Transportation

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)

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I was dreading the drive home from Lake Shasta. Sunday afternoon. The end of a major holiday weekend. Every car in Northern California would be converging on the Bay Bridge right around the same time I got there. Figure two hours from the Carquinez Bridge to the toll plaza. Hot weather. Tired, hungry kids who have to pee. Nowhere to go, no way to move. An impatient driver (me), who can’t stand waiting five minutes in a grocery store line, stuck in an endless, hellish queue with no outlet for the anger except to crab at my long-suffering partner. It wasn’t going to be pretty.

We did what we could. We got up early Sunday morning, de-fusted the boat, pulled into the dock by 11 a.m., and got on the road by noon. But still: 210 miles to San Francisco. We’d hit the Bay Area right about 3 p.m., along with every other auto-mad idiot who drove somewhere for the Fourth of July.

But a funny thing happened: we cleared Vacaville, and Crockett, and Vallejo, and I kept waiting for the traffic to hit. And then Albany and Berkeley and … whoa: we were on the bridge approach at 3:15, not one single stop-and-go spot, and the bridge was no worse than a typical pre-rush-hour weekday afternoon. It seemed as if nobody was driving.

Nobody is a bit too strong of a term — there were still plenty of people on the road. But for the first time in a decade, the California State Automobile Association reported a decline in car use over the holiday. "Less disposable cash and an overall increase in travel expenses have caused Californians to postpone or downsize their holiday getaways," CSAA spokesperson Cynthia Harris announced.

You could see that up at the lake, where rows of empty houseboats sat at the dock. Part of it was the incessant media coverage of the fires (in fact, Shasta was fine). But the biggest factor was the price of gas. At $4.50 a gallon, people don’t drive as much.

This is good.

For the first time in many, many years, people are talking about fuel efficiency again. I’m obsessed with it: change the oil, keep the car tuned and the tires inflated, and our utterly uncool Saturn wagon, with two-wheel drive and a small, weak four-cylinder engine, gets almost 40 mpg on the highway. We burned maybe 12 gallons round trip, which cost a little more than $50. Twice what it cost a few years ago, but not a deal-breaker. All of a sudden, the SUVs are grounded, and we’ve got the trick ride.

And I started to think: imagine what would have happened if courageous politicians in California had put a $2-a-gallon tax on gas five years ago. The SUVs and Hummers would be long gone. Public transit would be booming. And with 1.5 billion gallons of gas sold per year in the state, there would be $3 billion more each year in new revenue. Enough to fund huge improvements in urban transportation systems. The high-speed rail line to Los Angeles would be well underway. Traffic (and pollution, and global warming) would have dropped dramatically.

Yeah, the price of gas hits hard on working-class people who have to drive. I get that. It’s not the world’s most progressive tax. But the price has gone up anyway (as we all knew it would eventually) — and now all of that money is going into private oil company profits instead of going into public benefits. Something to think about.

Fighting for the right to party

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› steve@sfbg.com

It’s become increasingly difficult and expensive to stage street fairs, concerts, or other parties in San Francisco, a trend chronicled by the Guardian over the past two years (see "Death of fun," 05/23/06 and "Death of fun, the sequel," 04/25/07). But event and nightlife promoters have responded with a proposed ballot measure that would write the right to party into the city’s charter.

The "Promoting and Sustaining Music and Culture in San Francisco" charter amendment would acknowledge the importance of special events to the city’s character, streamline the process for obtaining city permits, and require the nine-plus city departments that promoters must deal with to submit reports outlining how their policies and fee structures will need to be altered to comply with the new mandate for fun.

The measure was developed by the Save SF Culture Coalition, whose members include the Entertainment Commission, Black Rock City LLC (which stages Burning Man as well as events here in town), the Late Night Coalition, and the Outdoor Events Coalition (a group formed last year to counter city policies and neighbor complaints that threatened to scuttle the North Beach Jazz Festival, How Weird Street Faire, concerts in Golden Gate Park, and other events). The measure is sponsored by Sup. Ross Mirkarimi and has picked up four other supervisors as cosponsors, so it needs just one more vote for the Board of Supervisors to place it on the November ballot.

"It was long overdue that the city produce a master plan and vision that promotes a sustainable environment for music, culture, and entertainment throughout the city," Mirkarimi said.

In fact, event promoters say they’ve been hit by a quadruple whammy that threatens their livelihoods and the vibrant nature of the city: rising fees charged by city departments looking to close budget gaps, increased concern over alcohol consumption and other liability issues, more conflicts over noise in increasingly dense neighborhoods such as SoMa, and the ability of a handful of complaining neighbors to create event-killing permit conditions. And those last two problems are only likely to get worse as the city grows.

"We want the city to create a sustainability policy that will save our outdoor events in the face of all the development that is going on," said John Wood, a member of the Late Night Coalition and a promoter who also serves on the San Francisco Love Fest board of directors. "We need to be able to say, ‘This is city policy and you’re not following it.’"

Promoter and club owner Terrance Alan was an original member of the Entertainment Commission, which was formed in 2003 in part to resolve complaints over noise and manage relations between nightclubs and their neighbors. But he said the agency has little staff and no leverage over other city departments involved in permitting, which includes the Planning, Building, Port, Police, Fire, Health, and Recreation and Park commissions and departments, as well as the Municipal Transportation Authority and Interdepartmental Staff Committee on Traffic and Transportation (ISCOTT), the body that approves street-closure permits.

"We have been completely unsuccessful at getting their attention," Alan said. But this new measure, he said, would "set the stage for ongoing discussions that need to be happening."

Or as Wood put it, "It would give us ammunition in the future battles we’re going to have. It’s not going to make those battles go away."

Recreation and Park Department spokesperson Rose Dennis said her agency must deal with many competing concerns, ranging from budgetary issues to being responsive to complaints raised by citizens. "We understand that it might feel heavy-handed, but we have a duty to do so because we have to balance a number of concerns," Dennis said. "[Event promoters] have a bottom line, and we have a bottom line. We have a lot of people to serve."

Yet she said the department will comply with the measure and adjust its policies, fees, and procedures as needed if the measure is approved by voters.

At a June 27 Board of Supervisors Rules Committee hearing, there was lots of support for the measure and no real opposition. "We’re concerned about the future of arts and culture in San Francisco," Steven Raspa, who does special events for Black Rock City, said at the hearing.

All three committee members voiced support for the measure, but because it needed some minor changes, a final vote was pushed back to July 9. Proponents characterize the measure as trying to bring some balance to a situation in which the loudest wheels — those of NIMBYs complaining about noise or party detritus — keep getting greased.

"The bureaucracy is hearing from these neighborhood groups all the time," Wood said. "We feel that we are the majority and we need to demonstrate that politically."

Amanda Witherell contributed to this report.

To read the measure or learn more, visit www.savesfculture.com

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."

Seven Hells of SF: The road to hell is paved with potholes

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By Kat Renz

sevenhellstwina.jpg
Rounding the peaks. All photos by Frank Chan. View more here.

“When gas is five bucks a gallon, I’m joining you!” An excellent sentiment shouted by a supportive driver on the afternoon of Saturday, June 21, from her idling car. And it was something I’d been thinking all day, that the three dozen other velophiles with whom I was riding the city’s most vertical inclines, officially dubbed “The Seven Hells of SF Bike Tour” were the badasses who’d easily contend with the realities – at least the personal transportation ones — of the fast approaching shitstorm called peak oil. Yet would the driver have expressed the same enthusiasm had she witnessed our collective past five hours – including the four blocks of Divisadero we had triumphantly climbed to the finish line at Sacramento five minutes before?

You’ll recall from high school lit class that Dante’s version of hell had nine circles, and they were cold. This unique tour’s organizers’, Dan Reider and Frank Chan, rendition had seven hills, all scorchers, exacerbated by the fact we rode midday on the tail end of the very un-San Francisco summer heat wave.

