felix — on the margins.

Of course, the authors recognize that the members of the group they’re following bear some responsibility for the day-to-day atrocity their lives have become. But they track these lines back carefully, conducting extensive interviews with family members, former employers, and ex-spouses who live more (or at least much less precariously) in the "mainstream." Part of what’s revealed in these back stories reminded me of William T. Vollmann’s argument, in his book Poor People (Ecco, 2007), about "accident prone-ness": that the cultures of poverty, addiction and marginalization have a snowball effect within individual lives. Meeting medical — or court — appointments becomes impossible without transportation; sores and open-container tickets turn into abscesses and bench warrants.

The book is divided into nine parts, each detailing an aspect of the everyday lives of the homeless addicts. In "Falling in Love," over the course of interviews, monologues, and Schonberg’s overwhelming black and white photographs, we watch the trajectory of Tina and Carter’s on-again, off-again romance. The chapter is bracketed by "Intimate Apartheid" and "A Community of Addicted Bodies," which illustrate the particulars of the group’s estrangements (from within and without) and its focal, primary romance — with heroin, crack, and alcohol.

In "Making Money," the few legal, and many more illegal, means of getting enough cash to fix are catalogued and considered. Bourgois considers the obsolescence of blue-collar manufacturing jobs, nationally and particularly in rapidly gentrifying cities like San Francisco. What interests the authors here, as elsewhere, are the ambiguously symbiotic, even parasitic relationships employers have with the homeless. One boss who relies on a member of the group pays him exactly enough for a bag of heroin, ensuring that he’ll be at work again first thing the next day.

Throughout the first-person narratives, Bourgois threads his argument: that the institutions, ostensibly set up to serve this body of addicts (from the police-state to community clinics) are, like the employers, both dependent on them (for government funding, menial labor, etc.) and ultimately at cross-purposes with them. The services senselessly undercut one another, forming a no-place for the homeless to barely survive in, characterized by the either/or of living purely by chance, in extreme squalor, or in a permanent maze of bureaucracy. So the Edgewater homeless carve out a life in between, under the freeways but with methadone treatment or an SRO perpetually on the horizon. It’s a shell game where the addict always loses.

There are plenty of good reasons to get this book and read it. If you’re interested in homelessness, addiction, or in the public health issues surrounding IV drug use, this is an excellent source of information. The authors treat their subject brilliantly and with great compassion. It is also a hell of a story, and it’s local. These people walk by you every day and should not remain invisible.

Events listings

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Events listings are compiled by Paula Connelly. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com.

THURSDAY 20

Beer for Singles San Francisco Brewing Company, 155 Columbus, SF; (415) 507-9962. 7pm, $10. Meet some new single beer loving friends while tasting beers and enjoying free appetizers.

Catalyst for Creative Encounters Museum of African Diaspora, 685 Mission, SF; (415) 358-7200. 6pm, $5-10. This kickoff of a new series of community think tanks for MoAD’s audience and supporters is titled, "Blowing up: Crossing thresholds of commercial, critical, and personal success." Twenty short presentations will outline what it means to "blow up."

Sex Workers Writing Workshop Center for Sex and Culture, 1519 Mission, SF; (415) 255-1155. 5:30pm, free. Join Gina de Vries for this writing workshop for people who work or have worked in all areas of the sex industry to share their writing and get honest, non-judgmental feedback.

FRIDAY 21

Breast Cancer Emergency Fund Awards City Forest Lodge, 254 Laguna Honda, SF; www.frantix.net. 7:30pm, $20. This semi-formal cocktail party to benefit the Breast Cancer Emergency Fund will honor survivors and community supporters with hor d’oeuvres, entertainment, and a silent auction. The Emergency Fund provides financial assistance to low-income people in San Francisco and San Mateo County who are in treatment.

Vintage European Posters Firehouse Building, Fort Mason, SF; www.vepca.com. Fri-Sat 10am-6pm, Sun 11am-5pm; free. View original works of European advertising art created over more than a century on topics such as cycles, food and wine, travel, transportation, and military recruiting.

BAY AREA

Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill Dance Palace, 503 B St., Point Reyes Station; (415) 663-1542. 7:30pm, $10. See a special screening of the 2003 film and join award-winning filmmaker Judy Irving and author Mark Bittner for a discussion after.

SATURDAY 22

American Indian Market and Powwow Julian Ave., between Mission and Valencia, SF; (415) 865-0964. 10am, free. Celebrate American Indian culture with arts and crafts, powwow dancers, drum groups, singers, spoken word, food, refreshments, and educational games and activities for children and adults.

BAY AREA

Hopalong Benefit Hopalong Animal Rescue, Parking lot on the corner of 2nd and Webster, Oak; (510) 267-1915. 10am-3pm, free. Hopalong Rescue is moving to a new location and selling dog and cat supplies for a bargain, such as toys, leashes collars, beds, and more. All proceeds go to Hopalong’s Medical Fund.

SUNDAY 23

Family Winemakers of California Festival Pavilion, Fort Mason, SF; 1-877-772-5425. 3pm, $60. This event features a chance to taste high-end wine from 360 family-owned California wineries, giving presence to small, boutique wineries.

Rock Make Treat between 17th and 18th St., SF; www.rockmake.com. 11am-7pm, free. Celebrating the Bay Area’s arts and DIY community, featuring 15 bands on two stages, and handicrafts, visual arts, and fashion vendors. *

Bikes are boring

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By Steven T. Jones

Controversial initiatives rarely pass the ideologically divided San Francisco Board of Supervisors with a unanimous vote. But last night, the board voted 11-0 to pass the new Bicycle Plan and reject appeals that its supporting environmental documents weren’t adequate.

