Transportation

Waiting for BRT

Sasha Cuttler
-
18
Waiting for BRT

By Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez

joe@sfbg.com

You’re on Muni’s underground line, the train stalled just shy of your stop, just stuck there, the light at the end of the tunnel right in front of you. It’s a frustrating feeling, right?

With more than six years worth of delays in three major transit overhauls — the Van Ness, Geary and Geneva Bus Rapid Transit Projects — it’s beginning to feel just like that.

The projects are designed to speed up the most trafficked transit routes in the city by making the buses run like trains. For the Van Ness Bus Rapid Transit, the 47 and 49 would drive in dedicated bus-only lanes shuttling riders north and south, reducing travel time by a third, according to project estimates.

Van Ness BRT was initially announced in 2004 with a planned unveiling of 2012. Eight years later, the new debut is set for 2018. The Geary Project is even worse, with a completion date slated for 2020.

The Van Ness BRT is finally getting its wheels turning this month, with the Environmental Impact Report set to be approved by a number of governmental bodies: the Van Ness BRT Citizen’s Advisory Committee, the Transit Authority board, and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority.

Why the hell has this bus project taken nearly a decade to start its engine? As is customary in politics, fingers are pointed at all sides.

At a citizen’s meeting for the Van Ness BRT on Sept. 4, two angry factions gathered in the Old First Church Fellowship Hall on Van Ness. The SFMTA’s spokesperson for the project, Lulu Feliciano, wrapped up her presentation to the crowd of about 100, and that’s when they pounced.

“Van Ness’ three lanes will be limited to two, but it’s a highway, isn’t it?” asked Carole Holt, owner of Russian Hill Upholstery. “Why do cars have no consideration?” She told the Guardian she worried her customers from Marin would have trouble getting to her store.

Another Polk Street activist, Kelly Gerber, walked right up to Feliciano’s face and gestured with his hand like an angry schoolteacher. “Why has no one ever heard of this?” he bellowed, telling us he opposes the loss of parking spaces.

Ironically, transit planners say car traffic would move faster, partially because of the elimination of all left turns along Van Ness except Broadway.

“They’re just angry and zooming in on every little detail,” Mario Tanez, spokesperson for the SF Transit Riders Union, said of BRT’s opponents.

The mostly younger crowd of transit activists showed up in equal force to counter the Polk Street merchants, hoping to stem the tide of NIMBYism.

“We’re the generation that will actually see these improvements,” Teo Wickland told us. He’s an urban planning student who hopes to see Muni running on time.

Feliciano said the project was complicated by having to coordinate multiple city agencies, all with their own goals.

Instead of digging up the same stretch of concrete a dozen times in a decade, San Francisco tries to include as many agencies as possible when cement is broken in any part of the city, she said. Since the Van Ness project is a two-mile stretch between Lombard and Mission streets, many are involved.

infographic showing different city agencies involved in the reconstruction of Van Ness

Graphic by Brooke Robertson

Peter Gabancho, the project manager for Van Ness BRT, said that the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission will put in new water lines, institute a rainwater catch system, and do sewer work. The Department of Public Works plans to repave, and the SFMTA will replace overhead bus lines and light poles.

When asked how much the city would save by combining work, he couldn’t give an exact dollar amount but said it was in the tens of millions, at least.

He also said that the process requires community meetings at many steps in the process. City officials visited Mexico City to see how they planned and built its BRT in just three years, and Gabancho said it’s because that city didn’t really consult the community.

“We can’t do business like that in San Francisco and I don’t think we want to do that in San Francisco,” he said.

All of that governmental insanity had a member of the Geary BRT’s Citizen Advisory Council calling it quits in a fury — he even wrote about it in his blog.

“What I’ve seen in the past six years has been a severe disappointment during which I have lost trust in America’s regulatory framework to enact effective transit improvements,” Kieran Farr, the CEO and co-founder of VidCaster, wrote. He described the process as fraught with starts and restarts, slips and delays, mostly due to a lack of leadership. And that’s the rub: There is no point person on this project with strong political will, according the SFTRU. “The mayor is not saying this is high priority,” Tanez told us. “He’s at all the Central Subway events, but getting political clout behind this by writing to our supervisors is the only way to do this.” The Van Ness project runs through the districts of Sups. Mark Farrell and David Chiu, who were both unavailable at press time. The SFMTA is slated to approve the Van Ness BRT EIR on Tue/17 at 1pm in City Hall, Room 400.

A bridge so far

Sasha Cuttler
-
46
A bridge so far

By Steven T. Jones

steve@sfbg.com

Pedaling onto the Bay Bridge over the weekend, I was suspended between our industrial past and sleek present. But my ride into the future was abruptly stopped just before I reached the island.

All the experts say we should all just be happy with the world’s longest bike and pedestrian pier, and it certainly is a wondrous thing to behold, this spacious and beautiful two-mile path that pasted big grins on the dozens of faces that I rode past on its sunny first Friday in operation.

But just as the duality of riding between the old Bay Bridge and the new invoked myriad metaphors, so too did the fact that my fellow taxpayers and I just spent $6.4 billion on a bridge from Oakland to San Francisco built almost exclusively for the private automobile.

Is this the future we’ve embraced? Are global warming, economic equity, and collective responsibility such distant abstractions that we can fill this beautiful new bridge with people sitting alone in expensive, deadly, polluting, space-hogging machines?

I looked into their work-weary eyes as I rode my bicycle out from Oakland with a few of my friends during rush hour, on a path wide enough to facilitate conversations among a pair of cyclists in each direction and strolling pedestrians, six abreast. It was lovely, like we had finally arrived in the civilized, people-powered present that we Guardianistas have been working toward for decades.

And then it ended, a vivid reminder that we’re not there yet.

 

SHARING THE ROAD

The past is blocking our progress, literally and metaphorically, at least for now.

The old Bay Bridge stands between the stubbed-off end of the new bike/pedestrian path and its intended touchdown spot on natural Yerba Buena Island, the conjoined twin of the artificial Treasure Island, where developers dream of building high-rise condo towers buffered against the rising sea.

Officials tell the Guardian that the path will likely be completed in early 2015, after the old bridge comes down. Then, we’ll be able to ride our bikes onto the island and cruise our way to the west side, with its beautiful views of our beloved city, San Francisco, shimmering just out of reach.

Next month, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission will release its latest study of how to complete the ride/walk, examining the placement of pathways balanced on either side of the Bay Bridge’s western span, their added weight compensated for with lighter decks for the cars, all at a cost approaching a billion bucks, with a capital B.

“Everything about this is going to be hard,” MTC spokesperson John Goodwin told me when I asked about allowing cyclists and pedestrians onto the Bay Bridge’s western span, citing an array of engineering, financial, and political obstacles.

“It’s a 10-year project even if a local billionaire decides to put up the money,” Goodwin said, noting that there is no public funding identified for the project except for maybe raising automobile tolls again, which would be a tough sell to voters for a bike and pedestrian project. “It’s an uphill climb and I’m not sure it will ever reach its intended goal.”

But completing this journey is really only as difficult as we make it. Just ask local activist/author Chris Carlsson, who says that he and some of his buddies could fix the problem in a day for a few thousand dollars. All we need to do it take the righthand lane, install some barriers, done.

“The bridge is more malleable than people treat it as and we need to have this discussion publicly,” Carlsson, a founder of Critical Mass and author of Nowtopia, told us. “Let’s solve this problem today. The idea that they would open this bridge without completing this path is insulting.”

To Carlsson and others of his radical ilk, this is an equity issue, and the opening of a car-only bridge is symbolic of our societal myopia. To believers in the automotive status quo, the idea of giving up one of five traffic lanes for the final, two-mile-long descent into San Francisco makes their heads explode.

“That’s just wildly unrealistic,” Goodwin said of Carlsson’s idea, even instituted on a temporary basis, noting that the Bay Bridge handles more than 270,000 cars per day, by far the busiest state-run bridge in California.

To many modern minds, automobiles are essential to our personal freedom and economic vitality — bikes are toys, public transit is for the poor, walking is what you do in your neighborhood or on the treadmill at the gym — but San Francisco is a voter-approved “transit-first” city that supposedly gives each of these modes priority over cars.

“The idea that the five lanes of automobile traffic is inviolable is ridiculous,” Carlsson said, calling it a relic from the days before the freeway revolts of the 1950s and ’60s, when San Franciscans rejected the conception of The City as just another stop along the fast and efficient interstate highway system.

In fact, it was that cars-first vision — before it was rejected by a populist revolt — that helped lead officials to remove the passenger trains that operated on the lower decks of this New Deal/WPA bridge for its first 17 years of life, turning the whole Bay Bridge over to cars, trucks, and the occasional bus.

The era of unfettered automobility had begun, and the idea that capitalism/industrialism and the health of our world might someday, somehow come into conflict with one another also seemed wildly unrealistic.

 

BRIDGING THE GAP

The Bay Bridge was my bridge growing up in the East Bay, our link to the big city that I traversed while safely cocooned in the backseat of my parents’ car, windows up, car filled with what we’d later call secondhand smoke, buffered against the wilds of West Oakland as we launched over the bay.

Today, my perspective has changed and so has my access through the old industrial waterfront, which has been opened up to all by a pair of new paths leading bikers and hikers to the bridge, both short rides from the West Oakland BART station.

One starts on Maritime Street, near the Port of Oakland and the remnants of the old railyard on what the Realtors have started calling Oakland Point; the other starts on Shellmound Street right across from Ikea, best accessed from West Oakland along 40th Street, where crews were in the process of placing tall cones to protect the bike lane as we rode past.

After the trails merge, it proceeds past the yards for the government agencies set up to serve the motoring public: CalTrans and its freeway maintenance facilities, and the California Highway Patrol, which has doubled its local bicycle brigade (which had worked just the Golden Gate Bridge) to police the new path.

“Best job in the world,” a smiling Officer Sean Wilkenfeld told me as he arrived at the end of the Bay Bridge path, where a couple dozen people stood watching the new Bay Bridge and the old, which took on a ghostly feel as we hovered next to its newfound lifelessness.

Personally, I really like the new Bay Bridge, with its elegant modern architecture and unobstructed bay views. But some of the friends and strangers that I chatted up there at the end of the line disagreed, singing the praises of the old, industrial, seismically unsound original.

“The new bridge is beautiful, but in some ways I like the old bridge better because you can see its functionality,” Joel Fajans, a physics professor at UC Berkeley, told me.