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“Maybe I’m the only idiot who’s done this three times.” Chan remarked once we were relaxing back at our starting point, the daisy-dotted grass at the east end of the Panhandle (Chan was also the only one with a gigantic camera dangling from his neck, and he still roasted most of us on the hills in order to document our agonizing glory). There’s a reason why the tour’s only offered about once every two years, as that seems to be the average recovery time. Regardless of our recently burning lungs and wobbly legs, at least three-fourths of our group of 42 finished, and all were stoked. One rider said it was the most fun (Fun?! Yep, fun.) he’d had in a long time, and another dared to suggest the tour should be offered more regularly.

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The torturous route

In case you can’t wait another couple years and want to try the hell ride yourself, here’s a lowdown of the route’s most prominent peaks.

Newsom’s manager to worker hiring ratio? 10:1.

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Does Newsom show more love to managers than workers?
photos and text by Sarah Phelan

SEIU Local 1021’s Robert Haaland says the City has a pattern of hiring way more managers than front line workers over the last decade.

“Over the last ten years, the City has hired managers to front line workers at a rate of ten to one, “says Robert Haaland, SEIU Local 1021’s political coordinator. “That means 1,000 managers to 100 front line workers. And fifty percent of these new management hires have occurred within the Newsom administration.

Haaland makes his argument using an analysis of full-time equivalent positions that the City has budgeted and funded over the last ten years, broken down. by union.

SEIU requested this analysis through the office of Board President Sup. Aaron Peskin.

These figures, Haaland observes, show that SEIU gained 113 new positions over the last decade, the Municipal Executives Association gained 334 positions, and Local 21, which represents professional and technical engineers, gained 781 positions.

“We’re not going after Local 21, or any union,” Haaland says. “We’re going after the City’s hiring practices, in which their priority is to hire executives and managers.”

Haaland’s explosive claims come as the City is going through one of the most painful budget hearings in memory, in an effort to reconcile a $338 million projected deficit–a deficit that Newsom’s critics claim has been predominantly balanced on the backs of the poor.

Monique Zmuda, Deputy City Controller, confirmed that there are 53.95 FTE MEA positions budgeted for 2008-09, with many occurring in the Municipal Transportation Agency and at the airport.

“The Muncipal Executives Assocation is sort of the top management level of the City,” Zmuda told the Guardian.

She noted that when the Mayor recently talked about deleting management positions, “He was not talking about the unions, he was talking about managers generically.”

“We also have managers who are attorneys, police, firefighters and physicians, and of we are looking at hiring increases over time, most are in police, nurses and sheriffs,” she said.

Says Haaland, “We’re not haggling over positions, we’re haggling over an institutional priority in every City department of hiring managers over workers.”
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And people wonder why the real Newsom looked stressed at his June 2 budget announcement at the Shipyard.

Towards Carfree: From geeks to freaks, a look at Portland bicycle culture

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Steven T. Jones reports from the Towards Carfree Cities conference
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Pedaling past a reclaimed intersection.

Culture creates the conditions to develop carfree spaces, and the bicyclist culture in Portland is rich and varied, running from the grungy Zoobombers to bike geeks like Mia Birk, all of whom were on vivid display Friday for a scorching Summer Solstice.

The Towards Carfree Cities conference wrapped up with a choice of mobile workshops around town, including the Transportation Geeks Bike Ride put on by Birk’s company, Alta Planning & Design. We pedaled down special bicycle boulevards, past bike traffic signals, colored lanes, bike boxes (which Clarence Eckerson with Streetfilms was very excited about), contra-flow lanes, and other traffic engineering feats before ending where all journeys here seem to, at a brewpub.

But for all the traffic improvements, we were still faced with many car-clogged roadways and dangerous intersections, although made a bit less so by the tendency of most Portland motorists to yield to bicyclists with a friendly wave and smile.

As the shortest night of the year began, colorful cyclists seemed to take over the streets, pedaling in small groups and huge, slow-moving packs. Four different Pedalpalooza rides all started around 9 o’clock in the hip southeast section of the city: Sexy Cyclist Karaoke 2 Karaoke, Dropout Bike Club’s monthly ride, Bowie vs. Prince Mobile Dance Party, and Solstice Ride.

The rides converged into one as they ascended volcanic Mt. Tabor just after midnight, still several hundred strong and acting as if they owned the night, which they really seemed to. But not everyone agrees with that pecking order, as we learned when a motorist threw a box of tacks into the street, flattening several bike tires.

Towards Carfree Cities: San Franciscans in the house

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Steven T. Jones reports from the Towards Carfree Cities conference in Portland.
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A Portland street corner.

San Francisco has a large contingent here at the Towards Carfree Cities conference. And judging from the size and engagement of the crowd at the “Battle for San Francisco (1992-2008): From Critical Mass to Congestion Pricing” workshop that some of us just presented, people around the world are carefully watching what we’re doing.

I moderated a panel made up of author and activist Chris Carlsson, geography professor Jason Henderson, San Francisco Bicycle Coalition executive director Leah Shahum, and Dave Snyder, the transportation policy director for the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association.

Other San Francisco area presenters have included architect David Baker talking about “Better Living through Density,” Mike Smith with NextBus, activist Jason Meggs on trolleys, Henderson of freeway revolts, and Gus Yates of Berkeley-based Carfree USA, who gave a fascinating presentation on how Treasure Island could be a carfee project and what he was told by the developers when he presented the idea (I’ll do a post on that later).

In our session, Snyder described how and why the activism of cyclists has driven the larger carfree movement: “The bicycle movement is where it’s at in terms of community organization.” But all agreed that promotion of the bicycle as a viable urban transportation option is a means to larger ends. As Carlsson said, “Bicycling is not the end, but it’s a piece to the larger movement.”

The discussion was really interesting and I hope to include a link to the audio from the session in the next few days. But in the meantime, here’s a report on the conference from Snyder, who has been working within this movement for more than 15 years.

Let’s change the bike laws

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Should bicyclists be allowed to treat stop signs as “yields” and stop lights like stop signs? Tomorrow, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s Bicycle working group will be pondering the question.

Idaho, recognizing the law of momentum is just as important as the vehicle traffic code, already adopted this practice back in 1982. And it’s working out fine, as guest writer Rachel Daigle pointed out in our special bike issue this year.

A piece in today’s Examiner highlighted naysaying from the Police Department about how this could increase accidents.

What if the exact opposite happened? What if changing the law to favor cyclists actually decreased accidents?

We all know most cyclists disregard the letter of the law because it’s really annoying to come to a full, unclipped stop at an empty intersection. Even Capt. Greg Corrales, chief of SFPD’s traffic company, was quoted in the Examiner saying, “There’s a small minority of bicyclists who actually obey the law.”

So let’s look at that. How difficult would it be – in fact, how difficult has it been – to break the will of cyclists? Clearly, ticketing cyclists doesn’t work – it’s a waste of strapped SFPD staff and resources and I’ll be the first to testify that my ticket for blowing through a stop sign only created a lot of resentment.

As it stands now, every intersection where a bike meets a car is a free for all. No driver really knows how a cyclist is going to behave because there is such a range of compliance with the law,

Instead, what if it were understood that at an intersection a cyclist was expected to roll through the sign and stop at the light, then wouldn’t that improve things?

This isn’t a call to toss safety to the wind. I’m a cautious cyclist: I function under the premise that no one can see me and I’m in constant and imminent danger of being creamed by a car. I would argue most smart cyclists also follow that creed and should continue to if California law were changed.

To that end, anyone interested in this issue should attend the meeting tomorrow at 1pm, at the MetroCenter Claremont Conference Room.

This memo [PDF], from Sean Co to the commission, outlines some of the issues really well.

Towards Carfree: Aboard a Portland-bound train

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Steve Jones reports from the Towards Carfree Cities conference.

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Our crew includes (from left) Jon Winston, Nancy Bodkin, Jason Henderson, and Brian Smith.

“We’ve got a runner,” the train conductor said over the PA system as we pulled out of Eugene, Oregon for the final leg of our overnight train from Oakland to Portland. Someone seeking good coffee had missed the train and was fruitlessly trying to catch up to us.