Despite the persistent arguments by anti-bike zealot Rob Anderson that bicyclists are a fringe minority from “Progressive Land” and that bikes aren’t an important transportation option, elected officials from across the political spectrum apparently think otherwise. The supercharged rhetoric that bikes elicit from fringe characters like Anderson notwithstanding, bicycling seems to be becoming non-controversial in San Francisco.

Sure, there may be some truth to points made by activist Marc Salomon that the unanimous approval indicates a plan that could have been more progressive (separated bikeways anyone?). But the bottom line is bicyclists now enjoy more mainstream support than does Anderson’s regressive vision of streets designed mainly for cars and buses.

Enclosed 49ers stadium in Santa Clara?

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Text by Sarah Phelan

The draft EIR for the 49ers stadium in Santa Clara states that the proposed construction will result “in significant cumulative transportation, air quality and global climate change impacts.”

According to the study, the significant unavoidable impacts of the proposal include a substantial increase in ambient noise levels during large stadium events, temporary noise impacts from construction, regional air pollutants in excess of established thresholds, significant impacts on 17 intersections on 8 weekday evenings a year, and on two local intersections on 42 weekend days.

It could also result in the abandonment of active raptor nests or the destruction of other migratory birds’ nests.

And expose construction workers and future site users to contaminated soil, airborne asbestos particles, and lead-based paint.

The proposed site is located within the worst-case release impact zone for two toxic gas facilities and thus, “could expose event attendees to toxic chemicals.”

Then there is the fact that it could impact “unknown buried prehistoric and/or historic resources.”

And numerous BBQ activities within 700 feet of neighboring residences “could result in odor complaints”

What impact this draft EIR will have on Santa Clara voters when they go to the ballot next March remains unclear.

But a quick skim through this 336-page report finds it concluding that other alternatives, including Mayor Gavin Newsom’s proposed site at Hunters Point Shipyard, are mostly deemed inconsistent with the 49ers objectives.

“The costs and time required for hazardous materials clean up, infrastructure and roadway/transit improvements, and permitting make the Hunters Point site inconsistent with the following objectives: locate the stadium on a site that can be readily assembled and that enables the development of the stadium within budget and on schedule; locate the stadium on a site that is served by existing streets and highway infrastructure adequate to reasonably accommodate local and regional game-day automobile circulation.”

The existing Candlestick Point site, as well as Pier 70, Pier 80, Pier 90-94 backlands, Baylands, San Francisco Airport, Moffett Airfield, Zanker Road, San Jose State, Santa Clara Fairgrounds, a reduced stadium size alternative and an enclosed stadium alternative are also evaluated.

Ultimately the report concludes that “the enclosed stadium alternative would meet all of the project proponent’s objectives.”

“In addition, this alternative would reduce impacts from crowd noise in the stadium…and would eliminate the visible light increases,” the draft EIR continues. ” Energy use would increase to some extent with the enclosed stadium because it would require more of the stadium area to be climate controlled. An enclosed stadium would, however, allow for a variety of design features that would at least partially offset energy consumption. This alternative is environmentally superior to the proposed project.”

Making great streets

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steve@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY There’s a growing movement to transform San Francisco’s streets into safe, vibrant public spaces, part of an international trend that has drawn together disparate partners around the belief that roadways shouldn’t simply be conduits for moving automobiles.

Recent advances include the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s approval of a package of 45 bicycle projects and the success of the Sunday Streets program, a series of temporary road closures to cars (the next one is this Sunday, July 12, in the Mission District).

And there are new players on the scene, from Streetsblog SF (see "Street fighters," 1/14/09) to the San Francisco Great Streets Project (www.sfgreatstreets.wordpress.com), a newly formed organization sponsored by the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR), the Livable Streets Initiative, and the Project for Public Spaces.

The Great Streets Project focuses on facilitating temporary conversions of streets into plazas (such as the new 17th Street Plaza at Castro and Market streets), parties, and other carfree spaces and with creating a civic conversation about the role of roads by bringing in renowned urban thinkers such as Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, who spoke at the main library July 6 and sat down for an interview with the Guardian the next day.

"The heart and soul of a city is its public pedestrian space," said Peñalosa, who banned parking on sidewalks and expanded Bogotá’s protected bikeways, ciclovias (temporary road closures that were the model for Sunday Streets), and bus rapid transit system, creating an urban renaissance that he has since promoted in cities around the world.

"It became clear that the way we build cities could make people so much happier," Peñalosa said, noting how such urban design concepts dovetailed with his advocacy for the poor. "In a poor city, the inequality is felt most during leisure time … My main concerns are equity and happiness and the way cities can contribute to those things."

Peñalosa noted that "the 20th century was a terrible century for human habitat. Cars took over for people. Later we realized that was a big mistake." Such growth patterns, Peñalosa said, are simply unsustainable in the 21st century, particularly as Asia and Africa modernize.

Many European cities have taken aggressive steps to correct that mistake, but in the U.S. — whose dominant economic position during those years created the most car-dependent infrastructure on the planet — change has come slowly.

"Change is difficult, but change is already happening," he said, noting the strong carfree movements in San Francisco, New York City, and other U.S. cities.

Peñalosa transformed Bogotá at a time when the country was besieged by a violent civil war, timing he said was more propitious than unlikely. As with the current global warming imperatives and the traffic congestion that is choking many big cities, times of crisis can be moments of opportunity.

"When the crisis is so big, people are willing to risk different things and make experiments," Peñalosa said.