Conversation among the cyclists turned to our beautiful new path and its untimely end. “What a dream come true to have a bike path on the Bay Bridge. I already wrote to my representatives about completing the route to San Francisco,” said Kurt Vogler, a 47-year-old environmental consultant from Oakland who rode the bridge with Fajans.

That was the phrase that everyone used, this notion of completion, conveying the sense that we’re somehow stuck between where we were and where we should be, suspended between the old and the new, waiting to catch up.

“I think it’s beautiful. It’s an engineering marvel, a miracle,” Garris Shipon, a engineer from Berkeley, said halfway through his bike ride on the Bay Bridge. “I’m glad they launched with a bike path at all, and I hope they finish it because I’d love to ride all the way across.”

 

 

TWO BRIDGES

The San Francisco-Oakland Bay and Golden Gate bridges were built at the same time, started in 1933. But the Bay Bridge — the industrial, utilitarian bridge connecting The City to its biggest, most diverse nearby population centers — was done first. The tall, pretty one — with its Art Deco flourishes and tourist appeal — took longer.

On its opening day, the Golden Gate Bridge was filled with pedestrians, while the Bay Bridge hosted its first traffic jam as it was unveiled, “with every auto owner in the Bay Region, seemingly, trying to crowd his machine onto the great bridge,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

It’s been the same story ever since, with cyclists and walkers crowding onto the Golden Gate daily, salty winds howling through their hair, while travelers on the Bay are caged behind steel and glass.

But not anymore. In fact, it’s far more pleasant to ride on the Bay than the Golden Gate, where the bike path is narrow and cluttered. Now, it’s the golden one that seems to belong to another age, with the Bay Bridge designed to be personally experienced.

“It’s really a spectacular excursion,” Renee Rivera, executive director of the East Bay Bicycle Coalition, told me. “I was taken by surprise by what fun it is to be on a bike on that bridge.”

But the stirring sensation of riding or walking the Bay Bridge only accentuates its main shortcoming; at least the noisy, harrowing Golden Gate Bridge goes all the way across.

“We just spent $6 billion on that,” Fajans said, gesturing to the new Bay Bridge, “and you’re saying we can’t spend a little more to complete the bike lane? That’s not fair.”

Goodwin and others say that motorists paid for the new Bay Bridge with their tolls, but Fajans calls bullshit, noting that BART passengers pay more than drivers for a round trip across the bay without buying exclusive access in the future.

In this age of austerity, with government funding for transportation projects drying up and people reluctant to raise their own tolls or taxes, it’s hard to do what’s needed. That’s one reason cycling advocates take what they can get, such as an expensive western span proposal with one of two paths reserved for maintenance vehicles to smooth the automotive flow.

“If we have to sell it to the public to increase tolls, we’ll have to show that it benefits everyone,” Rivera said.

Completing this path, somehow, is a top priority for the cyclists.

“It was a little tough to get people’s attention on the western span for the last couple years, but now is the time,” Leah Shahum, executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, told us.

Neither director seems willing to embrace Carlsson’s radical approach of simply seizing a lane.

“Like Chris, we feel strongly about equity on the bridge,” Rivera said. “At the same time, it needs to function smoothly as a bridge and I would be concerned about it bottlenecking at Treasure Island.”

Carlsson rejects the neoliberal approach of begging for scraps as we ride into a future that simply can’t continue to be dominated by automobiles. He says the Bay Pier must not rest there for another decade.

“Both bike coalitions have a resistance to appearing anti-car,” Carlsson says, “so they aren’t willing to say the obvious thing.”

Carlsson talks about the Bay Bridge as part of the free Shaping San Francisco lecture series at 7:30pm, Sept. 11, Eric Quezada Center for Culture and Politics, 518 Valencia, SF.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Kim calls for hearing on how SFPD investigates cyclist fatalities UPDATED

Sasha Cuttler
-
72
Kim calls for hearing on how SFPD investigates cyclist fatalities UPDATED

UPDATED In the wake of revelations of shoddy and insensitive police work related to the Aug. 14 death of 24-year-old bicyclist Amelie Le Moullac, who was run over by a commercial truck driver who turned right across her path as she rode in a bike lane on Folsom Street at 6th Street, Sup. Jane Kim today called for a hearing on how the SFPD investigates cyclist fatalities.

The issue has lit up the Bay Guardian website with hundreds of reader comments after we wrote a series of blog posts and our “Anti-cyclist bias must stop” editorial, including our revelation that the SFPD failed to seek surveillance video of the crash even as its Sgt. Richard Ernst showed up at an Aug. 21 memorial to Le Moullac to denigrate cyclists and make unfounded statements about the fatal collision.

Police Chief Greg Suhr later apologized for Ernst’s behavior and the flawed investigation and said that surveillance video unearthed by cycling activists led to the conclusion by a police investigation that the driver who killed Le Moullac was at fault, according to Bay City News and SF Appeal, which also reported on Kim’s call for a hearing.

As we reported, motorists are rarely cited in collisions with cyclists or pedestrians, even when there’s a fatality involved and the motorist didn’t have the right-of-way, which appears to the case in Le Moullac’s death. The District Attorney’s Office, which did not immediately return a call from the Guardian, is considering whether to bring criminal charges in the case.

UPDATE: We just heard from DA’s Office spokesperson Stephanie Ong Stillman, who said, “The San Francisco Police Department has delivered a preliminary investigative package and we are in the process of reviewing it to determine what additional investigation is necessary.”

UPDATE 9/5 5pm: San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Leah Shahum says she welcomes Kim’s hearings, which are long overdue. “We’re really thankful to Jane for bringing this forward,” Shahum told the Guardian, saying she hopes the hearing results in changes to how the SFPD investigates cyclist fatalilties. “We want to make sure there is ongoing accountability.”

She also said the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency has indicated to SFBC that it is working on near-term and long-term improvements on both Folsom and Howard streets, where cyclists in bike lanes must regularly contend to drivers cutting them off. The city does seem committed to a significant pilot of better bikeways there.”

Meanwhile, as the San Francisco Examiner reported today, Le Moullac’s family has filed a civil lawsuit against the driver who killed her, Gilberto Oriheaula Alcantar, as well as the company that he was driving for, Daylight Foods Inc., alleging that he was negligent in driving too fast and failing to pulled into the bike lane before making a right turn from Folsom onto 6th Street.

Put the Warriors Arena atop CalTrain

Michael Redmond
-
21

OPINION Numerous problems with the proposed location of a new Warriors stadium and surrounding complex are obvious. What we need is a better solution, not just laments about the folly of it all. Is there a better solution for everyone?

We can take a page from Warriors co-owner Peter Guber’s book, “Tell To Win.” He explains how a business proposal lives or dies in terms of the story it embodies. The story trumps piles of statistics or litanies of problems. This is what tries men’s souls and glazes eyes. But there is an alternative story to tell in this case, one that is win-win for everyone.

Let’s create a great sports complex at the heart of our public transportation system. We don’t need to clog the waterfront when we can build a great sports mecca elsewhere. Let’s take a cue from New York City and how Madison Square Garden perches directly above Penn Station.

Right now CalTrain has an ideally located terminus in the core of the city, but it’s unsightly. Why not put the new stadium directly above the CalTrain station? The same solution is being applied right now to the new Time Warner headquarters at Hudson Yards on the west side in New York: several skyscrapers will rise on platforms above an existing rail yard.

Consider the advantages: CalTrain passengers can walk upstairs to see a game! Muni and BART riders can take a short walk to the stadium. Soon they’ll be able to ride the Central Subway to it as well. It’s the perfect place for a major indoor arena that could host diverse events.

AT&T Park is just a block away and already lends enormous appeal to this entire area. The train yard extends from 4th to 7th St and the space above this great expanse could house a sizeable parking garage, less than a block from the 280 access ramp, as well as a hotel, restaurants, condos, offices and perhaps a shopping complex.

It’s everything Peter Guber and his partners dream of, that the city needs, and that we can embrace, now that it’s in the right place.

Let’s welcome the Warriors by all means. But do we want a Titanic on the waterfront when we can have a jewel above the CalTrain station that will simultaneously overcome the gulf that now exists between the western part of SOMA and Mission Bay?

This location could establish a sports complex the rival of any in the country. An essential, but dreary space turns into a great sports oasis, like Cinderella at midnight but in reverse. Perhaps the city will even want to include a large, well-equipped community recreation center for all of us who like to play as well as watch.

Bill Nichols is a consultant for documentary filmmakers and has published a dozen books related to the cinema. He lives in San Francisco.

Forget the Willie Brown Bay Bridge

Michael Redmond
-
73

EDITORIAL As the California Legislature prepares to wrap up before fall recess, a resolution is working its way through the approval process to rename the western span of the Bay Bridge the “Willie L. Brown Jr. Bridge.”

Brown, who formerly served as mayor of San Francisco and speaker of the California Assembly, is known for boasting about his hobnobbing with the rich and famous in his San Francisco Chronicle column, “Willie’s World.” But to longtime progressive San Franciscans who spent decades trying to stem the tide of gentrification, he was the powerful figure that rolled out the welcome mat for high-end developers and corporate interests, whose interests in San Francisco revolved around profit alone.

As mayor, Brown presided over land-use policies that resulted in high-end developments at a time when evictions were rampant, a trend that rings familiar in today’s tech-saturated San Francisco. Once, when pressed on the idea that his approach was making the city increasingly unaffordable, Brown’s famous retort was: “If you don’t make $50,000 a year in San Francisco, then you shouldn’t live here.”

It’s not just Brown’s insensitivity to struggling tenants, deep ties to corporate interests and high-end real-estate developers, or continued behind-the-scenes influence in San Francisco politics that cause us to squirm when we think about the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge bearing this politician’s name. There’s also the key question of whether Bay Area residents actually want to see this happen — and, given Brown’s historic role as a divisive figure, the idea that there is universal support for such an idea is laughable.

A legislative analysis presented to the Assembly Committee on Transportation a few weeks ago noted that lawmakers actually came up with ground rules for big decisions like whether a bridge ought to be named after someone, to “promote fairness.” The rules stipulate that such a proposal “must reflect a community consensus” — and guess what? Even Brown’s editors over at the Chronicle issued a June editorial opposing the idea.

Not only that, but proposals like this are only supposed to come from representatives of the district where the thing being renamed is located — yet this scheme came from Assemblymember Isadore Hall, a Democrat from Compton. But despite clear failure to adhere to these basic rules, only a single committee member voted against naming the bridge after Brown.

Interestingly enough, the bill even includes a request for Caltrans to determine the cost of posting signs commemorating Brown, which would evidently be funded by donations from unspecified private sources.