I was with a large contingent of Bay Area transportation policy experts, activists and thinkers – all bound for the Towards Carfree Cities conference — and we laughed. Then we laughed harder once we realized that Jason Henderson, a geography professor at San Francisco State, was no longer with us. Shit, we chortled, Jason didn’t make the train.

Co-conductor Justin Clark, who is just 22 but has been working for Amtrak for two years, walked by the aisle so I asked him what happened. “He decided to go to the coffee stand a block and a half up the street. I saw him running with the coffee in his hand,” Clark told me. He radioed conductor Archie Club, “and he said it was too late.” Clark said he might have stopped the train if it was his call, but it wasn’t.

“We don’t do it for fun,” Clark, whose tongue was pierced, said of leaving passengers behind and watching them run for the train. In fact, Clark felt a little bad as he stood in the doorway, watching the passenger try to stop the train: “I had to look away. I didn’t want him to see that I saw him.”

The trip had been a smooth one so far, leaving the Bay Area only a few minutes late, a sharp contrast to Amtrak’s reputation for long delayed trains, something activist Brian Smith connected to our runner: “That’s Amtrak’s new commitment to on-time efficiency.”

Jason walked up part way through my interview, so our crew was intact after all, soon to arrive for a big week in Portland.

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:
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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.

Wow! Homeless people win for once!

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photo courtesy of Indybay

It looks like the city of Fresno will be writing a big fat check to 225 homeless people who sued when city workers trashed their belongings in a series of raids on encampments in 2006.

Homeless people, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, and the private firm of Heller Ehrman LLP, filed a class action lawsuit against the city of Fresno and the California Department of Transportation, claiming their possessions were seized and destroyed without their notice. Back in 2006, the city was barred from continuing the raids by a preliminary injunction. And today United States District Judge Oliver W. Wanger gave preliminary approval to a $2.35 million dollar settlement for what occurred during those raids.

“It’s completely unprecedented,” LCCR’s, Anayma de Frias, told us, adding that they’d been hoping to get something, but nothing as substantial as this.

The terms are as follows:

Is growth good?

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I heard one of the greatest environmental writers in San Francisco history speak last week, and his message was a bit different from what environmentalists are taught to believe today.

Harold Gilliam was born almost 90 years ago, and was writing influential articles and books about the Bay Area — and the urban environment — long before most of today’s activists were born. He was an opponent of nuclear energy in the 1950s when most of California, including his employer, the San Francisco Chronicle, thought this wonder of postwar technology would provide power that was "dependable, safe, and too cheap to meter." He was against developers filling in the Bay in the early 1960s. He was writing about the problems with freeways when that was heresy. When I first arrived in San Francisco in 1982, I was amazed that the Chronicle would print some of the stuff he was saying. The guy is a genius and a local treasure.

And at the annual San Francisco Tomorrow dinner, where he was honored with the Jack Morrison Career Achievement Award, he had a few things to say.

After a brief talk about his early career (and giving thanks to his editors for allowing him to infuriate Chronicle publishers), he told us he wanted to challenge conventional wisdom for a moment.

He talked a bit about the Transbay Terminal project, which he said would be a wonderful, crucial part of the city, a transportation hub for the future and maybe someday the home of a fast train to Los Angeles. Then he asked if the price was worth it.

Since nobody in California wants to pay taxes, the only way to fund this kind of grand civic project these days is to sell off the skyline, to let developers build giant high-rise towers that make the city more congested, more rich, and less pleasant. A lot of people think tall buildings mean progress; even a lot of environmentalists think building up is good. "And I remember," Gilliam said, "when everyone thought filling in the Bay was the way to grow."

Actually, Gilliam said, we all ought to question for a second whether growth is always good, or if it’s worth the cost.

Something to think about.

Driving to death

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With all the understandable concern about global warming lately, we tend to forget that our over-reliance on automobiles also has a more immediate impact: death, lots and lots of death.
Research from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration already shows that traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for people ages 3-6 and 8-34, and is the third leading cause of death for all Americans after cancer and heart disease, some of which can also be traced back to the automobile.
Today’s Chronicle reports on new research showing that particulate matter, much of it from automobiles, causes far more premature death than previously thought, up to 24,000 annual deaths in California alone. In another piece, the Chron speculates that people might be driving less on Memorial Day weekend, the mother of all road trip holidays, but I still know lots of people who drove down to Lightning in the Bottle and other spots without pausing to consider the externalities.
Yet even after cutting more than $1 billion in transit funding last year, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger turned around and did the same thing this year, cuts that would cost the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency $37 million in the coming fiscal year. This isn’t just stupid and short-sighted: it’s deadly.
But there are countervailing forces fighting back, from a strong local bicycle movement to this fall’s high-speed rail bond measure to the international car-free movement, whose biggest annual event, the International Carfree Conference, will be held in Portland next month, the first time it has been in the U.S. And the Guardian will be there (arriving by train) with live daily coverage and interviews with leading thinkers and activists. Stay tuned.

The Bike Issue: Getting in gear

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1. City Hall has a bike room. For a while I thought only a scant number of city employees rode to work because the racks out front are usually pretty barren. Then I came across a storage room in the basement, near the café, full of bikes. What an encouraging sight. It was opened a few years back by the Department of the Environment, which is tasked with many of the city’s greening chores, and is available for all City Hall employees to park their rides safely inside.

2. More than 50 percent of San Francisco’s greenhouse-gas emissions come from transportation. Despite this, 20 percent of San Francisco residents polled in November 2007 by David Binder Research said riding a bike did nothing to curb global warming. Au contraire. Bicycles emit zero greenhouse gases (although the rider emits some carbon monoxide from huffing and puffing). A car produces roughly 20 pounds of CO2 for every gallon of gas burned. Gas stations in San Francisco sell about 953,000 gallons of fuel a day. At $4 a gallon, it would take about five months’ of fill-ups to buy every San Franciscan a $750 bicycle — and that’s a nice bike.

3. Someday when you’re waiting for a BART train, take a good look at a system map. It has almost every East Bay bike trail detailed, and many of the trails connect BART stations with recreation areas. "There are a lot of great ways to get out to nature from BART," said BART board member Tom Radulovich.

4. BART is getting more bike-friendly. About 15 percent of the 580 trains now have removed seats to create special areas for bikes. (Look for the cars marked "Bicycle Priority Area.") Though some riders would like each train to have an entire car dedicated to bikes (Caltrain’s approach), a BART spokesperson told me that it would be difficult because cars are added and dropped throughout the day to handle fluctuating ridership. Soon more stations will be outfitted with bike lockers, for rent at a couple of pennies an hour with a BikeLink pass (for information, go to www.bikelink.org). Later this year, the Embarcadero Station will be getting an entire storage room (like City Hall’s, and again, partially funded by the Dept. of the Environment.)

5. One BART oddity: That groove running beside the stairs at the 16th and Mission station is to wheel your bike up and down rather than carrying it. Who knew? Not me. It’s a pilot project, so if you use it and like it, let BART know by calling (415) 989-2278 and the transit agency might install some more.

6. A San Francisco Bicycle Coalition (www.sfbike.org) membership provides mad discounts, and not just at bike shops. Get 10 percent off at Rainbow Grocery and 50 cents off beers at Hole in the Wall — and that’s just the beginning.

7. Make sure you write down your bike’s serial number so it’s easier for the cops to track your ride if it gets ripped off (see "Chasing My Stolen Bicycle," 2/13/07, for more on bike theft in San Francisco). How do you find these magic digits? Flip your bike over and copy the number stamped on the bottom bracket where the pedals go through the frame.

8. Distant lands like Larkspur, Mill Valley, and Muir Woods are all much closer when you mix the bike with the boat. Marin has an amazing network of bike paths, and the Marin Bicycle Coalition (www.marinbike.org) has a map that one-ups San Francisco’s. (It shows the direction of the hills, not just the grade.) And … the ferries have bars.