While most San Franciscans have yet to truly embrace the transition from car culture, Great Streets Project proponents are using temporary projects to push the envelope and gradually introduce new ideas into the public realm.

"It’s important for everyone to come into this with a spirit of experiment," said SFBC program director Andy Thornley. "Presenting these things as trials helps people get comfortable with the ideas."

SPUR director Gabriel Metcalf said temporary projects often bypass the need for cumbersome and expensive environmental studies and outreach efforts, placing innovative urban design concepts on public display as ongoing experiments.

"They allow you to make adjustments. It’s an option that exists with public spaces that you don’t have with buildings," Metcalf said. "It de-escalates the fear people have over change."

Plus, as the project’s director Kit Hodge notes, temporary placements let transportation planners and advocates try out new ideas instead of just endlessly studying them. As she put it, "San Francisco has a tradition of creating great plans that don’t get implemented."

The prime example is Market Street, an inefficient street for automobiles and a dangerous one for bicycles and pedestrians, and one that has been subject to countless studies about how to make it more livable. Yet little changes. "You need to achieve as much consensus as possible," Peñalosa said, "but in the end, you have to take risks."

Or as Metcalf put it, "It’s time to start enjoying some of the fruits of urbanity that we’ve been denying ourselves."

Shifting gears

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rebeccab@sfbg.com

Bicyclists throughout the city cheered as the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency board unanimously approved 45 new bike-network improvement projects June 26, a move that was hailed as a major step forward for cyclist safety on city streets and a win for the environment.

In a historic decision, SFMTA accepted the findings of an environmental impact review associated with the long-stalled San Francisco Bike Plan and green-lighted almost all of its near-term project proposals, a decision that could trigger the construction of 34 new miles of bike lanes throughout the city starting as early as August.

Plans also call for innovative improvements such as colored bike lanes, converting on-street parking spaces from cars to bikes, thousands of new bike racks, and an effort to ramp up education about safety for bicyclists and motorists. Three years after a court injunction came down on bike-network improvements in the wake of a lawsuit for failing to conduct a full EIR, the board’s vote was widely applauded as a pivotal moment for bicycling in San Francisco. Now that the EIR has been adopted, the process of lifting the injunction has been set in motion.

The vote followed more than three hours of testimony from avid San Francisco cyclists, who asked for more bike lanes and greater accessibility for would-be bicyclists such as children and seniors. Fewer than 20 people turned out in opposition and most people on the thumbs-down side voiced their general support for enhanced bike lanes, but took issue with some flawed aspects of one of the projects.

For a comprehensive design that could ultimately remove more than 2,000 parking spaces from city streets to accommodate bicycle infrastructure, there was remarkably little discussion about the loss of parking.

An old familiar debate about bikes vs. cars continues to grind away — but even Mayor Gavin Newsom called this squabble a thing of the past, touting the Bike Plan as progress for San Francisco and focusing his comments at a press conference on sustainability and livability instead the competition for space on city streets.

IF YOU BUILD IT …


Moments after the MTA Board announced its decision, a crowd of die-hard bike enthusiasts from the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition exchanged hugs and congratulations outside the City Hall hearing room. The vote was hailed as a major, hard-won victory.

"This is a momentous day for better bicycling and a better San Francisco," said Leah Shahum, executive director of the 10,000-member organization. The city "has taken a significant step forward in proving its commitment to smart, sustainable transportation choices, and we expect to see the numbers of people choosing to bicycle to increase dramatically."

Still, there are undoubtedly some who only expect to experience a dramatic increase in frustration when looking for a parking space. There are 880 lane-miles of streets in San Francisco’s roadway network, and according to SFMTA spokesman Judson True, a total of 880 parking spaces throughout the city would’ve been removed if the MTA Board had approved all 46 Bike Plan projects. (The board okayed 45 out of 46 projects; the hotly debated Second Street project, which would have stripped out a handful of parking spaces to accommodate bike lanes, was continued for further study.)

Amid the hundreds of pages of comments submitted during the EIR process was a complaint that the Bike Plan — often touted as a win for sustainability — could adversely impact San Francisco’s air quality by causing more drivers to circle in search of parking.

"More time will be spent by persons in cars as a result of a lack of on-street parking (already at a critical lack of capacity) searching for an available parking spot or stuck in traffic jams due to removal of car traffic lanes," one member of the public complained.

In response, the EIR points to San Francisco’s Transit First policy, which essentially says that the city will provide more of an incentive to take public transit than drive. "The social inconvenience of parking deficits, such as having to hunt for scarce parking spaces, is not an environmental impact," the EIR notes. "There may be secondary physical environmental impacts such as increased traffic congestion at intersections, air quality impacts, safety impacts, or noise impacts caused by congestion. In the experience of San Francisco transportation planners, however, the absence of a ready supply of parking spaces, combined with available alternatives to auto travel … induces many drivers to seek and find alternative parking facilities, shift to other modes of travel, or change their overall travel habits. Any such resulting shifts to transit service in particular, would be in keeping with the city’s Transit First Policy."

The underlying idea is that the Bike Plan can help to clear the air, fight climate change, and boost public health by making it more convenient to go without a vehicle — and more of a headache to drive.

As one commenter pointed out, the Bike Plan could also make life easier for people with disabilities who have to drive by replacing cars with bikes and thus freeing space in traffic lanes.