If the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge is going to be named after anyone, we agree that the honor should be reserved for beloved 19th-century San Francisco eccentric Joshua Abraham Norton, the Scotsman who proclaimed himself Emperor of the United States in 1859 and printed his own currency.

So far, a Change.org petition calling on Gov. Jerry Brown to name it the Emperor Norton Bay Bridge has garnered 1,800 signatures. “He was a champion of racial and religious unity, an advocate for women’s suffrage [and] a defender of the people,” the petition notes. That sounds more like something motorists can be proud of when they drive back and forth across the bay.

 

Choose your own adventure

Michael Redmond
-
4
Choose your own adventure

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER For fans of experimental performance, there’s nothing quite like the San Francisco Fringe Festival. Now a venerable 22 years old, the Fringe still retains its freewheeling nature, where anything goes and expecting the unexpected is the best approach. It’s also served as a vital incubator for many now-established theater companies — including Cutting Ball, Crowded Fire, Mugwumpin, and Thrillpeddlers — and no other festival prepares theater artists for the business realities of self-producing quite like the Fringe. The fest makes them responsible for every detail of their show’s success, including play creation, technical design, transportation, and audience outreach.

Hosted at the EXIT Theatre, which holds down the edge of the downtown theater district, the SF Fringe is the final stop on the annual Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals circuit (which stretches east to west across the North American continent). Over the years, it has welcomed artists from as nearby as the Mission District and as far away as Mauritius, drawing their names (literally) out of a hat during a public lottery to ensure that all applicants get an equal shot at participating.

This commitment to non-curation is what sets the Fringe apart from other theater festivals, as even the organizers don’t know what to expect from a given show until the curtain goes up. With that caveat in mind, here’s a sampling of shows that look promising for one reason or another — though your best bet, as always, is to see as many shows as possible and discover what stands out for you.

Solo shows are a Fringe staple, since technical considerations are skewed in favor of minimalist productions. With Held offers a glimpse inside the mind and method of a local artist, John Held Jr.; playwright-performer Jeremy Greco (of The Thrilling Adventures of Elvis in Space infamy) spent over a year interviewing Held about his life, and another year creating a show out of the material. Rebecca M. Fisher (2007’s The Magnificence of the Disaster) takes her audiences down south with Memphis on My Mind, while local comedian and circus school alumna Jill Vice brings them to the bar to pour everyone a (metaphorical) round in The Tipped & the Tipsy. Triple threat musician, actor, and improv artist Jeff England promises to combine all of his talents in his solo offering Tale Me Another, while another triple threat (singer-dancer-actor) Movin’ Melvin Brown brings his well-traveled performance piece A Man, A Magic, A Music to SF for the first time.

Shows which topically involve sex are another time-honored Fringe tradition, and this year’s selection seems especially wide-ranging. There’s 52 Letters, by Regina Y. Evans, which delves into the tricky territory of sex-trafficking with a performance poetry format; and The Women of Tu-Na House, a solo show by Nancy Eng, who portrays eight women working the “massage parlor” circuit.

One sexy show that breaks into the territory of the fantastical is Fish-girl, co-created and performed by Siouxsie Q, creator of the popular sex worker podcast and blog the WhoreCast. A mermaid grapples with “the feeling of being half in one world and half in another,” a common sentiment among sex workers, many of whom also “identify strongly with the mermaid myth,” according to Q.

For lovers of the purely experimental there are always a few Fringe shows that are best categorized as impossible-to-categorize, and it’s often these shows that best encapsulate the spirit of what’s possible, theatrically, in and out of the Festival. This year these include the welcome return of Popcorn Anti-Theater’s traveling bus with a whole new lineup of performers (including clowns, comediennes, and shadow puppeteers) and new secret locations on their mysterious itinerary.

Fringe stalwarts Dark Porch Theatre return with what sounds like one of their most ambitious projects to date, StormStressLenz, a fractured remix of the works of J. M. R. Lenz, an 18th century German playwright of the little-referenced sturm und drang movement. Remounted in 30 small vignettes connected to one of six themes — love, tricks, conflict, sorrow, resolution, and reunion — the piece is said to be structured like a concert of chamber music, with director-translator Martin Schwartz as conductor. Davis Shakespeare Ensemble’s Nightingale is a work of devised theater combining medieval and modern text, movement, shadow puppetry, and beat boxing; while performance artist Cara Rose DeFabio brings a follow-up to her 2012 multimedia piece She Was a Computer with After the Tone, a reflection on death, immortality, and technology with an audience participation component (hint: keep your cellphone on).

“This is my first Fringe, and I couldn’t be more excited,” DeFabio confides enthusiastically. “While at times it feels overwhelming, that abundance of choice and excitement is exactly what buoys the whole festival.” *

SAN FRANCISCO FRINGE FESTIVAL

Sept. 6-21, $12.99 or less (passes, $40-75)

EXIT Theatreplex

156 Eddy, SF

www.sffringe.org

 

The other thing Chelsea Manning said, and more updates

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
-
23

By now, we all now that Pfc. Bradley Manning, who was sentenced to 35 years on Aug. 21 for leaking classified U.S. government documents, would like to enter the next phase of her life as a woman named Chelsea. “I want everyone to know the real me,” Manning said in a statement. “I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female.”

But the message on gender identity wasn’t Manning’s only public statement the day the sentencing was decided. There was also this, a heartfelt explanation of why the whistleblower did what she did, titled, “Sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society.” Manning writes:

“It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret military reports on a daily basis that I started to question the morality of what we were doing. It was at this time I realized in our efforts to meet this risk posed to us by the enemy, we have forgotten our humanity. We consciously elected to devalue human life both in Iraq and Afghanistan. When we engaged those that we perceived were the enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians. Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability.”

Meanwhile, Bay Area supporters who rallied for Manning at the San Francisco Pride Parade and every other juncture – including attending the trial in Fort Meade, gathering on the day verdict was announced and most recently launching a campaign calling for the WikiLeaker’s pardon – also gathered at Justin Hermann Plaza Aug. 21 in response to the sentence.

The SFPD and CCTV


Yesterday, we told you about CommunityCam, a new online mapping platform that displays surveillance camera locations throughout San Francisco. We’d placed a phone call to Sgt. Dennis Toomer of the San Francisco Police Department’s Media Relations Unit to ask whether SFPD has an eye toward collaboration on this effort, but didn’t hear back until after publishing the post. In a voice message, Toomer explained the manner in which SFPD utilizes CCTV footage to investigate crimes. He said:

“The SFPD does not own or operate any [permanently installed] cameras. There are some cameras throughout the city, but those are operated by the Department of Emergency Management. Consequently, we don’t monitor cameras either. At events like the Pride Parade, Bay to Breakers, we have put up our own cameras along the parade routes, or along the race routes, just for the purpose of deploying resources.

“As soon as the event is over, those cameras come back down, and we don’t store any kind of video footage. What we do is, we rely on the public, the commercial businesses, banks, stores, you name it, to provide us with video if a crime occurs in that area – but it’s not something that we monitor. We ask the public to provide us with any kind of video tape, or cameras or surveillance that they operate. We don’t maintain our own system. Again, the city cameras that are around in certain areas – like the Tenderloin, Bayview, I believe out in Ingleside – those are all operated and managed by DEM.”

Where the Uber meets the road 

We recently reported that Uber, the smartphone-enabled ride service that does not wish to be lumped in with rideshares or taxis, is facing a class action lawsuit from drivers who claim they were cheated out of hard-earned tips.

Uber spokesperson Andrew Noyes initially declined to comment, but has since emailed an official response (which does not actually contain any answers to the Guardian’s questions). Here is what Noyes had to say about the lawsuit, which Uber has not yet received:

“While we have not yet been served with this complaint, the allegations made against our company are entirely without merit and we will defend ourselves vigorously. Uber values its partners above all else and our technology platform has allowed thousands of drivers to generate an independent wage and build their own small businesses on their own time. Frivolous lawsuits like this cost valuable time, money and resources that are better spent making cities more accessible, opening up more possibilities for riders and providing more business for drivers.”

Memorial for cyclist marred by SFPD harassment

Sasha Cuttler
-
380

A memorial and informational event this morning at the 6th and Folsom corner where a bicyclist was fatally run over by a truck last week was marred by a tense and unsettling confrontation with an SFPD sergeant who showed up to block the bike lane with his cruiser, lecture the cyclists, and blame the victim.

The event was organized by the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition to raise awareness of the incident and that dangerous intersection and to call for the city to make improvements. It included friends and co-workers of 24-year-old Amelie Le Moullac, who was riding in the Folsom Street bike lane on the morning of Aug. 14 when an unidentified delivery truck driver turned right onto 6th Street, across her path, and ran her over.

SFPD Sgt. Dennis Toomer tells the Guardian that the department has completed the traffic incident report, information from which can only be shared with the parties involved, but that the investigation of the fatality is still ongoing and will be forwarded to the District Attorney’s Office for review once it’s done.

But SFBC Executive Director Leah Shahum said that SFPD Sgt. Richard Ernst, who showed up at the event a little before 9am, had already drawn his own conclusions about the crash and showed up to make his apparent disdain for “you people,” bicyclists, disturbingly clear.

Shahum said that she tried to be diplomatic with Ernst and asked him to please move his patrol car out of the bike lane and into an available parking space that was right next to it, saying that it presented an unnecessary hazard to bicyclists riding past.

But she said Ernst refused to do so for almost 10 minutes, telling the group that he has “a right” to leave his car than and that he was “making the point that bicyclists need to move around” cars parked in bike lanes, according to Shahum’s written account, which she prepared to file a report about the incident with the Office of Citizens Complaints.

“He then told me explicitly that he ‘would not leave until’ I ‘understood’ that ‘it was the bicyclist’s fault.’ This was shocking to hear, as I was told just a day ago by Commander [Mikail] Ali that the case was still under investigation and no cause had yet been determined,” Shahum wrote.

And apparently Ernst didn’t stop at denouncing Le Moullac for causing her own death, in front of people who are still mourning that death. Shahum said Ernst also blamed the other two bicyclist deaths in SF this year on the cyclists, and on “you people” in the SFBC for not teaching cyclists how to avoid cars.

“I told him the SF Bicycle Coalition does a significant amount of safety work educating people biking and driving about sharing the road, and that I’d be happy to share more information with him. I again urged him to move his car out of the bike lane. He again refused, saying it was his right and he wasn’t moving until I ‘understood,’” Shahum wrote.

Shahum said there were multiple witness to the incident, including three television reporters who were there to cover the event.