9. DIY is the way forward. The three-class series at Box Dog Bikes (www.boxdogbikes.com), which covers flats, replacing cables, and truing wheels, is cheap and goes into enough depth that I no longer feel like there are certain parts of my bike I’m not supposed to touch with an Allen wrench. Follow it up with a membership to the Bike Kitchen (www.bikekitchen.org), a DIY shop with tools, parts, and people on hand to help you tune your spokes. It also regularly hosts "WTF" nights for girls, queers, and transpeople.

10. Need to know how to find the bike lanes and avoid the hills? Get one of those great bike maps (available at City Hall and at bike shops) when you join the SF Bike Coalition through a free download at www.sfbike.org/download/map.pdf. You can also pick them up at the energizer stations all over town on Bike to Work Day. It will help you find the best routes and navigate groovy spots like the Wiggle, which is the best route from mid-Market Street to Golden Gate Park. If you look along the sides of the streets, you’ll even see the green bike route signs that say "Wiggle." If you get lost, just look for a bike lane, which are well-marked all over town. Or follow all the other bikers.

Follow that “Balloon”

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After years of Tarantino twists and shot-for-shot shams, homage has gotten a bad name. Let’s call Flight of the Red Balloon something else: a transportation device in which Paris, Albert Lamorisse’s beloved 1956 slice of magical realism The Red Balloon, and a patchwork family float in and out of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s inscriptive view. At 61, the former Taiwanese new wave pacesetter is on a travel kick. After moving to Tokyo to film 2003’s Café Lumière, his tribute to Yasujiro Ozu, the filmmaker next went to Paris, thanks to a commission by the Musée d’Orsay. Flight of the Red Balloon‘s reception at Cannes was lukewarm, but away from that hothouse it’s plainly a masterwork. Mysterious without being opaque, it is as delightful in its particulars as in its overall musical intelligence.

It starts simply, with a boy and a balloon. The red orb reappears periodically in Hou’s film, like a refrain, but this prologue provides the fullest convergence with Lamorisse’s original. A sleepy-eyed child calls out to the air before descending the Metro steps; the camera pans up, catches a first glimpse of the talisman as it lingers behind wind-brushed trees, and then follows it across the rooftops of an overcast Paris.

The balloon retreats, but Hou’s camera stays alight. We soon find the boy, Simon, living in a jumbled apartment with his mother Suzanne (Juliette Binoche), a blustery creative type who voices puppet shows. She has engaged a young Chinese filmmaker as Simon’s nanny: Song Fang (playing herself) is first seen entering Suzanne’s puppet theatre, her oval visage shrouded in the richly-toned shades of black typical of Hou’s collaborations with cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-Bin.

The conflicts within this autumnal story world pass at a remove. Hou wryly observes aspects of Parisian life (a downstairs neighbor unable to ask a simple kitchen favor without detailing his mutton stew, for example), but doesn’t tether his film to such observations. Instead he emphasizes resonant textures: the musical interplay between the relaxed camerawork and Binoche’s breathy, bleached-blond performance; the lyrical enfolding of a child’s half-comprehending, absorbed perspective with that of a foreigner’s; and too many paired scenes and visual echoes to count, including a couple of lovely pirouettes up and down a spiral staircase. Throughout, Hou’s inclusive model of filmmaking draws from painting, music, and puppetry. Whenever he ventures into the mother and child’s apartment, currents of light and color are pitched between minimalism and reverie.

Much like some of this season’s other film highlights (In the City of Sylvia, Alexandra, Paranoid Park), Hou’s latest foregoes plot restrictions for acute ambience and sustained portraiture. I didn’t respond to Flight of the Red Balloon as quickly as I did to the others, but it’s the one I most want to revisit. Diffuse yet deep, Hou’s vision erases the boundaries between his film and the worlds that surround it.

The red balloon of The Red Balloon beckons, but Hou’s film also bears a surprising resemblance to Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vep (1996) in its skipping ellipticism, its depiction of a detached Asian woman swimming amid unkempt Parisians, its utterly free way of withholding story information and averting linearity, and its double-exposed invocation of a past French film classic. Assayas is no stranger to Hou’s work, having made a documentary about the Taiwanese director in 1997 (HHH), but their unique sensibilities impart common materials with entirely different moods. Where Irma Vep radiates frenetic energy, Hou’s profoundly subdued film lingers in the drowsy quiet of afternoon. In this respect, Flight of the Red Balloon also reminds me of another French film about childhood, stasis, and puppet shows: François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959). One new wave shores up another, and an old man’s meditation reflects a precocious debut like so many carefully angled mirrors.

FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON

Opens Fri/16 at Bay Area theaters
www.ifcfilms.com

The Bike Issue: Behind the pack

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Also in this issue:

>>10 things Bay Area cyclists should know

>>Don’t Stop: Bike lessons from Idaho

› steve@sfbg.com

There’s a strange dichotomy facing bicycling in San Francisco, and it’s spelled out in the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s "2007 Citywide Bicycle Counts Report," which features a cover photo of Mayor Gavin Newsom and me pedaling up Market Street together on Bike to Work Day two years ago.

That photo, its context, and the information contained in the report tell the story of a city that at one time set the pace for facilitating bicycling as a viable alternative to the automobile. But that city has been passed up since then by cities such as Chicago, New York, Washington DC, Seattle, and Portland, Ore.

San Francisco still has a higher per-capita rate of bicycle use than any major city in the United States, and that number has been steadily rising in recent years, even as construction of new bike facilities has stalled. The report’s survey found a 15 percent increase since the first official bicycle count was conducted in 2006.

"This increase is especially significant when viewed in light of the injunction against the City’s Bicycle Plan. This injunction has stopped the City from installing any new bicycle facilities since June 2006. Despite a lack of improvement or additions to the City’s bicycle route network, cycling use in San Francisco appears to be increasing," the report read.

It’ll take at least another year for city officials to wrap up the environmental studies on the 56 proposed bike projects and get Judge Peter Busch to lift the injunction (see "Stationary biking," 5/16/07). But it’s still an open question whether San Francisco’s three-year hiatus will be followed by the rapid installation of new bike lanes and other facilities.

City officials express confidence, and there are some hopeful signs. Newsom has been focused on environmental initiatives, the MTA has beefed up its bike staff from six full-time slots to nine, advocacy groups like San Francisco Bicycle Coalition are at the peak of their numbers and influence, and all involved say promoting bicycling is a cheap, effective way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, and traffic congestion.

"I’d be very surprised if, within six months after the injunction being lifted, we don’t see a record number of bike lanes striped," said MTA spokesperson Judson True.

Yet there are still political barriers to overcome in a city where cars are the dominant transportation option — and the first barrier is Mayor Newsom. He has yet to show a willingness to back his green rhetoric with policies that actually take space from cars, which many of the bike lane projects will entail.

"I think we have seen this mayor talk big on some environmental problems, but I’ve been disappointed that on transportation, that thinking hasn’t been turned into action yet," said SFBC executive director Leah Shahum, whom Newsom appointed to the MTA board but then removed earlier this year before her term expired, a sign of the complex and largely adversarial relationship between the mayor and bicyclists.

Newsom has been able to avoid tough decisions on bikes and cars for the past two years because of the injunction and the wait for Muni and traffic congestion studies, which are being released throughout 2008. But that’s about to change with the court’s ban on new bike projects slated to end next year. So will Newsom, who may be running for governor at the time, be willing to make controversial decisions that back up all his green talk? It’s an open question.

The common denominator in all the cities that have pedaled past San Francisco in recent years is that they’ve had strong mayors who have embraced cycling and partnered with bike advocates to change the rules of the road, often contracting them to work directly on projects.

"We’re poised for it, but will we act on it?" Shahum said of the potential for a bike boom in San Francisco. "It’s going to be a real test next summer and I think the mayor’s role is crucial."

THE GREEN BUG


Like many big city mayors, Newsom has become enamored of all things green at the same time that he’s trying to manage an overtaxed transportation system. He is pushing for Muni improvements and has voiced support for congestion pricing initiatives that could make driving a car more expensive.

"This trend of big city mayors focused on transportation to deal with environmental problems is spreading, and I think Newsom has caught that bug," Shahum said.