BRAKING THE HABIT


There are, of course, many sound arguments for nudging people away from driving. At a June 26 press conference, Newsom noted that 54 percent of the city’s greenhouse-gas emissions are related to vehicle traffic on the city’s roadways — and reducing those carbon emissions would go a long way toward making the city more climate-friendly, not to mention healthier for cyclists and non-cyclists alike.

Meanwhile, Bert Hill, chair of the city’s Bicycle Advisory Committee, noted that 40 percent of car trips in the city cover two miles or less, a distance easily traversed by bicycle. If more people opt to go by bike, the result could be calmer traffic, cleaner air, and possibly a boost for business. "No one goes shopping on the highway," one commenter pointed out during the SFMTA Board hearing. For all of these overarching benefits to be realized, of course, many motorists will have to change their behavior by electing to leave the car at home.

The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition points to evidence suggesting that many frequent drivers are in fact ready to transform into frequent bicyclists. "New bike lanes will … attract tens of thousands of new bicyclists," an SFBC press release noted. "More than one-third of San Franciscans say they would ride if streets had more bike lanes and were more inviting for bicycling."

Newsom sounded a similar note, calling the Bike Plan "inevitable" and asserting that the debate that "used to be framed in terms of two wheels vs. four … that is behind us." Instead, he added, it’s time for "a new narrative of collaboration and partnership" between people who share the road.

Still, a battle continues to be waged against the implementation of the Bike Plan. Mary Miles, the attorney responsible for securing the three-year Bike Plan injunction (see "Stationary biking," 5/16/07), momentarily ruined the party at the SFMTA hearing by showing up, casting an icy glare, and warning the SFMTA board to "just stop now. We are appealing these actions." In the overflow room on City Hall’s first floor, Miles’ comments elicited hoots of laughter from a crowd of cyclists.

Miles’ client, Rob Anderson, is known for his cynical view that most people will never be encouraged to ride a bike, and that the Bike Plan unfairly rewards cyclists, a "special interest" group, at the expense of the majority of people, who drive.

Anderson and Miles are expected to appeal the SFMTA’s decision, possibly throwing one last monkey wrench into the process of moving the Bike Plan forward. Construction of new bike lanes can’t begin until the legal issues are resolved and the injunction is lifted.

PARK(ING) IT


A frantic driver who has just found a parking space might be thrilled to seize it, but Matthew Passmore has sparked a different sort of appreciation for parking spaces. One of the founders of Park(ing) Day, Passmore helped draw international interest in 2005 by temporarily transforming a parking space in the Mission District into a public park.

Since then the trend has caught on all over the world: all it takes is some Astroturf, a couch, and a few coins to pay the meter fare — and suddenly the public space usually reserved for cars is transformed into an attractive mini-park for pedestrians and passers-by.

The Park(ing) Day exercise, an event that takes place in September, has since prompted the creation of some 600 parks, free clinics, and other temporary "spaces" as part of the wider commentary about the allocation of public space. In Passmore’s view, "far too much of our city is dedicated to the automobile," and Park(ing) Day is just one way of illustrating this point.

For the soon-to-be 79 miles of bike lanes in the city, after all, there are still 880 lane miles built for cars, and San Francisco streets still accommodate a whopping 320,000 parking spaces. For his part, Passmore characterizes the removal of a few parking spaces as mere "growing pains," but emphasizes that in the long run, the Bike Plan will benefit everyone — not just cyclists.

Turning point

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MORE ON SFBG.COM

>>Deconstructing the politics of parking in San Francisco

>>Safer streets for cyclists cause growing pains for motorists

news@sfbg.com

San Francisco has been a "transit-first" city since 1973, when the Board of Supervisors first adopted the policy of officially promoting public transit, pedestrians, and bicycles over the automobile. But the label has really been in name only — until this year.

Through an unusual confluence of policy initiatives that have been moving forward for several years, San Francisco is finally about to have a serious discussion about the automobile and its impacts. And parking policies are being used as the main tool to reduce traffic congestion, better set development impact fees, increase city revenue, and promote alternatives to the automobile.

"Our parking requirements need to be revised to support this [transit-first] policy by limiting parking supply — the single greatest incentive to drive — where transit and other modes are viable alternatives," reads the city’s Better Neighborhoods Plan.

While the very notion of deliberately limiting parking will likely be met with howls of protest by many drivers — indeed, urban planners already acknowledge that it’s probably not politically feasible to make drivers pay for their full impacts — they also say it’s the only way to decrease the over-dependence on the automobile.

"Without limiting parking, people will choose an auto-oriented lifestyle and continue to drive. Traffic will continue to worsen, and we will never shift the balance in favor of ways of getting around that are more effective in moving people," the plan continues.

Yet the push isn’t as dire for drivers as its stark language suggests, thanks to some innovative initiatives that could ironically make it even easier to park in some areas than it is now, in the process easing traffic congestion by eliminating the number of cars circling the block looking for parking spaces, which studies show can often account for up to one-third of the cars on the road.

DEMAND-BASED PARKING PRICES


The SF Park program is scheduled to begin later this summer in eight pilot areas, providing real-time parking data to give drivers better information on where to find spots and controlling demand with a market-based pricing system that raises rates when spots are scarce, encouraging turnover and freeing up spaces.

It is just one of many current initiatives. The city is looking at extending meter hours to nights and Sundays and adding parking meters in Golden Gate Park (those are simply revenue measures aimed at city budget deficits). Another study is examining the nexus between parking and developer impacts that could be used to charge new fees for construction. There’s also a comprehensive study of on-street parking policies that will be going before the Board of Supervisors (sitting as the San Francisco County Transportation Authority) next month after nearly five years in the works.