“In addition to the Sgt’s inappropriate and dangerous behavior of parking his car in the bike lane and blocking safe passage for people bicycling by, it was deeply upsetting to see him unnecessarily disrupt and add tension to what was already an emotional and difficult time for many people who lamented this sad loss of life,” Shahum wrote.

Asked about the actions and attitudes expressed today by Ernst, who we could not reach for comment, Sgt. Toomer told us he “cannot talk about personnel issues.”

Compounding Ernst’s insensitive and judgmental approach today, it also appears the SFPD may have failed to properly investigate this incident, which Shahum and the SFBC have been tracking closely, and she said the SFPD told her that there were no video surveillance tapes of the collision.

After today’s event, SFBC’s Marc Caswell decided to check in at businesses on the block to see if they had any video cameras aimed at the intersection, and he found an auto body business at the intersection whose workers said they did indeed have revealing footage of the crash that the SFPD hasn’t requested, but which SFBC today delivered to investigators.

“He had the time to come harass us as a memorial, but he didn’t have the time to see if anyone had footage of this incident. It’s very unsettled,” Shahum told us.

Whoever was ultimately at fault in this collision and others that have injured or killed bicyclists in San Francisco, today’s confrontation demonstrates an unacceptable and dangerous insensitivity and animosity toward bicyclists in San Francisco, which was also on display in the comments to the post that I wrote last week about the incident.

It’s fine to debate what happens on the streets of San Francisco, and you can even harbor resentments toward bicyclists and believe that we deserve your ire. But when you endanger people’s lives to make a point, or when you threaten violence against vulnerable road users, then you’ve gone too far.

Yes, let’s talk about what happens on the roads and how to improve behaviors, but let’s not forget our humanity in the process.  

Waiting to connect

Michael Redmond
-
10
Waiting to connect

news@sfbg.com

Eight years ago, San Francisco almost gave away an enormously lucrative public utility to Google and Earthlink: a citywide Wi-Fi connection. The hastily drawn up plan was championed by then-Mayor Gavin Newsom after a Google executive pitched him on the idea of citywide wireless Internet access at a dinner party.

Google’s Wi-Fi scheme would have blanketed the city with coverage, but it would also have required users to obtain Google accounts to sign in, thereby facilitating the company’s vacuum-like data harvesting practices that suck up everything from search queries and emails to the geographic locations of smartphones and tablets. Google’s Wi-Fi plan would have allowed the tech giant to insert “prioritized placement” of ads and brands into a Wi-Fi user’s feed, limiting choice of content through profit-driven algorithms.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, ACLU of Northern California, Electronic Privacy Information Center, and we at the Bay Guardian all criticized the plan (see “Tech Disconnect,” 11/9/05). Earthlink, Google’s partner in the privatization deal, nearly went bankrupt in 2007 and the company bailed on the Wi-Fi proposal. That was the end of the city’s first Wi-Fi scheme. Thousands of free networks in cafes and hotels popped up in the meantime, leading many to question the purpose of building municipal Wi-Fi.

But municipal Wi-Fi is back. Sup. Mark Farrell and Mayor Ed Lee announced recently that free Wi-Fi is coming to 31 San Francisco parks. Google is involved yet again, but officials in the city’s Department of Technology say that the network will be not be controlled by Google, nor directly susceptible to privacy invasions by the “don’t be evil” company or its affiliates. In short, it will be a public utility.

 

PUBLIC UTILITY

“I think a lot of the prior debate around free Wi-Fi in San Francisco that never moved forward was because of different questions around business models,” Farrell told us. “To emphasize, this is a free gift [from Google] of financial benefit to the city of San Francisco with no strings attached.”

For the parks, Google has agreed to give a $600,000 contribution to fund Wi-Fi installation and two years of operation. Farrell said this is the company’s only role. There will be no Google hardware or software allowing the company to devour user data or steer traffic.

San Francisco’s reinvigorated push to build out public Wi-Fi comes just as major telecom companies and Internet giants like Google are again targeting large Wi-Fi networks for privatization. In the late 2000s, many tech companies abandoned Wi-Fi services as unprofitable. Telecom companies were busy expanding their cellphone infrastructure.

But thanks to the proliferation and technical advances of smartphones, cellular networks are now choking on megabits of traffic. Telecom companies see Wi-Fi as a means of offloading mobile traffic onto broadband infrastructure. Google and other companies see Wi-Fi networks as vast troves of consumer data, and airwaves on which to advertise.

Google’s grant for Wi-Fi in San Francisco’s parks comes after months of bad press for the company and the tech sector, including revelations that all of Silicon Valley’s top companies readily cooperated with the NSA’s electronic surveillance programs.

Google also recently paid out $7 million to settle state investigations into its “Wi-Spy” data collection activities: wireless receivers hidden in Google’s Street View vehicles sopped up communications data, including passwords and even email content, from millions of networks in the United States and Europe. Beside Google’s numerous spying scandals, the company has also come under criticism for aggressively avoiding federal taxes, and locally for its impact on San Francisco’s transportation and housing problems.

If the $600,000 gift is designed to bolster Google’s image as a good corporate citizen, it probably also makes good business sense. “Thousands of Googlers live and work in SF,” said Jenna Wandres, a spokesperson for the company replied to our inquiries by email.

Marc Touitou, director of the city’s Department of Technology, told us the park Wi-Fi system will be entirely the city’s, and that no third party corporation will determine who can use the service or under what terms.

“It’s not a Google network, it’s not a Wi-Fi name from Google. It’s a donation, a gesture,” said Touitou. He added that talks with AT&T to let the company roll out a Wi-Fi network for all of Market Street were recently cut off because his office has decided to build the system as a fully municipal network instead.

 

CORPORATE GIFTS

Touitou’s office has plans to light up free municipal Wi-Fi along the Embarcadero, in the Castro, Noe Valley, and perhaps even on Muni buses in the near future. With the parks, Touitou said the idea is to gain back the confidence of the public, to show that the city can do this on its own. Touitou also said that he hopes the city will budget funds for these Wi-Fi systems so that they’re not reliant on corporate gifts.

“We reserve right to leverage this model where companies can put money in because it’s in their interest,” Touitou said. “They don’t care what name is on the network so long as they can dump their traffic on it.”

A public utility model will allow San Francisco to own and operate Wi-Fi across the city and to allow telecom companies to funnel mobile traffic through the city’s infrastructure, likely for a fee. Touitou said it doesn’t make sense for the city to give away its Wi-Fi infrastructure as it is a limited and increasingly valuable asset.

“The day we sell it would be a sad day,” Touitou added.

He described the city’s two radio towers, 200 buildings, thousands of utility poles, and the fiber optic grid that can connect these as the backbone of a robust municipal wireless network. Telecom and Internet companies will pay to use the infrastructure under this model. Most privacy experts who examined San Francisco’s prior Wi-Fi plans have yet to weigh in on the parks network. Revelations about the NSA’s vast spying programs have consumed the attention of groups like EFF and the ACLU.

Touitou said, however, that the city’s Wi-Fi privacy policies will be strong. “This isn’t a third party network trying to market to you,” explained Touitou. “It’s a city network that wants to facilitate traffic, and we want to have the privacy respected.”

Even as San Francisco plans its next steps with city Wi-Fi, Google is rapidly expanding its own wireless network operations. Already the company controls the citywide Wi-Fi network for Mountain View where the “Googleplex” is located. Google also has Wi-Fi networks scooping up communications in Boston’s South Station and New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. The terms of Google’s Mountain View deal do not limit Google from collecting data, and users are required to sign in with a Google account. Google also recently announced that it will take control over Starbucks’ thousands of Wi-Fi networks, creating a potentially vast trove of consumer data and a marketing platform for both companies. Starbucks has 50 locations in San Francisco.

AT&T, which lost the Starbucks contract to Google, and also lost its bid to take over Market Street’s airwaves, has its own data mining projects that tap the company’s Wi-Fi networks in 30 countries for personal information, and to route telecom traffic.

So even with municipal Wi-Fi, tech and telecom companies will still have ample ability to siphon off communications data straight from wireless networks and hand it to the feds or to advertisers.

Lawsuit alleges Uber unfairly withholds tips from drivers

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
-
51

A class action lawsuit filed against Uber, a tech-based service that connects riders to drivers and has filled San Francisco streets with sleek black town cars, alleges that the company is cheating its drivers out of tips.

The suit also charges that drivers have been misclassified as independent contractors under California law.

Uber’s website tells customers there is “no need to tip,” and drivers are prohibited from accepting any extra cash. The complaint alleges that “drivers do not receive the tips that are customary in the car service industry and that they would otherwise receive were it not for Uber’s communication to customers that they do not need to tip.”

The lawsuit was filed in San Francisco’s Northern District on Aug. 16. Attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, of the Boston-based firm Lichten & Liss-Riordan, believes that by withholding tips “Uber is artificially trying to make the total price look lower – and in doing so, they’re hurting the drivers.”

Douglas O’Connor, who is named as a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said that when he started working as an Uber driver in San Francisco about 10 months ago, he was told not to accept tips because they were included in the service fees automatically charged to customers’ credit cards. But there’s nothing in his paycheck to indicate whether he has received a gratuity or for what amount, O’Connor said.

“For some of the drivers there has been a line item, but that line item that’s called the gratuity has not gone to the drivers,” Liss-Riordan explained. In those cases, it appears Uber takes half, she said. And in cases like O’Connor’s, “There is no separate gratuity that’s going to the drivers,” Liss-Riordan said, so the representation that any tip was included in the first place is “a lie.”

Liss-Riordan noted that Uber has even been known to send out “secret shoppers” who are directed to take Uber, offer cash tips, and report whether the drivers accepted the tips or declined with the explanation that the tips are included in the service fee, as they are instructed to.

Meanwhile, Uber recently required drivers to agree to revised contract terms, which is mandatory in order to continue their relationship with the ridesharing company. Buried in the fine print is an arbitration clause with a class action waiver. By agreeing to these terms – something Uber not only requires but makes exceptionally easy with the tap of a button on a smartphone – drivers are essentially giving up their rights to join a class action suit against the company. O’Connor noted that the contracts were sent out in English only, but English is not the first language of many Uber drivers.

“In order to opt out of this class action they have to send a hand-delivered letter to the general counsel of Uber in San Francisco,” Liss-Riordan pointed out. “We’re also trying to get the word out to Uber drivers that if they want to participate in this class action case and potentially recover their tips, they actually have to opt out of this arbitration clause.”