SFBC and other groups have been meeting regularly with Wade Crowfoot, the mayor’s new director of climate change initiatives, to push the bike plan work forward, create an aggressive implementation strategy, and craft new initiatives like the recently unveiled "Healthways" proposal to close down the Embarcadero to cars on summer Sunday mornings, an idea borrowed from Bogotá, Colombia.

It’s a sea change from that ride I took with Newsom two years ago, three days after he vetoed Healthy Saturdays, which would have created another day of car-free roads in Golden Gate Park. He labeled the bike advocates as "divisive," and told me his veto decision was influenced by "people in the neighborhoods who just came out in force in ways that, frankly, I didn’t expect."

Those feelings, held by the half of San Franciscans who use a car as their primary mode of transportation, haven’t gone away. Newsom’s advisers and the MTA staffers working on the Bike Plan acknowledge the political challenges in completing the bike network, which advocates say is an important prerequisite for convincing more people that cycling is a safe, attractive option.

I asked Oliver Gajda, who is leading the MTA’s bike team, whether the 56 projects he’s now working on would be queued up and ready to build once the injunction is lifted. While the technical work will be done, he said that most projects still will require lots of community meetings and negotiations.

"Some of the projects will take a couple years of work with the community, and some will take less," Gajda said. "When you discuss the potential of removing lanes or parking spots, there are lots of different interests in San Francisco that have concerns."

That’s where the rubber meets the road. Yes, everyone wants to see more cycling in San Francisco — Newsom two years ago even set the goal of 10 percent of all vehicle trips being made by bicycle by 2010, a goal that nobody interviewed for this article thinks the city will meet — but is the city willing to take space from cars?

"The public priorities are already correct, but we need political leadership to implement those priorities even when there’s opposition," said Dave Snyder, transportation policy director with the San Francisco Planning Urban Research Association.

Crowfoot said Newsom is committed to creating better alternatives to the automobile.

"The mayor is fully supportive of expanding the bike network and that will involve tradeoffs," Crowfoot said, acknowledging that some projects involve losing lanes or parking spaces to close the bike network’s most dangerous gaps. "To the extent that the bike network continues to be a patchwork, people won’t get on bikes."

But the mayor also has been fully supportive of the Transit Effectiveness Project’s proposal to reform Muni, even though he recently suggested opposition to proposed parking fine increases might mean that some TEP proposals need to be scaled back.

Skeptics also note that Newsom removed Shahum from the MTA and has appointed no one else with connections to the bicycling community since then, even though that body has sweeping new authority under last year’s Proposition A to implement the bike plan and make decisions about which transportation modes get priority and funding.

"I’m pushing for that, and we’ll see what happens," Crowfoot said of his efforts to get a complete bike network going during the Newsom administration’s reign, acknowledging that, "the proof is in the pudding."

ZERO-SUM GAME


San Francisco’s strong bicycle advocacy culture, the creation of lots of new bike lanes between 2000 and 2004, and innovations like Critical Mass and the sharrow (a painted arrow on the road indicating where bikes should safely ride) made this city a leader in the bicycling movement.

Yet it is only in the last few years, when San Franciscans have been sidelined by the injunction, that the movement really gained mainstream political acceptance and begun to make inroads into the dominant car culture of the United States, slowly and belatedly following the lead of European cities like Amsterdam and Copenhagen.

"Interest in bike-friendly policies is surging, along with the growing number of adults who are riding more. Moreover, the movers and shakers of the biking scene are often smart, always passionate, and they believe strongly in what they are doing. Even when such groups are in the minority, they often enjoy significant political success, and they should never be discounted," J. Harry Wray, a political science professor from DePaul University in Chicago, argues in his new book Pedal Power: The Quiet Rise of the Bicycle in American Public Life (Paradigm, 2008).

Jeffrey Miller, executive director of Thunderhead Alliance, a national umbrella organization supporting regional bicycle advocacy groups, told us he’s pleased with the movement’s progress in recent years.

"There’s been an awakening by the decision-makers in both government and businesses that bicycling and walking can solve a lot of the environmental problems we’re facing," Miller said.

He cited Portland, Ore., Chicago, Seattle, Washington DC, and New York as the cities leading the way in prioritizing bicycling and creating systems that encourage the use of bikes, and said he was sad to see the setbacks in San Francisco.

"But advocates in each of those cities will say there’s so much more work to be done," Miller said.

Most of that work centers on changing how drivers and planners think about cities, and especially with those who see the competition for space as a zero-sum game. Miller noted that it’s good for motorists when more people are encouraged to opt for alternate forms of transportation.

"If you just get 10 to 20 percent of the drivers to use those other modes, it frees the freeways up for cars as well," Miller said. "I don’t see why we go out of our way to favor cars over every other form of transportation."

Like many advocates, he said a strong and consistently supportive mayor is crucial to change the priorities in cities.

"We have an executive leader in Mayor Daley who believes strongly that the bicycle is a big part of the solution to our environmental problems," said Rob Sadowsky, director of the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation.

"We have an incredible partnership with the city," he said, noting that the organization often works directly on city contracts to create more bicycle facilities, something that happens in other bike-friendly cities like Portland and New York. But it doesn’t happen much in San Francisco.

"There’s a real sense that we’ve turned a critical corner and things that we’re been fighting for, for years now, are in sight," said Paul Steely White, executive director of Transportation Alternatives in New York. "In the last year, there have been some significant policy advances."

Like Mayor Daley in Chicago, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has become a vocal advocate of green transportation alternatives and has been willing to stand firm against displaced drivers.

"Anything you give to cyclists is basically taken away from automobiles," White said, adding that New York officials "have not shied away from taking parking away, or even a lane on Ninth Avenue. And that shows how serious they are."

The problem isn’t just San Francisco’s, but California’s as well. It is the state’s decades-old California Environmental Quality Act that was used to stall the Bike Plan and make bike projects so cumbersome. Sadowsky said bike projects in Chicago are relatively easy to implement, with little in the way of hearings or environmental studies needed.

Oregon laws also helped make Portland a national leader, with a requirement that all new road construction include bike lanes, paid for with state funds. Yet here in the small, 49-mile square that is San Francisco, with ideal weather and a deeply ingrained bike community, many say the city could be on the verge of regaining its leadership role in the bicycle policy.

A poll conducted in November 2007 by David Binder Research found that 5 percent of residents use a bicycle as their main mode of transportation, and that 16 percent of San Franciscans ride a bike at least once a week. Even more encouraging is the fact that most reasons cited for not biking — not enough bike lanes or parking, bad roads, feeling threatened by cars — are all things that can be addressed by smart bike policies.

"If it’s going to happen anywhere, it’s going to happen in San Francisco — as far as making more bicycling a reality," Gajda told us. "I really feel like we’re poised after the injunction to take it to the next level."

GET INVOLVED

The SFMTA has a series of upcoming workshops on the city’s Bike Plan and network:

Central Neighborhoods May 21, 6–7:30 p.m., SoMa Recreation Center Auditorium, 270 Sixth St.

Southeastern Neighborhoods May 22, 6–7:30 p.m., Bayview Anna E. Warden Branch Library, 5075 Third St.

Western Neighborhoods June 3, 6–7:30 p.m., Sunset Recreation Center Auditorium, 2201 Lawton.

Northern Neighborhoods June 4, 6–7:30 p.m., Golden Gate Valley Branch Library, 1801 Green.

BIKE TO WORK DAY, MAY 15

Biking is easier and more fun than many people realize, so Bike to Work Day is the perfect excuse to try it on for size. There will be energizer stations all over town for goodies and encouragement, and lots of fellow cyclists on the road for moral support, including group rides leaving 11 different neighborhoods at 7:30 a.m. After work, swing by the SFBC’s Bike Away from Work party from 6–10 p.m. at the Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell St. For more details, visit http://www.sfbike.org/

Finally a fix for Fell-Masonic

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fell-masonic.jpg
Image from sfist.com

I and other bicyclists and pedestrians have long been urging the city to do something about the dangerous intersection of Fell and Masonic, and that pressure yesterday yielded a small but significant victory.
City attorneys persuaded Judge Peter Busch to make an exception in his injunction against bicycle projects so that the city can create a dedicated left turn lane and traffic signal phase for cars, which now cut across the pedestrians and bicyclists in a way that often leads to life-threatening collisions.
Kudos to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency and City Attorney’s Office for taking this seriously enough to head back to court over it, and another big raspberry to anti-bike blogger Rob Anderson (the guy responsible for the injunction) for forcing the city to jump through so many legal hoops just to make some common sense improvements to promote safe bicycling.
The project must still go through the city approval process — where Anderson will likely to be speaking against it and threatening to sue again — but it appears to be a done deal that will be built by early summer.