Yet creating more progressive parking policies requires political will, which will surely be tested in the coming months. Indeed, this year’s battle over the Municipal Transportation Authority budget — whose $128 million deficit was closed by Muni fare increases and services cuts rather than parking increases by a ratio of about 4-1, thanks to pressure from drivers and Mayor Gavin Newsom — was an early indicator of the pitfalls that exist within the politics of parking.

Using a $20 million federal traffic congestion management grant, SFMTA has spent years developing the SF Park program, approving most of the details last fall and planning to roll it out by summer’s end.

"Under-regulated on-street parking results in limited parking availability, inefficient utilization of spaces, and excess vehicular circulation," begins the San Francisco On-Street Parking Management and Pricing Study Final Report, which is headed to the Board of Supervisors next month. "This program will assess the effectiveness of using pricing and complementary strategies as a way to manage demand for parking."

The program will be rolled out in eight areas, coordinating parking information in more than 6,000 street spaces and 20 city-owned parking garages, and using that information to adjust parking rates — charging more when spots are scarce and for additional hours — to try to achieve a parking occupancy rate of about 85 percent.

"An on-street parking occupancy of 85 percent has been demonstrated by parking experts … as the benchmark for the practical capacity of on-street parking. At 85 percent occupancy, approximately one available space is expected per block, thus limiting the cruising phenomenon and generally assuring the availability of a space," the study reads.

SFMTA spokesperson Judson True called SF Park "the future of parking management, adding that "we are taking a big bite of the parking management pie with SF Park, which is the most advanced parking management system of any U.S. city."

THE TRUE COST OF CARS


It’s just the latest work product from transportation planners that have spent years behind-the-scenes developing programs to deal with the city’s over-reliance on the automobiles. "It’s all part of a strategy of using parking as a demand management strategy," said Zabe Bent, a planner with the San Francisco County Transportation Authority.

She is working on the parking policies, as well as a proposal to charge motorists a congestion fee for driving into the downtown, which comes before the Board of Supervisors this fall (although implementation is probably at least three years away).

Bent said city officials are working on a number of fronts to shore up San Francisco’s "transit-first" status and prepare for growth in what is already one of the country’s most congested cities. So some of the decisions coming up are bound to be tough.

"It’s a tradeoff we need to make to achieve our goals," she said, noting that the central question transportation planners are wrestling with is, "How do we achieve a more sustainable growth pattern?"

Such noble intentions can always get hung up on politics, and the ever-present question of how to pay for it during an era of fiscal crisis. So it appears the city may have to get creative with funding its new approach to parking.

Alica John-Baptiste, the assistant planning director overseeing the parking impact fee study, said that while it does appear to be a big year for new parking policies, "this conversation has been underway for a number of years. A lot of the discussions we’ve had are now being studied."

Most recently it was the citizens committee that developed the Market-Octavia Plan — one of the first to cap how much parking developers may build along with the projects — that sought guidance about what the city could legally do to recover the full costs associated with automobiles.

"There were a bunch of questions that came up about parking as an issue," she said of the Market-Octavia process. So the Planning Department and other city agencies began to explore the cost of parking as part of the city’s update of the Transit Impact Fee that is charged to new development, with the idea of expanding that to include impacts to all modes of transportation.

"We are looking at parking as a land use and its impact to the [transportation] system," she continued. "This is a city that really wants to support other modes than just transit."

The contract for that parking nexus study was awarded to Cambridge Systematics earlier this month with initial recommendations expected by the end of the year. That study is expected to show that developers and drivers don’t come anywhere near paying for the full cost of the automobile to San Francisco. "These nexus studies usually suggest a much higher fee rate than is feasible to provide," she said.

In other words, drivers and developers would freak out if asked to pay for their full impacts, arguing that that doing so would stifle development, hurt the economy, punish those who need cars, etc. So the fees will likely be set lower than needed to cover the city’s costs.

Even in the short-term, simply extending meter hours into the evenings — as SFMTA is now studying to help the city deal with its budget deficit — is likely to trigger a pitched battle between progressive supervisors and politicians who side with some merchant groups that consider parking sacrosanct.
David Heller, president of the Greater Geary Merchants Association, will be one of those leading the charge. By way of argument, he criticized San Francisco as "a very business-unfriendly city" compared to competitors like Colma and Burlingame and laid out this scenario: "After 6 p.m., there are no power lunches going on. People want to relax. Imagine you sit down to a nice dinner. You’ve got your wine and are enjoying your appetizer and in the middle of your meal, you have to get up and feed the meter. When you return, the ambiance has been lost. What are the chances you’ll return to that restaurant?"
And so it goes with the politics of parking, where pressing realities clash with visceral reactions, driver prerogatives (such as the "right" to feed the meter, which actually isn’t legal), and other distracting entitlement issues.
Gabriella Poccia and Rachel Buhner contributed to this report.

———–

PARKING BY NUMBERS


Number of on-street parking spaces in SF: 320,000

Number these spaces that have meters: 24,000

Total parking spaces in San Francisco: 603,000

Number of cars and trucks registered in SF: 441,653

Annual revenue from meters and city-owned garages: $64.5 million

Annual revenue from parking citations: $90 million

Number of street spaces in 8 SF Park pilot zones: 6,000

Hourly meter rates in the zones, depending on demand: 25 cents to $6

Hourly garage rates in the zones, depending on demand: $1 to $10

Number of residential parking permits issued: 89,271

Cost of purchasing an on-street residential parking permit: $74 per year

Number of temporary permits: 2,867

Annual revenue from residential parking permits: $5.7 million
Cost of purchasing SF parking on Craiglist: $100 to $500 per month
Annual city revenue if residential permits were market-based: $320 million

The mobility of space

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sarah@sfbg.com

Jason Henderson is standing on Patricia’s Green in Hayes Valley, shielding his eyes from the midsummer sun, as he explains how this area, which once lay in the shadowy underbelly of the Central Freeway, was reclaimed as a pedestrian-friendly park.