O’Connor said he drives between 30 and 70 hours a week, and would like to continue doing so in the long run. But without the additional income he feels he could be earning in tips, “I’m not going to be able to do it. It’s just so expensive to live in the San Francisco Bay Area.” He described what happened when a businessman he’d ferried to the airport offered to add an additional $10 to $15 onto his company credit card for exceptional customer service. He couldn’t, because Uber does not provide a mechanism for attaching an additional driver bonus onto the service fee. 

Asked if there was an estimate as to how much drivers could be losing in tips, Liss-Riordan said, “It adds up to a lot – for someone working there for over a year, you could be talking in the hundreds if not thousands of dollars.” And for the entire class of Uber drivers, who are estimated to number in the thousands across major U.S. cities, she noted that the total damages sought could end up being in the millions.

In addition to charging that Uber is “unjustly enriching” itself by collecting fees that are owed to drivers, the suit also claims that Uber drivers should be classified as employees under California law.  

“Under California law, there’s a multi-factor test to determine whether someone is an employee or an independent contractor and the test looks at things like … whether the workers’ services form the core part of what the business does,” Liss-Riordan explained. In this case, they do, she added: “If there were no drivers, there would be no Uber.”

As independent contractors, Uber drivers must pay for their own gas expenses and vehicle maintenance. They are not eligible for workers compensation or unemployment benefits in the event that they are terminated. Nor is Uber required to make any contributions toward its San Francisco drivers’ health care costs, since its drivers aren’t considered employees. The San Francisco Health Care Security Ordinance mandates that employers contribute toward healthcare for any employee working eight hours or more.

Liss-Riordan specializes in representing tipped employees. She prevailed in a lawsuit against American Airlines on behalf of skycaps who were prevented from receiving tips because the airline created a $2 fee for curbside check-in that led passengers to believe that gratuity was included.

Reached via email, Uber spokesperson Andrew Noyes declined to answer questions about the allegations raised in the complaint, nor would he explain why Uber required its drivers to agree to an arbitration clause waiving their rights to join a class action suit. Noyes declined to comment, saying the complaint had not yet been formally served.

O’Connor, meanwhile, said he agreed to be named as a plaintiff in the case “in order to improve working conditions for myself and my colleagues.” Asked if he was concerned whether this decision would affect his standing as an Uber driver, O’Connor shrugged it off. “I’m probably not going to get the employee driver of the month award,” he joked.

Plan Bay Area takes legal punches from the left and right

Sasha Cuttler
-
45
Plan Bay Area takes legal punches from the left and right

Plan Bay Area, the regional strategy to funnel future population growth into San Francisco and other big cities in order to combat climate change, is now being slammed with legal challenges from both sides of the ideological spetrum.

Those left-right punches could knock out a plan that critics called a schizophrenic attempt to accomplish competing goals with inadequate resources and resolve. For example, it created incentives to increase housing density along transit lines, but it did little to limit private automobile use, make that housing affordable by people who do use transit, or address the displacement of existing urban populations.

Earthjustice, Communities for a Better Environment, and the Sierra Club today filed a lawsuit in Alameda Couty Superior Court challenging Plan Bay Area’s recent approval by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and the Association of Bay Area Governments.

That lawsuit follows one filed Friday with the same court by the Building Industry Association of the Bay Area. And those two suits follow another one filed Aug. 6 by the conservative Sacramento law firm Pacific Legal Foundation on behalf of a group calling itself Bay Area Citizens.

While that first lawsuit from the Tea Party crowd criticizes the very idea of regional planning and the validity of addressing global warming, these latest two lawsuits basically call out Plan Bay Area and its supporters for not going far enough to address the goals laid out in the plan.

Earthjustice and the community groups it works with criticize Plan Bay Area for disrupting Bay Area communities with an accelerated growth plan that doesn’t address environmental justice issues like those faced by West Oakland residents, whose air quality would be worsened by an influx of automobile traffic.   

 “The people of the Bay Area take pride in living in one of the most diverse, culturally and economically vibrant metropolitan areas in the world. We demand smart planning for growth—the kind that improves our quality of life, makes life easier and less expensive for residents all over the Bay Area, and allows our communities to thrive and grow,” Irene Gutierrez, Earthjustice associate attorney, said in a press release. “This requires responsible planning that reduces climate change pollution, plans for smart public transit growth, avoids toxic zones, and dirty and harmful air quality. Plan Bay Area does not achieve those goals. The people of the Bay Area deserve a much better plan.”

And Bay Area developers are focused on how the plan calls for more transit-oriented development without investing in the public infrastructure needed to serve it, criticizing the state legislation behind Plan Bay Area that relaxes the environmental studies of projects in transportation corridors.

“SB 375 calls on the Bay Area and other regions of California to integrate residential and transportation planning in ways that fully accommodate their housing need and in ways that allow for reduced reliance on and emissions from passenger vehicles,” said Bob Glover, executive officer of BIA | Bay Area. “Plan Bay Area is a cop out.  It neither plans for enough housing nor provides a reasonable path for developing it and therefore looks a lot more like a pulling up of the draw bridge than a sustainable communities strategy.”

To learn more about Plan Bay Area, you can read our May cover story, “Planning for Displacement,” or the coverage of a public forum that we and other groups sponsorerd.

Dick Meister: Still dreaming of justice

-
2

Dick Meister is a San Francisco-based columnist who has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century.  Contact him through his website,www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

Think back to Aug. 28, 1963.  More than a quarter-million labor and civil rights activists led by Martin Luther King Jr. march onto the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to demand good jobs at decent wages and strict enforcement and expansion of the laws guaranteeing meaningful civil and economic rights to all Americans.

The demands, spelled out in Dr. King’s famous “I have a Dream” speech that day,  will be forcefully raised once again by  a fiftieth  anniversary March from the Lincoln Memorial  to the King Memorial  on the  Mall  this August 24.

The 2013 march has been called for very good reason: The need for greatly strengthened labor and civil rights is at least as urgent today as it was in 1963. By any measure, the 1963 March was a huge success. It had a direct and strong influence on the enactment a year later of laws prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations and the passage two years later of the Voting Rights Act that enabled many African -Americans to freely cast ballots for the first time.

But despite the successes that followed the march, the nation once again faces severe economic and social problems. Consider:

*Voter suppression has become a serious problem once more, with several
states imposing new restrictions on the right to vote that have been upheld
in court.

*Unemployment remains notably high, particularly among African-American
workers, and young workers generally, even as a great need for workers to
rebuild the nation’s crumbling transportation and energy infrastructure
continues to mount.

*Jobless workers now, as then, need much more government aid, with
unemployment insurance payments averaging only $300 a week.  Many workers
who manage to find jobs are able to work only part-time or only temporarily,
and for less pay than they made on previous jobs.

*Millions of women workers face blatant job discrimination, as do older
workers, the young and African-American workers in general. They often are
paid less than others doing the same work, and often are denied promotions
that they’ve earned. Women sometimes face sexual harassment as well.
*Millions of workers, male and female alike, are forced to live on
poverty-level pay, including those workers making the grossly inadequate
federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. Many of the country’s fast-food
workers are lucky if they make even that.

*Millions lack paid sick leave needed to care for sick children and other
family members and to keep them from having to work when ill and endanger
the health of others as well as themselves.

*Public employees, who perform some of the country’s most vital work, are
under steady attack by politicians and others who seize on them as
scapegoats by blaming the workers, many of them women and people of color,
for the economic problems that beset government at all levels. They strive
mightily to cut the employees ‘pay and pensions and other benefits and mute
their political and economic voices.

*Income inequality is a severe problem. The gap between the haves and
have-nots is downright spectacular. A recent study by the Economic Policy
Institute showed, for instance, that the CEOs of major companies make on
average about 273 times more than the average worker. That’s right ­­
average executive pay is almost three times  the average pay of ordinary
workers. Are those who direct work really worth so much more than those who
actually do the work?

 *Thousands of workers are endangered by lax enforcement of job safety laws,
thousands shortchanged by employers who fail to pay them what they’ve been
promised and clearly earned.

*Anti-labor employers openly violate laws that promise workers the right of
unionization that would enable them to effectively try to improve their
inadequate pay and working conditions. That’s one of the key reasons the
share of workers in unions has declined to a 97-year low of barely 11
percent.

*Despite the rise of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers union, the
men, women ­-and too often children — who harvest the food that sustains us
all are barely surviving on their poverty level wages.

*Free trade agreements and the offshoring of U.S. jobs have led to the loss
of millions of domestic jobs.

President Clayola Brown of the AFL-CIO’s A. Philip Randolph Institute, a key
2013 march sponsor named for the leader of the 1963 march, notes that as in
1963, “the job situation is deplorable. Today, we have 30-year-old people
who have never had a full-time job in their lives.”

Brown will be among the thousands of union and civil rights advocates who,
like the marchers 50 years ago, are expected to gather on the National
Mall Aug. 24 to raise their demands for justice, as they march from one to
the other of the sculpted likenesses of two of the greatest advocates of
social and economic justice who’ve ever lived.

Dick Meister is a San Francisco-based columnist who has covered labor and
politics for more than a half-century.  Contact him through his website,
www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than
350 of his columns.    Copyright 2013 Dick Meister.

(Bruce B. Brugmann writes and edits the Bruce Blog on the San Francisco Bay Guardian website. He is the editor at large and former editor and co-founder and co-publisher with his wife Jean Dibble of the SF Bay Guardian, 1966-2012.)

Tragedies remind us to pay attention and share the roads

Sasha Cuttler
-
114
Tragedies remind us to pay attention and share the roads

A pair of tragic news items involving bicyclists in San Francisco — one cyclist a victim, another a perpetrator — illustrates the need for all of us to slow down, pay attention, and safely and respectfully share the roadways of this crowded city.

The victim of yesterday’s fatal collision between a truck and bicyclist at Folsom and 6th Streets — in which the motorist turned right across the path of cyclist in a bike lane, but was inexplicably yet not surprisingly not cited by police — was today revealed to be 24-year-old Amelie Le Moullac.

Meanwhile, 37-year-old cyclist Chris Bucchere was today sentenced to 1,000 hours of community service and three years probation after pleading guilty to felony vehicular manslaughter after last year trying to beat a red light at Castro and Market streets and fatally striking elderly pedestrian Sutchi Hui.

“Motorists, pedestrians, and bicyclists must share the road in a responsible way because there are dire consequences when traffic laws are disregarded,” District Attorney George Gascon said today after Bucchere’s sentencing.