Greening away poverty

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› news@sfbg.com

If the flow of venture capital is any indication, the new green economy is not just coming, it’s about to boom. There’s good reason to be excited about capitalists pouring money into saving the planet. But is it really the panacea that true believers say it is?

The idea behind "social uplift environmentalism" is that the new green economy is strong enough to lift people out of poverty. The argument: millions of "green-collar jobs" — defined as living-wage, career-track jobs that contribute directly to improving or enhancing environmental quality — will be created as the need for green energy, transportation, and manufacturing infrastructure grows.

If green is the new black, eco-populism is the new environmentalism.

But the pesky realists out there question whether the private sector will work quickly or efficiently enough to solve crises as massive as global warming. And many Bay Area activists say they have good reason to be wary of green solutions to problems like inner-city poverty.

In early April, the San Francisco–based Center for Political Education (CPE) brought in prominent environmental and social justice activists to discuss some of these issues. One of the primary concerns about turning blue collars green has to do with doubts about job training programs, which don’t have a great track record.

"People are getting trained for nothing — for an old economy, for jobs that don’t exist," activist Oscar Grande of People Organizing for Environmental and Economic Rights (PODER) told the Guardian.

At the gathering Ian Kim, director of the Green Collar Jobs program at Oakland’s Ella Baker Center, agreed that there have been major problems in job training programs but said that this shouldn’t doom future programs to failure. "Workforce development has been on a starvation diet for the last 10 to 15 years," he said at the CPE event. "It’s easy to do job training really badly. But when done well, it can work."

In a conversation with the Guardian, Jennifer Lin, research director for the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, cited Solar Richmond as an example of a small but successful green-jobs program. Lin also acknowledged that it took a while for the first 18 trainees to find employment in solar panel installation.

Another hot topic at the CPE event concerned land use — a scorching topic in our housing-strapped city. Grande said one of the struggles PODER has taken on in the Mission District is preserving industrial lands, the breadbasket for low-income communities. San Francisco’s industrial base has eroded due to factors such as offshoring jobs and dotcom-era condo developments in areas formerly zoned for industry, he said.

One of the biggest questions raised at the CPE event concerned the limits of green capitalism: can an environmental solution be successful if it doesn’t challenge the constant-growth philosophy that created the problem?

"There is a lot of feel-good energy being put in by politicians about this really good [green jobs] program. But they’re not addressing how incredibly enormous the challenges are and the kinds of shifts — like getting all of us out of cars, providing local foods that don’t have to be shipped from thousands of miles away — that need to happen," the CPE’s Fernando Martí told the Guardian.

Kim says that while the climate crisis allows us to critique capitalism in a way that has not been possible for decades, he acknowledges that the work the Ella Baker Center is doing is within a constant-growth framework.

"While it’s important in the radical left to have conversations about capitalism and powering down, that’s not where we’re starting out with green jobs," Kim told the CPE audience.

Mateo Nube, training director for the Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project, suggested that both short- and long-term goals are important. "We need to build an infrastructure for the transition. We need to rebuild our food production systems in a way that actually takes care of everybody and is sustainable. From that vantage point, the idea of green jobs and a New Deal makes a lot of sense. But in that process, we have to incorporate an understanding that a constant-growth model is suicide."

The next ugly high-rise

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EDITORIAL The San Francisco Planning Department is preparing for a new set of zoning rules that could allow a 1,200-foot high-rise office building — half again the height of the Transamerica Pyramid — near First and Mission Streets. It’s part of the devil’s bargain for the new Transbay Terminal, and it badly needs to be reined in.

The proposal for gigantic new towers is the city’s way to finance reconstruction of the terminal, which ought to be the central link in a regional transportation network that combines buses and high speed rail downtown. It’s a worthy project — and an expensive one. Estimates for the new terminal run around $1 billion. And neither the city nor the state have that kind of money right now.

There’s a reason for that, of course: Californians have been living for decades in a fantasy world, a place where grand public achievements — like a great park system, a great public university system, new trains and roads — can be built and maintained without anyone having to pay for them. Once upon a time, tax money built this state’s preeminent public institutions; now even the mention of higher taxes sends Democrats and Republicans alike scurrying for political cover.

So the only way San Francisco officials can see to pay for the monumental new train and bus station — a facility, we’re told, that could rival Grand Central Terminal in New York — is to sell off the skyline. Gerald Hines, a Texas developer, is prepared to pay $350 million for a single plot of land near the terminal — if he can build a massive high-rise there. The same goes for the rest of the public land around the site: the higher the buildings the city will allow, the more cash that comes in for the project. Since this is San Francisco, affordable housing will be part of the payoff.

We support the Transbay Terminal project, and we support more affordable housing — but this isn’t a good deal for the city.

For starters, we’re not at all convinced San Francisco needs another giant office tower, much less a complex of giant buildings choking a corner of South of Market. Who are we trying to attract to the city? The giant outfits that can pay the high rents to fill these buildings are not doing much for the local economy. In fact, small, locally-owned businesses create most of the new jobs in this city. And while Dean Macris, the former planning director who is still a development advisor to Mayor Gavin Newsom, loves big high spires, a lot of us find them hideous. That ugly tower on Rincon Hill, which has nothing but housing for the very rich, is a blight on the skyline. Why would we want more of the same?

This week’s presentation will be the beginning of a long process that needs to end with a rational development plan (a transit village with a heavy mix of affordable housing?) that’s driven by the city’s needs. And San Francisco officials need to take a hard look at whether auctioning off the skyline is the only way to fund the Transbay Terminal.

Spinning our wheels

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newsom bike.jpg
Newsom and me at a past Bike to Work Day.
While other U.S. cities pedal forward with smart policies to encouraging bicycling — the cheapest, easiest and greenest of the transportation options besides walking — San Francisco continues to lag as we move toward annual Bike to Work Day on May 15. Part of that is the court injunction against new bike projects, but even more of it is a simple failure of political will by Mayor Gavin Newsom and other civic leaders.
We saw another example of that cowardice in this morning’s Chron when Newsom and some supervisors promised to fight new parking fine increases even if it meant scaling back needed improvements to Muni. Meanwhile, Newsom years ago announced plans to offer easy bicycle rentals at many bus stops, yet it is Washington DC that actually went ahead and did it, following the lead of Paris and other world-class cities. Newsom has a bunch of high-paid environmental advisers, and his web page announcements are always chock full of green promises, so why does San Francisco have such a hard time with such a basic goal of encouraging more bicycling in this 7×7 city?

SFIFF: Blood ties

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

You can keep those classy, highbrow Coppolas. I’ll play the low card with the Argentos any day. This year’s San Francisco International Film Festival is a feast for fans of the father-daughter team: Dario directs Asia in Mother of Tears, his long-awaited final entry in the cultishly beloved "Three Mothers" series, which includes 1977’s Suspiria and 1980’s Inferno. Asia also stars in Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Tales, as well as the fest’s opening-night film, Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress.

I first encountered the duo under the least relaxing of circumstances at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival. Press interviews for Mother of Tears were held in a hectically crowded hotel restaurant. Waiting for my turn, I watched as team Argento chowed down a quick lunch, chattering together in Italian about who knows what (witches, ancient artifacts, the weather?). I clutched my tape recorder, feeling possibly the same mixture of fear, awe, and excitement that filled Suspiria’s Suzy Bannion when she arrived at a certain cursed ballet school.