"In 1989 the freeway went all the way to Turk Street," said Henderson, an assistant professor of geography at San Francisco State University, describing how the raised concrete roadbed, built in the 1950s, cut across this neighborhood and blocked the sky — until the Loma Prieta earthquake hit and damaged the final section so badly it had to be torn down.

That natural disaster triggered a public discussion about the use of the surrounding space, and a 15-year fight that culminated in 2005 in the dedication of the Green, which is part of the Octavia Boulevard Project. Neighbors and business owners pushed the city to convert a damaged freeway into a landscaped park.

That sort of change fascinates Henderson. "I am interested in how people move around cities, and how urban space is configured for movement," he said.

The young professor was raised in New Orleans and wrote his dissertation on transportation and land use debates in Atlanta — which, as Henderson notes, is "the poster child for sprawl but became a hotbed in the ’90s of a national discourse about how we should grow, which became this very interesting debate about reurbanizing."

Henderson’s research focuses on the politics of mobility. He decided to move to San Francisco in 2003 because he saw it as an opportunity to live in a city where a car is not necessary and to study the history of the city’s freeway revolt, which began in the 1960s.

And while he is proud of this park, which was dedicated as Hayes Green then renamed for the late Patricia Walkup, a Hayes Valley resident who tirelessly advocated for the park until her death in 2006, Henderson thinks the local politics of parking have reached "a spatial stalemate."

"During the freeway revolt of the 1960s, San Francisco rejected the freeway but not the automobile," Henderson explained. "But even as San Francisco residents decided that they did not want big gashes of freeway through their waterfront, the Marina, and Golden Gate Park, the city continued to have laws that said every housing unit was to have one parking space.

"So the city adopted a transit-first policy on paper, but didn’t take space away from cars. And if you don’t do anything, you’re not solving the problem."

The problem in San Francisco is what he called the "essentializing of cars."

"A core idea within the parking debate is that there is a universal love affair with the automobile," Henderson explained. "But Obama is downsizing GM and Chrysler, and for the first time since 1960, vehicle miles traveled have started to go down. Until last year, the mantra was that Americans are going to drive. But then we found out that at $4 a gallon, this country freaks out and changes."

Earlier this year, Henderson published a paper that analyzes the city’s politics of parking through the lens of two ballot initiatives from the November 2007 San Francisco election.

"San Francisco’s parking debate is not just about parking. It is a contest over how the city should be configured and organized, and for whom," Henderson wrote in his paper, titled "The Spaces of Parking: Mapping the Politics of Mobility in San Francisco."

His research led him to conclude that progressives, who want to make the city more bike- and public-transportion friendly, are pitted against the more conservative elements (he calls them neoconservatives), who want to increase space for parking and cars at all costs, with the moderate (or in his words, "neoliberal") factions tangled in between.

Part of Henderson’s critique involves estimating the hidden costs of parking — and as it turns out, that can be done using Google and Craiglist. According to a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency 2008 fact sheet, there are an estimated 320,000 on-street parking spaces in San Francisco, including metered spaces, each consuming, on average, about 160 square feet.

According to a 2002 presentation by Jeffery Tumlin, a national transportation consultant, if the city rented these spaces for the lowball rate of $1,000 a year, San Francisco would rake in $320 million annually.

There would be no shortage of demand — market prices are way higher. Henderson’s review of Craiglist unearthed folks who looking to rent parking spaces in San Francisco and willing to pay from $100 to $500 a month.

But SFMTA — which issues more than 89,000 residential parking permits annually and recently opted to cut Muni service and routes and increase fares on public transit rather than extend parking meter hours to balance its budget shortfall — decided to increase the cost of these parking permits, starting July 1, by only $2, from $72 to $74 — per year. That’s less than 10 percent of market value.

The resulting revenue will be dedicated to the cost of administrating the program — not to offset the hidden costs of parking, which include carbon dioxide emissions, air pollution, congestion, and occupying valuable space.

Henderson is intrigued by the relationship between parking policy and a complex set of factors that include public health, obesity, and the cost of affordable housing. He notes that if a city’s housing policy requires developers to provide a parking space for each housing unit, too often developers don’t build that housing, or build it smaller, or build it as part of a luxury complex.

"The progressive response to this dilemma is to try to get government to eliminate the one parking-space-per-unit goal and cap the total amount of parking built. Meanwhile, the neocons, who believe government should be active in creating more parking, rail against more bus lanes," Henderson said.

As he notes, common to both groups is the desire for government to help them achieve their vision.

"Much as we see San Francisco as a progressive place, it’s also peopled by neoliberals and very conservative folks — and progressive and neoliberals coalesce on the issue of ‘smart growth.’ And there are lot of progressives who have a car and say, ‘I don’t want to be car dependent; I’d like to do city share, but I’d feel stranded.’ And those who say ‘I always want to have my own car, but I only drive it once a month.’"

Conceding that "tweaking the system" will cost money, Henderson cites congestion pricing as an area where the various factions can find agreement.

"The important question is, what will the revenue be used for?" Henderson said, noting that some will argue that if you charge motorists to use roads, then the money should be used to improve the roads, which is what has happened with toll roads in Texas.