Both of these incidents were sad for all concerned, and they should remind us to be responsible and attentive travelers, a lesson that we could all use. Everyday on my bike commute home, I see motorists running red lights or darting heedlessly around obstacles, risking people’s lives to save seconds of their days; cyclists impatiently edging their way past pedestrians; and pedestrians stepping out into traffic without looking around them, often because they’re absorbed by their smartphones.

We’re all guilty of bad behavior on the roadways at times, myself included, so I’m not going to presume to stereotype any particular group of road users (I’ll leave that to the trolls). But when we hear about terrible tragedies like these, it’s good to take a moment to reflect on our own behavior and do what we can to civilly share our civic spaces, particularly when wielding the deadly weapons of a fast-moving bicycle or an automobile moving at any speed.  

Shareable, smearable

Michael Redmond
-
25

After writing critically about problems in the business models of so-called “shareable economy” companies in last week’s issue — including our cover story on Airbnb and other companies that facilitate short-term home rentals (“Into thin air“) and a story on the rideshare company Lyft (“Driven to take risks“) — the topic continued to dominate the sfbg.com Politics blog, with fresh posts and lots of reader comments:

AIRBNB PILE-ON

The excellent bilingual newspaper El Tecolote covered some of the same ground we did in its Aug. 1 cover story, “Unregulated Rental Business Takes Over Housing,” focused on how Airbnb is contributing to gentrification and displacement in the Mission District.

Reporter Jackson Ly found a couple that turned a rent-controlled apartment on 24th St. into a $249 per month de facto hotel room, booking it for 24 nights in August and making $5,976 in just one month, on top of the $3,069 they’re making in August renting out the guest room in the apartment where they actually live for $99 per night.

“It’s cheating the people that pay taxes,” Maria, who lives in the unit below this couple’s investment apartment and is tired of the rotating stream of tourists in her building, told the newspaper.

I got ahold of El Tecolote Managing Editor Iñaki Fdez. de Retana, who said that housing issues like this one are extremely important to the Latino community that lives in the Mission, and he’s been surprised that Mayor Ed Lee has been unwilling to address the impacts of Airbnb and other tech community contributors to the problem.

“It is very important,” he told us, noting that visiting European tourists are changing the character of the neighborhood. “In particular on 24th Street, which was once seen as the heart of the Mission, it’s changing overnight and [Airbnb and other housing rental websites] is a big part of that.” (Steven T. Jones)

 

UBER UGLY CRASH

Uber’s policy on insuring its drivers will soon be taken for a test drive, as the company that runs the mobile app-based ride requesting service and a driver were served with a court summons last week from a woman severely injured after a crash near a San Francisco intersection.

Those insurance policies were said to meet brand new regulatory requirements on rideshare services introduced by the California Public Utilities Commission on July 30, which was meant to solve the longtime regulatory battle between rideshare services and local governments.

The plaintiff in the suit, Claire Farhbach, was a bystander, not a customer, and that unique twist in the injury suit has experts from the taxi industry waiting to see if Uber will step up to the plate to pay for Farhbach’s injuries, or if Uber will leave driver Djamol Gafurov on the hook for the bill.

Fahrbach was walking up Divisadero street near Hayes at quarter of midnight March 12 when Gafurov’s black town car, operating as a private taxi, collided with another car on Divisadero while turning left. One of the cars then collided with a fire hydrant, and in the words of the civil suit, “this impact caused the fire hydrant to be violently sheared from its base and propelled through the air a number of feet northbound…when the fire hydrant struck (Farhbach) with a tremendous amount of force.”

Gafurov’s private taxi was operating as a “partner” of Uber, which is how the company defines its relationship to the network of drivers on its website. No private taxis or drivers are considered to be employees of Uber, as the company has repeatedly maintained, claiming that the drivers, and their actions, are not its responsibility.

Uber spokesperson Andrew Noyes told us repeatedly that drivers are not employees of the rideshare company: “Our legal team took a look at the files you sent. This is not an ‘Uber’ driver, they’re not employed by us. They’re employed by their licensed and insured limousine company.” (Joe Fitzgerald)

 

MAKING CABS BETTER

For all the (justified) grumbling about the business models of ridesharing services like Lyft and Uber, the so-called ridesharing revolution may prove to be a catalyst for a taxi industry overhaul.

“We’re adding hundreds more taxis, and our board has approved regulations for each vehicle to provide real-time locational information,” San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesperson Paul Rose told us.

“One of our goals is to move forward with making the data available to our customers to hail a cab with an app,” Rose added, referencing a plan unveiled by the transit agency several weeks ago. Faced with stiff competition from random vehicles adorned with garish pink mustaches, the taxi industry is taking a stab at evolution, or at least imitation.

To be a cab driver right now, paying off the pricey medallion they must purchase in order to operate while oblivious new transplants rake in the cash without following the same set of rules, must be infuriating.

At the same time, let’s be honest here: There’s a reason people are ditching conventional cabs and climbing into cars with random strangers who may be beckoned with the tap of a smartphone. And it has nothing to do with passengers’ sentiments about government regulation or newly minted tech millionaires.

The taxi industry lags far behind the lightning-speed reality many Bay Area residents have come to inhabit, but if it weren’t for the competition, they might not have any incentive to change.

Rideshare services might be your quintessential rogue tech companies backed by nauseating sums of venture capital, but at the end of the day, people also want taxi service that does not suck. (Rebecca Bowe)

Taxis reinvent themselves to be more like Lyft

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
-
49

For all the (justified) grumbling about the business models of ridesharing services like Lyft and Uber, the so-called ridesharing revolution may prove to be a catalyst for a taxi industry overhaul.

“We’re adding hundreds more taxis, and our board has approved regulations for each vehicle to provide real-time locational information,” San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesperson Paul Rose told me in an interview yesterday.

“One of our goals is to move forward with making the data available to our customers to hail a cab with an app,” Rose added, referencing a plan unveiled by the transit agency several weeks ago. Faced with stiff competition from random vehicles adorned with garish pink mustaches, the taxi industry is taking a stab at evolution, or at least imitation.

This week’s issue of the Guardian includes a story by journalist and part-time Lyft driver Josh Wolf, exposing a catch-22 facing Lyft drivers seeking full-coverage auto insurance. On our Politics Blog, reporter Joe Fitzgerald highlights a similar question that surfaced around ridesharing after an Uber driver’s involvement in a terrible accident.

The question of who foots the bill after someone gets crippled in a rideshare wreck is one of many accompanying the rise of unregulated app-connected cabs. Customers hailing a car with Uber have nowhere to turn in the event of a bad encounter, in contrast with the SFMTA’s complaint system for monitoring registered cabbies.

The SFMTA receives 100 to 120 cab-related complaints each month, and requires the city’s 311 information hotline info to be posted in every registered vehicle. “We follow up with every incident,” Rose said. “Results range from addressing or notifying the driver, to the very extreme – a revocation of a permit.”

To be a cab driver right now, paying off the pricey medallion they must purchase in order to operate while oblivious new transplants rake in the cash without following the same set of rules, must be infuriating.

At the same time, let’s be honest here. There’s a reason people are ditching conventional cabs and climbing into cars with random strangers who may be beckoned with the tap of a smartphone. And it has nothing to do with passengers’ sentiments about government regulation or newly minted tech millionaires.

Head over to Yelp (sorry, but it’s instructive) and read the comments yourself: Services like Lyft, Uber, and Sidecar are garnering rave reviews (Homobiles actually seems to have won the most ardent fans of all), while Yelpers use the online forum for virtual venting sessions to describe their frustrating taxi experiences. Maybe it’s a skewed sample, but there seem to be lot of people out there who were left languishing while waiting for a cab, and they’re pissed. No wonder Silicon Valley investors think it’s a good idea to dump $60 million into some faux-taxi scheme lacking clarity on even the basic question of insurance.

Wolf wrote about his experience as a Lyft driver; here’s my personal anecdote as a taxi patron. I called for a cab on a recent weekday and it never showed. When I phoned again to ask where it was, a robotic voice intoned, “an error has occurred,” and then the line went dead. Twice. When I dialed a second company, the dispatcher told me flat out that there were no cars close by. He suggested I just call someplace else, because he couldn’t help. 

Fail.

The taxi industry lags far behind the lightning-speed reality many Bay Area residents have come to inhabit, but if it weren’t for the competition, they might not have any incentive to change.

Rideshare services might be your quintessential rogue tech companies backed by nauseating sums of venture capital, but at the end of the day, people also want taxi service that does not suck. The Lyft drivers I’ve met tend to be people like Wolf – young, idealistic, bent on pursuing a creative passion despite the city’s high cost of living, and grateful for flexible work hours that make it possible to follow that dream and still make rent.

With that, here’s a sappy breakup letter composed to Yellow Cab by one Cori D., a Yelper. “I just don’t love you anymore,” she writes. “You’ve left me waiting on the curb one too many times now without a word. No ‘I’ll be a little late’ or ‘sorry you’re late for work now.’ … So I’m leaving you. In fact, I’ll confess that I’ve been cheating on you. Uber is just so handsome and reliable. … You might even say he bends over backward for me.”

True story? Or just some clever guerilla marketing orchestrated to plug Uber? Like most things pertaining to San Francisco’s information-age gold rush, it’s impossible to know for sure.

Lawsuit over injury from airborne fire hydrant tests Uber’s insurance practices

Erica Hanna
-
103
Lawsuit over injury from airborne fire hydrant tests Uber’s insurance practices

Uber’s policy on insuring its drivers will soon be taken for a test drive, as the company that runs the mobile app-based ride requesting service and a driver were served with a court summons last week from a woman severely injured after a crash near a San Francisco intersection.

Those insurances policies were said to meet brand new regulatory requirements on rideshare services introduced by the California Public Utilities Commission on July 30, which was meant to solve the longtime regulatory battle between rideshare services and local governments.

The plaintiff in the suit, Claire Farhbach, was a bystander, not a customer, and that unique twist in the injury suit has experts from the taxi industry waiting to see if Uber will step up to the plate to pay for Farhbach’s injuries, or if Uber will leave driver Djamol Gafurov on the hook for the bill.

Fahrbach was walking up Divisadero street near Hayes at quarter of midnight March 12 when Gafurov’s black town car, operating as a private taxi, collided with another car on Divisadero while turning left. One of the cars then collided with a fire hydrant, and in the words of the civil suit, “this impact caused the fire hydrant to be violently sheared from its base and propelled through the air a number of feet northbound…when the fire hydrant struck (Farhbach) with a tremendous amount of force.”

The hydrant flew 81 feet from its original position, according to the police report.

The suit notes that Fahrbach sustained lacerations to her body, a fracture in her lower leg, and multiple herniated discs that “more likely than not will require surgical intervention in her future.”