Fortunately, my chat with the pair was devoid of ceiling maggots, underwater zombies, or — as featured in Mother of Tears — demonic monkeys. Probably the most frequent question Dario Argento has had to answer is the most obvious: why did he decide to finish the trilogy now, nearly three decades post- Inferno? "We have a time for everything," he told me, because of course that’s exactly what I asked him first off. "You wait until the idea comes."

There’s no doubt Mother of Tears sprang from Argento’s brain; his signature occult themes, glorious violence, and attention to style (instead of, say, plot) are all accounted for. He cowrote the film’s script with a pair of Americans he met while working on Showtime’s Masters of Horror series, Jace Anderson and Adam Gierasch (Simona Simonetti and Mother of Tears editor Walter Fasano are also cocredited). The film, which opens theatrically in San Francisco in June, received mixed reviews on the festival circuit. Variety critic Dennis Harvey, who also writes for the Guardian, called it a "hectic pileup of supernatural nonsense." True enough, but I would argue that while Mother of Tears is flawed, it’s enjoyably flawed.

The story revolves around a museum worker named Sarah (Asia Argento) who must summon previously dormant spiritual powers (inherited from her late mother, played by Asia’s real-life mother and Dario’s former partner, Inferno star Daria Nicolodi) to defeat an evil witch’s plot to take over Rome and eventually the world. Eyes are gouged out. Cleavers make short work of necks. Underground pools of muck must be navigated. Udo Kier, playing an exorcist, very nearly reprises his Suspiria role as Exposition Guy. Characters, including witches, take the time to use public transportation. Silly? Yeah, a bit.

Waiting to make Mother of Tears enabled Argento to take advantage of CG, one of his favorite cinematic inventions. His 1996 film The Stendhal Syndrome (which also starred Asia) was reportedly the first Italian release that used CG. In Toronto, Argento told me the film has more than 180 visual effects — including a church on fire — which were created in conjunction with Lee Wilson, another Masters of Horror veteran.

The freedom Argento has enjoyed with CG (now, he says, "it’s possible to fly high!") is matched by another door that has opened since the releases of Suspiria and Inferno: the censorship that plagued his early career is less of an issue in these accustomed-to-gore times.

"I hate censors," Argento assured me in our second interview, conducted over the phone in late March. "For Mother of Tears, I talked to the producer, the distributor, the financier [and told them], ‘I want to be free. I want to show my natural reality after so many years.’ And I did that."

In Rome prepping for his next film, simply titled Giallo (sorry, fellow horror nerds, I couldn’t get him to spill any dirty details), Argento reflected on working with his daughter. Stateside, Asia Argento is known chiefly as an actor (she tangled with Vin Diesel in 2002’s XXX and pissed off corpses in 2005’s Land of the Dead). But she’s also directed a handful of films, including 2000’s Scarlet Diva (which Dario co-produced) and the 2004 J.T. LeRoy adaptation, The Heart Is Deceitful above All Things.

"She understands what it means to be in the project — not just thinking about her character, but the other parts of the film," Argento said. "Since she was a child, she’d follow me on the shooting of many of my films. She grew up on the sets of my films. She’s very comfortable in this world, this show business."

In Toronto, Asia Argento stepped in as translator for both my questions and her father’s answers. She said that when she heard about the Mother of Tears script, she asked to be a part of the film. As in previous Argento-Argento collaborations like The Stendhal Syndrome, the part called for some grueling physical scenes. Still, the pair seem to have an easy rapport, laughing over the aforementioned underground pool of muck ("That was really gross to do," Asia remembered. "He prepared that for three days, this horrible soup. I would watch him prepare that soup, but I wouldn’t say anything!") Later, over the phone, Dario described he and his daughter as "big friends."

Onscreen, Asia Argento has a certain magnetism that few other performers can claim. In Go Go Tales, she appears in only a few scenes, playing a surly dancer who drags her giant Rottweiler with her everywhere, including into her stripper dance routine. Abel Ferrara, who also directed her in 1998’s New Rose Hotel (she directed him in the 1998 short doc Abel/Asia), calls her a "very, very special actress."

"She’s courageous, she gets out there, and she’s not afraid to take chances with the character or with herself," he said, calling from New York, where he’s working on a documentary about the Chelsea Hotel. "When you write a script like [Go Go Tales] obviously you’re looking for the women to bring it to life. We knew we needed people who could really bring something to the table. She’s got that something — it’s indescribable."

Mother of Tears offers Argento a juicier part as a woman who may or may not be totally crazy. But it’s her role as the titular character in The Last Mistress that ranks among her best work to date. It’s a dramatic, passionate period film about an upper-class man’s insurmountable attraction to his moody, impulsive woman on the side (guess who?). Her character pinballs from ecstatic howls to anguished wails, glamorous salon-lolling to beachside pipe-smoking, and dinner table stare-downs to horseback smackdowns. Indeed, it’s a bit over the top, but she pulls it off. As a pair of striking careers can attest, it’s an ability that’s surely imprinted on the Argento genes.

GO GO TALES Sat/26, 11:45 p.m., Kabuki; Mon/28, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki; April 30, 3:15 p.m., Kabuki

THE LAST MISTRESS Thurs/24, 7 p.m., Castro

MOTHER OF TEARS Fri/25, 10:30 p.m., Kabuki


>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

The price of gold

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Five years ago, the overseers of San Francisco’s iconic Golden Gate Bridge were facing a $454 million budget deficit. That figure was larger than the gross domestic products of East Timor, the west African country of Gambia, and the Independent State of Samoa.

Investigative reporter Thomas Peele of the Contra Costa Times decided to try and figure out how a bridge in the United States could amass a funding shortfall that dwarfed the economic output of entire nations. For one, he reported in a 2002 story, the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway, and Transportation District used money from the tolls paid by motorists to bankroll an expensive transit system that includes a network of buses in Marin County and a fleet of ferry boats that collectively cost millions per year to operate.

Peele also discovered that the bridge’s 19-person board of directors, some members of which live far from the Bay Area, spent more than $56,000 over a two-year period just to cover trips — including meals, rental cars, and hotels — to regular meetings at the Golden Gate’s administrative offices in San Francisco.

The embarrassed district promised reforms and vowed to get its economic house in order.

But five years later, we’ve learned, very little has changed.

The district touts its substantial cuts in overhead, insisting everything possible has been done to avoid raising the toll on motorists. But the Golden Gate Bridge District’s financial problems aren’t going away — and the only solution the administration can come up with is perpetual toll increases.

Even that answer poses huge problems. The bridge doesn’t expect that the actual volume of toll-paying motorists, or the ridership on its buses and ferries, will rise in the near future at the same pace as its expenses, which are largely consumed by employee salaries, benefits, and other perks that the district’s hundreds of workers, including its board members, enjoy.

Public records show today that the district pays for health insurance for 14 of the (very) part-time directors. Last year alone, that insurance combined cost $48,000 — even though several of the board members, including two mayors and four county supervisors, are already eligible for insurance coverage in their home counties.

The bridge district’s projections show vast deficits stretching off into the next decade — and if the problem isn’t solved, a public transit system will be at risk. Riders, among them a high number of business commuters, make 9.4 million annual trips on Golden Gate’s transit system. If the fiscal mess continues unabated, the board will either have to hike tolls to larger numbers ($10, $15, $20?) or start cutting back on the buses and ferries.

The only alternative, says Golden Gate board member and San Francisco supervisor Gerardo Sandoval, may be to ask state lawmakers for the right to change the district’s charter so it can raise money a different way, such as through sales or parcel taxes.

But many of the board members, who benefit from the lucrative sinecure and the power of this bureaucracy, don’t want to take that risk. "Their fear is that if they go to Sacramento, no one’s going to ask them their opinion," Sandoval told us. "The end result is going to be some legislation that significantly changes the way the bridge is run."

BUY A BIB, SAVE A BRIDGE


Bridge officials say the projected deficit was a lot worse five years ago, before they instituted cost-cutting measures. The biggest cuts came in the form of eliminating nearly 200 positions, about a fifth of the workforce. The district also instituted a hiring freeze and forced workers to negotiate wage rollbacks and share more of the costs of their medical coverage.