But in San Francisco, activist are pushing the opposite approach. "Whereas the sustainable transportation movement in San Francisco wants to use the revenue from congestion pricing to fix Muni and discourage driving," he continued.

In his paper on parking policy, Henderson details exactly how parking allocations push up the price of housing — and change the face of ongoing developments.

A typical off-road parking space takes up 350 square feet when room to move in and out is factored in — and that’s comparable to many offices and living spaces in San Francisco. The parking alone costs $50,000 to $100,000 to develop — a cost that’s passed on to the homebuyer.

But in most neighborhoods, developers can’t avoid parking, because of planning laws. "This means that neighborhoods like the iconic North Beach simply could not be built today," Henderson wrote, noting how mandatory parking provisions mean that the lower floors of new buildings are likely to contain parking garages, not storefronts and cafes, and garage entrances take away street parking and limit where street trees can be planted.

"But at least contesting car space is on the table in San Francisco" Henderson said. "That makes it an intriguing bellwether for other places."

Life by the numbers: More bikes = fewer bike collisions

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By Rebecca Bowe

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Things were finally beginning to fall into place for Jon Aguon. The 24-year-old college student and avid surfer and skater had completed his summer courses the day before, he’d just signed a lease on a place in the city, and he planned to spend the afternoon at a skate park on Potrero Avenue. He loaded up his skateboard, hopped on his bike, and started making his way there.

The trouble started when a bus stopped ahead of him, blocking the bike lane. In a matter of seconds, Aguon looked over his shoulder, checked for oncoming traffic, and began maneuvering around it. That’s when the Ford Expedition entered the picture.

“I remember the split second before I got hit, the roar of the Expedition motor. I knew exactly what this car was doing: accelerating to pass me,” he says. “Well, it didn’t pass me.”

Aguon says he bounced off the SUV, spun a 540, and then wound up landing on his knee. The shock set in, and he immediately curled into a fetal position. Moments later, he stood shakily. There was a sharp pain in his back, and a large blood spot was forming on his jeans at the kneecap. As he stood there dazed, the driver left his name and number with a nearby cyclist and drove off.

The bike accident occurred almost a year ago, and now Aguon — who suffered a broken rib, a badly sprained ACL and a bruised and swollen Tibia from the ordeal — says he’s still at just a fraction of his strength. Since the collision, “I haven’t even tried surfing,” he says.

Getting hit hasn’t kept Aguon from using a bike as his exclusive mode of transportation. But it did inspire him to speak out in favor of the Bike Plan, a comprehensive citywide network of new bike paths and amenities with improved cyclist safety as its centerpiece. “I’m not one of those cyclists who hates cars,” Aguon told us, adding that in fact, he loves to drive. But he believes that with improved bicycle infrastructure, accidents like his could be fewer and farther between.

Cyclists cheer as SFMTA Board approves Bike Plan projects

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By Rebecca Bowe

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San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Leah Shahum (right) and cyclist Lynn Howe moments after the SFMTA Board declared its unanimous support for 45 new Bike Plan projects.

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency Board approved 45 San Francisco Bike Plan projects earlier this afternoon, a move that will nearly double the number of bike lanes in the city.

The unanimous decision prompted cheers and applause from cyclists who turned out at the MTA hearing en masse to voice support for the citywide Bike Plan. Some 200 people signed up to comment at the hearing, and the overwhelming majority were supporters donning hot-pink stickers distributed by the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition that screamed, “Double the number of bike lanes.”

For more than three hours, the board heard personal stories from people who get around by bike: parents, seniors, students, health-care workers, teachers, lawyers, landlords, scientists, and even a 14-year-old boy named Cameron who told the MTA Board that he gets nervous about getting “doored” while riding his bike. (“Sharrows,” the San Francisco-grown road markings that depict arrows in the bike lanes, are designed to keep cyclists out of the car-door zone to reduce the danger of being doored, or slammed by an unexpected door. The bike plan calls for marking 75 miles of on-street bike routes with sharrows.)

Fewer than 20 speakers voiced opposition to the plan, and most took issue with a proposal for Second Street that would reduce parking to accommodate new bike lanes and restrict left turns at various intersections. Several representatives from the South Beach Mission Bay Business Association and the South Beach/Rincon/Mission Bay Neighborhood Association said there hadn’t been enough community outreach conducted in their neighborhood, and called the plan for Second Street “flawed” — but most voiced their general support for enhancing bike lanes in the city. The MTA Board ultimately voted to remove the Second Street project from the package of projects up for approval, setting it aside for further discussion.

BART strikes looms

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By Wendi Jonassen
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BART riders may need to come up with other modes of transportation next week.

A strike by BART employees threatens to shut the system down on Tuesday after weeks of heated labor contract negotiations have gotten nowhere.

At midnight on June 30, BART’s four-year labor contract with five different unions will expire. Workers threaten to strike, effectively shutting down BART and disrupting commutes for thousands as they fight to negotiate a 3 percent increase in pay to accommodate cost of living and better benefits.

But BART management isn’t budging. It wants to balance the $250 million budget deficit by reducing payroll, which its says accounts for 75 percent of the budget, and increasing fares in July and December. BART also wants to work out some outdated work procedures that they say cost time and money.

Bike projects approved in SF

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By Steven T. Jones

After almost three years of no bicycle improvements in San Francisco — the result of a court injunction imposed because the city’s Bike Plan wasn’t submitted to proper environmental review — city officials have taken a pair of actions that will likely result in the biggest bicycling boom in the city’s history.