Gafurov’s private taxi was operating as a “partner” of Uber, which is how the company defines its relationship to the network of drivers on its website. No private taxis or drivers are considered to be employees of Uber, as the company has repeatedly maintained. Uber provides software that lets passengers connect with drivers, like a digital dispatch, and the ridesharing service then takes a cut of the fare.

The image above is a modified police report from the fire hydrant incident, with numbers added: 1) site of the initial collision 2) where the vehicle hit the fire hydrant 3) where the hydrant hit Farhbach.

Yet that distinction has made their insurance liabilities nebulous, and local officials have taken notice. Officials at SFO last week started arresting rideshare operators in and around the airport, and the SFMTA, which regulates taxis, also considers them a problem.

The San Francisco Airport Commission and the SFMTA submitted concerns to the California Public Utilities Commission, charging that a “lack of adequate liability insurance, criminal background checks, driver training and regular vehicle inspections all decrease public safety, and although some [transportation network companies] represent that they do all of the above, the Airport Commission is asking for regulatory verification.” according to a CPUC report. “The SFMTA asserts that TNCs have a negative effect on public safety because of a lack of regulatory oversight.”

Cab drivers have long been regulated by the state, and these agencies contend that not only are rideshare companies like Uber dangerous, but the lack of insurance can be financially ruinous to pedestrians and drivers alike.

“Because it’s a pedestrian suing, that opens up a whole can of worms, and Uber may try to put the liability on the driver,” said Trevor Johnson, director of the San Francisco Cab Driver’s Association. A former cabbie himself, he’s been on both sides of that sort of litigation, as well as in legal actions with tech companies like Uber.

Johnson is not confident the driver will be covered by his own insurance plan, because in its current pseudo-taxi company state, many insurers consider you not quite a taxi but not a private driver, putting these tech-cabbies in an awkward limbo.

“He may be left with a big judgment, and his insurance may opt to not cover him because he’s with Uber,” he said.

This is backed up in our current issue of the Guardian, where Lyft driver Josh Wolf wrote from personal experience that it is difficult for Lyft drivers to obtain full insurance coverage for their vehicles.

A rideshare driver criticized Uber in a letter he wrote to the Guardian after reading that article. “I work for a limo company, I’m fully insured, the car is fully insured, but Uber takes absolutely no responsibility for its drivers,” the driver, who wanted to be identified as “Zark,” told us. He said he feared joining the ranks of self-employed cabbies, who often are under-insured. “[Uber] holds their customers in really high regard, but they don’t hold their drivers in any regard.”

Uber maintains that the drivers, and their actions, are not their responsibility.

In response to a query about the lawsuit, Uber spokesperson Andrew Noyes stated repeatedly that drivers are not employees of the rideshare company.

“Our legal team took a look at the files you sent. This is not an ‘Uber’ driver, they’re not employed by us. They’re employed by their licensed and insured limousine company,” he said. “The important thing is that theres no characterization of a driver as a driver at Uber.”

But Gafurov, the driver named in the accident, isn’t actually employed by a limo company.

Gafurov declined to speak to the Guardian, but after some digging, a disgruntled bystander, angry with Gafurov, found that he is self-employed and registered with the CPUC as the “Limo Car Service Corporation.”

Gafurov was driving with liability insurance, his CPUC registration shows — but he not did not have excess liability insurance, which would be needed to cover extraordinary damage caused by the flying fire hydrant. The gaping hole left by the hydrant spilled water out onto all the surrounding businesses, causing intense damage, and everyone affected is seeking compensation.

Fahrbach’s lawyer, Doug Atkinson, told us the cost of the accident will be enormous.

Notably, few independent drivers have excess liability insurance.

“A lot of carriers don’t have it, because it’s expensive,” Johnson told us. “This is a case for the excess insurance, as it stands right now with that much damage and that many people after him, unless Uber steps in and helps him save the day this driver is going to be in the hole for the next 20 years.” He added, “This guy’s life is over.”

Atkinson is hopeful that getting Uber to pay that insurance won’t be a hard sell. “I’m not looking for some protracted legal battle, I want to see a company that will do the right thing, who’s saying ‘I’m revolutionizing cab driving.’”

In order to persuade the CPUC of its viability during the regulatory proceeding, Uber told them it has the very excess liability insurance that Gafurov needs, in excess of $5 million, according to CPUC documentation from an April workshop.

But having that insurance in place is different from using it to cover damages when needed. According to Uber’s partner agreement with its drivers, “Uber and/or its licensors shall not be liable for any loss, damage or injury which may be incurred” by a driver.

Asked if Uber will help Farhbach pay her medical bill, Noyes responded, “You’re writing about a specific case and I don’t think I can say much more. A professionally licensed driver is protected by their company, it’s not really my issue to weigh in on.”

Meanwhile, Fahrbach isn’t doing very well at all, she wrote in an email. Her injuries forced her to leave her two jobs in San Francisco, one at a farmer’s market and another at a cafe, and she moved back in with her family in North Carolina to recover.

“My recovery has been a slow steady process laced with many ups and downs,” she said. “Having been immobile for the better part of three months has had an everlasting effect on my physical state. I will most likely be dealing with spinal problems for the rest of my life, but have tried to remain positive and grateful for the progress I have made.”

Fahrbach said she doesn’t have the money to cover her medical bills out-of-pocket, and this frightens her. “Frankly, if there is insufficient insurance to cover my injuries and losses, my financial future will be dismal.”

Plan Bay Area: better, but it still gentrifies

Michael Redmond
-
0

By Peter Cohen and Fernando Martí

Council of Community Housing Organizations

OPINION On July 18, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) and the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) adopted the region’s first so-called “sustainable communities strategy,” as required under new state environmental laws. Plan Bay Area will direct the largest share of the region’s growth to the region’s urban cores — two-thirds of the region’s overall housing production is directed to 15 specific cities.

The vision is what environmentalists refer to as “smart growth” — shrinking the footprint of the region’s future development as a more environmentally friendly and geographically efficient pattern to absorb ever-increasing population. San Francisco alone has a very tall order: Our city will absorb 25 percent of new urban development, which equates to 92,000 new housing units and a pace of housing construction averaging around 3,100 units annually (a rate that has been reached only twice over the last 50 years since the era of 1960s urban renewal development).

The question that framed debates through the three-year process in drafting and finally adopting the plan is how that amount of new growth can be “done right;” that is, without gentrifying working class and poor communities and ensuring that infrastructure, including affordable housing and transit service, will keep up with that pace of growth. Tim Redmond’s feature article in the June 4 issue of the Guardian (“Planning for displacement”) and a June 12 forum sponsored by the Guardian, CCHO, and UrbanIDEA very thoroughly laid out the issues and critiques of the Plan Bay Area draft that was released by MTC/ABAG earlier this spring.

With such fundamental flaws when the draft plan was released in April, how did the July 18 adopted final Plan Bay Area fare? First, there is no question this regional “smart growth” plan will make combating gentrification at ground-level harder. But second, the plan could have been worse if not for a tremendous final pushback by progressive advocates from San Francisco and throughout the region loosely united in a “Six Wins for Social Equity” coalition and the committed leadership of a small core of progressive regional leaders — including two of San Francisco’s representatives, David Campos (MTC) and Eric Mar (ABAG) — who championed some final amendments.

Those “wins” (in reality, concessions by MTC/ABAG) achieved in this final push include: adding a public process to develop priorities for the Bay Area’s $3.1 billion share of state cap and trade funding, such as to affordable housing and local transit operations; strengthening the $14 billion transportation block-grant funds program (“OBAG”) to link it directly to local cities’ affordable housing production and displacement-prevention policies; and adding a requirement for MTC to develop a comprehensive strategy to prioritize funding of local transit service and transit maintenance.

Though the details of those amendments are fairly squishy and do not alter the development trajectory of the plan, they are potentially valuable handholds to work with going forward as Plan Bay Area gets implemented (and updated in four years).

That said, San Francisco’s front line working class neighborhoods and communities of color still stand to take the brunt of potential negative impacts from this regional “smart growth” plan. Theoretically they could receive the potential benefits of public infrastructure investments and stimulated economic activity. But while the risks are real, the potential benefits are still illusory.

We must become more engaged if we are to move Plan Bay Area beyond policy statements and promises of future “best-practices” to make sure vulnerable people are not displaced from their neighborhoods in the tide of infill real estate development and are guaranteed a real share of the fruits from “equitable” smart growth.

Pedaling slowly

Michael Redmond
-
0
Pedaling slowly

news@sfbg.com

With San Francisco bicycle rental companies such as Blazing Saddles and Bay City Bicycle Rentals and Tours having bike fleets numbering in the thousands, why does the new San Francisco bike share program only have 350 bikes? And can that really be effective?

In August, San Francisco and a handful of other Bay Area cities will join the ranks of the dozens of cities in the country that have bicycle share programs, although most are more robust than ours. For example, New York City’s bike share program offer 6,000 bikes.

Sponsored by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District and bankrolled by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission with more than $7 million, the program will bring 700 bikes to the region — half of which will make their way to San Francisco.

In the following months, San Francisco could be allotted 500 total bikes. For the initial launch, 35 bike share stations will be spread throughout the city, and when the bicycle count rises, the number of stations will jump to 50.

MTC spokesperson Sean Co told us that most of the money for the program goes to the cost of the bikes themselves. Each bike costs $5,000, is outfitted with tracking technology, and is expected to last 10 years. In addition to being high-tech, all bike share bikes are unique to Alta Bike Share Systems, and require special tools to be taken apart, another factor in the high price tag.

The rest of money goes toward the stations and fees for a consultant that helps run the program. Co believes that the membership fees alone will make up for the over $7 million spent on the program. But that’s assuming the program isn’t a flop, which some fear it could be given the anemic number of bikes being offered.

 

WHY SO FEW?

New York City’s bike share, Citi Bike — financed completely by Citigroup Inc. with no public funds — launched in May with 6,000 bikes and 300 stations. That program is already approaching a million total rides. Chicago’s Divvy bike share system started off with 750 bikes at the beginning of July and will increase to 3,000 at the end of August.

Kit Hodge, deputy director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, is one of the people who says that 350 bikes just isn’t enough for San Francisco. “The city and SFMTA have estimated that it would take 3,000 bikes to have an effective bicycle share,” Hodge told us. “We definitely are pushing for more bikes.”

But San Francisco’s bicycle share may get the thousands of bikes that some believe it needs. The Board of Supervisors recently passed a resolution that calls on the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency and Department of Public Works to have a much larger system by 2014.