Bus services from the district’s fleet of 200 were reduced by 22 percent in March and November of 2003, and taking a bus from Marin to San Francisco now costs 34 percent more than it did five years ago. The weekday fare for a ferry from Larkspur to San Francisco was raised a whopping 118 percent, and available ferry seats were reduced 23 percent by cutting trips. It can cost between $7 and $8 one-way to ride Golden Gate’s ferries and buses today.

But over the next five years, the district still anticipates its deficit will reach $91 million.

So after raising the toll five years ago, bridge officials want to do so again as soon as September. Motorists would pay $6 in cash, $5 if using a FasTrak prepaid device, and $3 instead of $1.50 for disabled drivers.

"It seems pretty clear that the [bridge’s] staff is driving the board of directors, and not the other way around, toward infinite toll increases," Sandoval said. "It’s a ludicrous idea, but that’s the only one they have right now."

Earnest bridge staffers point out in reports prepared for the public that they’ve implemented "revenue enhancements," such as putting out a donation box for visitors who might be willing to give up some pocket change and creating special sales programs at the gift shop.

Online trinkets for sale have even been expanded. At Goldengate.org you can purchase a piece of the bridge’s original cable for $175 or an $8 baby bib that reads "Golden Gate Bridge: Big, Strong and Awesome, Just Like My Dad."

But that’s not going to add up to $91 million.

Meanwhile, the anticipated deficit doesn’t even include capital projects like the nearly $185 million the district wants to spend overhauling and replacing its buses and ferries, or the $36 million it hopes to spend over the next 10 years deterring suicides, which are perhaps the second best-known feature of the Golden Gate Bridge after its aesthetic beauty.

And, of course, the bridge constantly needs repainting, thanks to the wind and salt air. "There’s more [required] maintenance on the Golden Gate Bridge than any other bridge in the country because of where it’s at…. It has to be looked after everyday by a crew of ironworkers and painters and whatever else is needed," said board president John Moylan.

The district’s largest operating expense involves paying the remaining 836 full- and part-time workers at the bridge and granting them fringe benefits like insurance coverage and supplemental pensions. This year alone salaries and benefits will cost about $100 million.

THE RED INK MOUNTS


About 60 percent of the district’s budget goes toward keeping its ferries and buses running, but key performance measures show that Golden Gate’s transit system does poorly in three crucial areas, including cost efficiency and effectiveness. When compared with national averages, Golden Gate Transit has one of the top five highest operating costs per "vehicle revenue mile" — a barometer of efficiency — out of the 150 largest transit agencies nationwide, making it more inefficient than BART, AC Transit in Alameda County, and the transportation authorities in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, according to 2005 figures maintained by the federal Department of Transportation.

It’s common for transit systems to rely on government subsidies, and few environmentalists have sympathy for drivers who whine about toll increases from the comfortable interiors of their automobiles. Mass transit is the future of urban living.

"The Golden Gate Bridge may not be as efficient as other comparable systems," Sandoval said, "but if we abandon the investment we have made in mass transportation, it will really leave us with poor options in the years to come."

Alan Zahradnik, Golden Gate’s director of planning, adds that the bridge’s buses and ferries are dissimilar to other transit systems around the country because they tend to carry fewer commuter passengers over greater distances mostly during peak hours compared to transportation authorities like San Francisco’s Muni and AC Transit.

"It’s more expensive to provide suburban, fixed-route transportation," Zahradnik said.

Nonetheless, without an increase in the toll for motorists, the bridge expects to sustain annual deficits for each of the next 10 years until the red ink reaches $290 million.

So it would seem that if the district is asking everyone to tighten their belts, its board of directors should probably do the same. The extraordinarily large 19-member Golden Gate board contains more than twice as many directors as the seven-member board that oversees Muni’s trains and buses and the nine-member board that governs BART.

That’s a throwback to history. When the bridge district formed in 1928, several counties north and south of the span were asked to participate in the $35 million bond issue required to construct a road across the Golden Gate, and although the bonds were paid off decades ago, each of those counties still receives representation on the board.

"There have been attempts to topple the bridge district in the past, but they’re so hard-wired, it’s been impossible," said Susan Deluxe, a Tiburon resident and long-time critic of the district.

The list includes two counties located far to the north, Mendocino and Del Norte — the latter bordering Oregon. But the board’s structure hasn’t been tinkered with since its formation.

When asked whether the far-flung board has outlived its usefulness, the representative from Del Norte County, Gerald Cochran, explained that the distant jurisdictions help diminish tension between the representatives from San Francisco and Marin, who frequently argue over who should contribute more to maintain the bridge. Besides, he said, Del Norte stepped up to help make the Golden Gate Bridge happen in the first place.

"It’s not what we do today," Cochran said, "it’s what we did 75 years ago to get this bridge built. We make our contributions."

The travel expenses of the two directors representing Del Norte and Mendocino counties were the highest board-meeting travel costs he found back when Peele first reported on the board’s budget — $42,404 to cover trips from their home counties to San Francisco for regular board meetings over two years.

In 2002, bridge officials told the public that the district’s top-heavy administration would spend less along with everyone else to save money. The newest $6 toll was proposed "with the understanding that staff will continue to focus on finding internal cost savings," one staff report promised.

But that’s not exactly what new numbers we obtained from the district through a public records request show. Transporting distant directors to district meetings over the past two years cost more than $54,000.

Exasperated district staffers respond that travel for board members to conferences around the globe has already been trimmed and the number of regular meetings they hold in San Francisco were cut to save on the $50 stipends board members traditionally earned per meeting for serving.

A HEALTHY PERK


A majority of the directors receive health insurance coverage from the district, either Blue Shield or Kaiser — a perk that few other part-time boards in the state offer. Last year, that cost $48,000.

But many of the directors already receive coverage from plans in their home counties. The bridge paid $1,200 last year to cover Mike Kerns; he is also a Sonoma County supervisor, where he’s on a second plan that includes life, dental, vision, and health coverage — and costs taxpayers there about $63,000 annually, the clerk of Sonoma County’s board told us. Kerns was on vacation when we called his office at press time.

Board member Albert Boro receives health insurance through the bridge, but taxpayers in San Rafael, where he’s the mayor, pay an additional $19,000 annually to cover him there, according to figures provided by San Rafael’s city manager.

But Boro told the Guardian that the bridge coverage is "secondary and it’s only utilized when my primary doesn’t cover something…. It’s not a premium in the sense that it might be through the city [of San Rafael]."

Three San Francisco supervisors participate in the plan offered here for county employees, which annually costs taxpayers approximately $10,500 per person, according to the controller’s office. But the bridge also covers those individuals. The list includes Tom Ammiano, Jake McGoldrick, and Gerardo Sandoval and costs a total of $14,000 to cover all three of them, according to district numbers we requested.

Ammiano said the benefit could be done away with if it truly became a burden on the bridge’s budget. "That would take the will of the board," he said. "[Doing away with it is] not something I would be against, but I can only speak for myself."

Board director Bevan Dufty, also a San Francisco supervisor, declined to sign up for the coverage when he joined the bridge’s board in 2005.

"I had insurance and it seemed duplicative to me … I meet with people every day who don’t have insurance from all walks of life and so I felt fortunate," Dufty said.

Only about 12 percent of the 450 or so special districts that responded to a survey two years ago asking about health coverage said they offered such benefits to their directors or trustees, according to Neil McCormick, head of the California Special Districts Association. The group represents around 900 waste management, utility, fire, and recreation districts across the state. The Golden Gate district is not a member.

The real problem here is that after the district retired its bond debt in 1971, it never came up with an adequate revenue source to cover all of its operating or capital costs. Bridge officials never sought from state lawmakers a mechanism, for instance, to borrow money at a fixed rate, like school districts do.

So what will the bridge do in five more years? Nobody seems to know. According to San Francisco board member Janet Reilly, "That’s the $64,000 question…. There’s only so much toll tolerance among drivers."

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