Last night, the Bike Plan’s new Environmental Impact Report was approved by the Planning Commission, and this afternoon, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission board unanimously approved the plan and 45 new bicycle projects around the city (delaying only the 2nd Street bike lanes for further study and discussion). Now, once any appeals play out, city officials will be able to return to court later this summer to get the injunction removed and construction on new lanes, racks, and other improvements should begin this fall.

Mayor Gavin Newsom, other officials, and bike advocates are right now holding a press conference on the steps of City Hall. Guardian reporter Rebecca Bowe, who has been covering the hearings, is there and will offer a full report later on this blog and in Wednesday’s Guardian.

Busting bars

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news@sfbg.com

San Francisco’s legendary nightlife venues are being threatened by a state agency that over the last two years has adopted a more aggressive policy of enforcing its arcane rules, in the process jeopardizing both needed tax revenue and a vibrant, tolerant culture that these bureaucrats don’t seem to understand.

At issue is an arbitrary policy of the California Department of Alcohol Beverage Control. For the past two years, ABC has been on a campaign against a growing list of well-established clubs, bars, and entertainment venues in the city, an effort driven by vague rules and stretched authority. The community has rallied behind the bars and local politicians have spoken against ABC’s crusade, but the agency isn’t showing any signs of stopping.

Most recently, Revolution Café in the Mission District had to stop selling beer and wine for 20 days after ABC cited them for patrons drinking on the sidewalk adjacent to its front patio. Inner Richmond’s Buckshot’s liquor license was pulled because of technical violations of alcohol and food regulations, forcing owners to close their doors for a few weeks. Both bars stand to lose a substantial portion of their profits before returning to normal business operation.

DNA Lounge’s license is currently being held over its head because ABC saw operators as "running a disorderly house injurious to the public welfare and morals" after sending undercover agents in during queer events. State Sen. Mark Leno responded by telling the Guardian, "The ABC should enforce the law, not make statements relative to morals."

Café du Nord, Slim’s, Swedish Music Hall, Great American Music Hall, Rickshaw Stop, Bottom of the Hill, and a list of more than 10 others are also fighting long, expensive battles to stay open — but not because of underage drinking or drinking-related violence. In fact, most of these venues never had a run-in with ABC until two years ago. These bars’ livelihoods are being threatened because of an arbitrary technicality on their alcohol and food license.

ABC was established in 1957 with the mission to be "responsible for the licensing and regulation of the manufacture, sale, purchase, possession, and transportation of alcoholic beverages." ABC is funded through alcohol license fees, and has been run by governor-appointed director Steve Hardy since 2007, about the same time the crackdown started.

According to ABC spokesperson John Carr, the problem is that these clubs are deviating from their original business plans. The venues are "operating more like clubs, with only incidental food service." ABC didn’t notice any changes in these businesses until two years ago. In some cases, it took ABC 20 years to notice a change.

For example, when Café du Nord owners filled out the forms to get their business license, they were asked to predict the percentage of alcohol sales to food sales. Predictions didn’t pan out exactly, and ABC started an audit two years ago. The only recourse to an audit is to adhere to a random rule that requires these all-ages venues to serve 50 percent food and 50 percent alcohol. This rule is not a law, and ABC isn’t required to enforce it.

Slim’s has been cited on the same food/alcohol grounds. Its sister club, the Great American Music Hall, as well as Bottom of the Hill and most recently Buckshot all have similar 50/50 stories. All are fighting financially drowning battles with ABC. At some point in the court process, these bars must appear in ABC courts with judges hired by Steve Hardy.

Carr claims that only one venue, which he declined to identify, is being cited with the arbitrary 50/50 rule. All the other venues must adhere to their own specific ratio of food to alcohol, written in their original business plans. Regardless of the specific numbers, all are being threatened on the grounds that "they altered the character of their businesses […] which is different from the business plan they submitted to ABC when they were originally pursuing their ABC license."

Many of the bars in question have been around and thriving for decades with the same focus on business, music, and culture. Slim’s, for example, has been in San Francisco for 22 years, going the first 20 without a citation. But in the past two years, it has had four citations between it and the Great American Music Hall.

There is much speculation from all sides of this war about its causes, but no one seems to know why ABC, seemingly out of nowhere, started its crusade against music venues and clubs in San Francisco. Even the ABC is vague and unresponsive about this, broadly claiming it is acting on complaints and just doing its job.

Since the inception of the crackdown is a mystery, it seems fitting to focus on finding a resolution. The last thing anyone in this city wants is to see the clubs and venues shut down, something club operators say hurts the city’s culture. "Kids growing up with live music can only be good," said Dawn Holiday of Slim’s.

Beyond the culture and rich nightlife in question, bars and clubs bring in a significant amount of money to the state. Some of the bars alone can bring the state more than $5,000 each month in sales tax. In the current economic crunch, shutting down reliable sources of revenue doesn’t seem wise.

After two years of battles, ABC has taken some of the bigger hearings off the calendar in an attempt to come to a peaceful resolution. After talks with Hardy, Leno is hopeful for a positive end to the battles. Leno does not want to see any business closed and believes the best way to ensure a thriving nightlife is to establish a special license for the venues. If the only problem with our beloved venues is technicalities with the license, let’s change the license, not the venues.

In the meantime, the community is rallying around the bars and entertainment venues, showing its support. DNA Lounge started asking for donations for its legal proceedings. Visit its Web site for the full story and ways to contribute. When Buckshot reopens July 4, show up and support them. Maybe the best way to fight back is to go out and have a drink, listen to music, dance with queers, and over-indulge in unadulterated San Francisco culture.

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