“Five hundred bikes isn’t enough for a citywide bike share,” Sup. Scott Wiener, who sponsored the resolution, told us. “If you look at other cities with a large population and a lot of people biking, bicycle share stations have to be heavily concentrated in many different areas. With the 500 bikes, other areas of the city will be excluded.”

But critics like Wiener and Hodge may not have taken into account that this program is only a trial run, with enough funding to last a year, according to BAAQMD representatives.

BAAQMD Director of Strategic Incentives Damian Breen told us the program is just the right size: “We feel the pilot is appropriately sized. I don’t think we’ve limited ourselves at all. This is to test the waters and see what it can grow into.”

Breen also thinks that mainly focusing on San Francisco for the Bay Area-wide bicycle sharing program would be unfair to other cities. Unlike other bicycle sharing programs, such as New York City and Chicago, San Francisco’s bicycle sharing system is just one part of a regional program that includes Redwood City, Palo Alto, Mountain View, and San Jose.

“This stage of the program is to see what works and what doesn’t,” Breen said. “Maybe the bicycle share might be used more in the suburbs than in San Francisco. When you do something regionally you have to take all cities and all outcomes into account.”

When asked if the bicycle sharing program would have increased the number of bikes in San Francisco if there was additional funding, he said no.

“I think obviously all partners would have liked the program to be bigger in certain areas,” Breen said. “Whether or not it would have been bigger in places like San Francisco, if there was more funding, I cannot say.”

Breen says BAAQMD will consider corporate sponsorship for the bike share once the initial money from the pilot runs out.

 

THE LAST MILE

The possibility of more stations and bike share rides in the city isn’t appealing to Blazing Saddles bicycle rental company owner Jeff Sears.

“If stations are placed in areas like the Fisherman’s Wharf, or North Beach, people may be tempted to use bike share instead,” Sears said. “But, we’ve been assured by the BAAQMD that that’s not going to happen.”

Breen says the service is directed at residents who commute, and may need the bike for that “last mile” of their trek.

“This is different than bicycle rentals, which are usually meant for a day of riding,” Breen said. “They are designed for 30 minute use — the main audience is folks who are looking for that last mile after they get off of Caltrain or BART.”

Breen went on to say that areas with bicycle sharing programs also saw bicycle renting programs go up as a whole. But Jeanne Orellana of Bay City Bicycle Rentals and Tours believes otherwise.

“We absolutely feel that it would affect business,” Orellana said. “We wish that it would coexist with our business, but other cities with bicycle sharing programs have seen bicycle rental shops close down due to the competition.” A scenario similar to what Orellana imagined played out in Miami Beach, Fla. Unlike the program in store for the Bay Area, Miami Beach’s DecoBike offers pricing plans for residents and tourists, and many of the tourists find themselves choosing the bike share over rental shops in the area, causing business in bicycle rental shops to reportedly drop 40 to 50 percent. Wiener acknowledges the reservations that Orellana and Sears hold about bike share, but he said that both options can coexist in the same city. “They’re two completely different markets,” Wiener said. “I understand the concerns that they have but comparing bike sharing and bicycle rental is like comparing apples to oranges.” And the BAAQMD, SFBC, SFMTA, and Wiener all agree on one thing: Tourists choosing bike share over bicycle rental companies just doesn’t make sense economically. Renting a bicycle for a day at Bay City Bicycle Rentals and Tours is $32. Taking a bicycle out for the day at the bike share comes at a heftier price. For $9, customers can get a 24-hour subscription with unlimited 30 minute rides from station to station. But after those 30 minutes are up, fees get added. A 31- to 60-minute ride costs $4, and each 30-minute increment after that costs $7, which can build up to over $150 in a day if the bicycle is not returned to a station. In the meantime, Orellana hopes that consumers will make the right decision for themselves. “I trust and hope that many people will do the math and find that bike share isn’t cheaper for exploring the city,” Orellana said. Co said that more than 300 people purchased memberships for the Bay Area bicycle share 24 hours after memberships were up for grabs a couple weeks ago. BAAQMD is pleased with the results, and viewed it as a good turnout. The official launch date has not been released, but its infrastructure is now being put into place with its imminent launch.

Jello sounds off

Tony Robles
-
0

When setting up an interview with Jello Biafra, I got this light-hearted warning: “There is no such thing as a short interview with Jello.” It’s true, the legendary punk showman/spoken word enthusiast is full of political ideas, historical references, and elder-punk-dude tales. How can he be expected to keep it brief?

Below, we spend an intense half hour discussing the media, corruption, spoken word, Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine, Jello Biafra and the New Orleans Raunch and Soul All-Stars, and the future of underground rock’n’roll. (For the feature on Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine, see this week’s paper):

San Francisco Bay Guardian Where do you gather your news? What are your sources for political commentary in your songs?

Jello Biafra Why, the Bay Guardian, of course! Where would a local voter be without your fine rag? I just hope the new ownership and staff goes pedal to the metal to keep up the standard of muckraking and ethics. There’s so much corruption to dig up in this area.

I think the real renaissance was before the Weekly was sold to New Times/VVM, when the Guardian and the Weekly were both muckraking papers concentrating on local issues and were trying to out-scoop each other. That’s what I’d like to see continue and come back.

But basically I’d read a lot of periodicals. Locally, we have you folks, among others. And then you know Nation, Progressive, Mother Jones, interesting things people send me in the mail, digitally or otherwise, talking to people, putting two and two together — trying to write songs about stuff that no one else has! Or at least not in the same way.

SFBG Why is that? Why choose to write songs about something no one else has?

JB It’s just filling in the gaps with what’s interesting. I’m proud that no two of my music albums sound alike. Not even the Lard albums sound alike. From Dead Kennedys onward my mission as the main lyricist and composer of the damn tunes, I kind of stick to my punk core — whether I intend to or not, it’s just who and what I am — and but kind of widen the base of the pyramid to what you can do with that energy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQpPvFPegdE

SFBG What are some the topics you focused on when writing White People and the Damage Done?

JB I guess it was a little more focused as a semi-concept album, than anything since Frankenchrist. It’s basically about grand theft austerity, and how unnecessary it is, what a scam it is. People have asked me when we go to play different cities or countries, what I think is the biggest problem in the world today and they expect me to say something like “climate change” which I prefer to call “climate collapse” because that’s what it is, or inequality, or war, or whatever, and I say you know, there’s a worse one, it’s corruption. Because that is what’s blocking anything constructive being done about all the other problems. There’s a thread through White People and the Damage Done about that. 

The title track is not so much about race specifically, but about this attitude of the higher ups in the United States, the EU, and others, is that other countries, especially ones run by people of color, where we call them “Third World” or whatever, are somehow unfit to govern themselves and need us to pull the strings, plant the puppets, and tell everyone what to do. And it’s often for the purposes of looting their resources and exploiting their people. And what kind of unintended consequences that can have.

For example, we talk about why we need more democracy in Iran, and we don’t have the big bad Soviet Empire to freak out everyone anymore so we have Iran and North Korea instead. Wait a minute, you want democracy in the Middle East? Well Iran was a democracy in the early 1950s, guess who decided to overthrow the democratically-elected leader Mohammad Mosaddegh, and put the most hated person in the country, the Shah, back into power? But he was our policeman for the gulf basically, and he got overthrown anyway. And now it’s a theocratic regime. Where would be today if we had just left that region alone in the 1950s?

Same for Afghanistan. I nearly went through the roof when I found out about an interview with Jimmy Carter’s old national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski’s, whose daughter is on one of the morning cartoon pundit shows, bragged on an interview with French media about what a great thing we did by arming, training, and financing the guerrillas in Afghanistan before the Soviet Union invaded, and how we cracked apart the evil empire, hooray for us, we win.

But look what we created for crying out loud. We were even helping back a young hothead with a trust fund named Osama Bin Laden. And then once the Soviets were out, we didn’t lift a finger to help rebuild the country, let alone take back the guns and rocket-launchers. And now look where we are. That’s another example of white people and the damage done.

[Pause] hold on my juice machine, now I have to turn it off, it’s bouncing all over the counter.

SFBG What kind of juice are you making?

JB Oh, just a mixture of stuff. Spinach, apples, other things.

SFBG Can you tell me about forming Guantanamo School of Medicine?

JB Here we go again. I wanted to have another band ever since Dead Kennedys, it just never quite happened. Either people weren’t available, or I was off doing spoken word or other adventures, but of course I never stopped making albums, there was Lard, two with the Melvins, one with DOA, Mojo Nixon, NoMeansNo.

I kept the music out there, I just didn’t have a performing vehicle. And then when I was down at the Warfield seeing the Stooges on Iggy’s 60th birthday, it occurred to me, “oh shit, I turn 50 next year. I better do something or I may never get another chance.” If it’s half as good as the Stooges, I’ll declare victory.

SFBG Do you have any other projects coming up?

JB I started getting back into spoken word. I did a tour in Australia after the band’s tour was done. And at some point, something that will probably see the light of day: some of the New Orleans guys from Cowboy Mouse and Dash Rip Rock dared me to come down there during the jazz fest a few years ago and do a whole set of New Orleans soul and rhythm and blues songs, which I did with some badly needed garage rock added in and we got Mojo Nixon’s keyboard wizard with all the Jerry Lee Lewis moves, and quite the cacophonous horn section, as well as [Cowboy Mouth’s] Fred LeBlanc, and [Dash Rip Rock’s] Bill Davis.

The multitrack recording was a trainwreck, but then Ben Mumphrey who works with Frank Black and the Pixies and many others, called me up and said he could rescue this recording. Slowly but surely he has been rescuing it. So Jello Biafra and the New Orleans Raunch and Soul All-Stars will see the light of day somehow. We haven’t been able to pull it together to play a show though. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as8Y2HWzUwI

SFBG I was wondering your opinion of this new, kind of second tech bubble taking over in areas like the Mission?

JB Again, I refer you to one of my songs. It came out on the EP of the rest of the recording session when we recorded The Audacity of Hype with Billy Gould. The song is called “Dot Com Monte Carlo.” And sure enough there was a little mini firestorm on the Internet of course. A lot of people writing in were too chicken-shit to sign their own names, but they said ‘oh that’s such an old topic, it doesn’t matter anymore.’

Well I had this funny feeling we weren’t done with the Dot Com Holocaust. Sure enough, now it’s more aggressive and obnoxious than ever. Dot Com Monte Carlo — that’s kind of what Willie Brown’s puppets are trying to turn this city into, yet again.

It has been really sad for me to see so many cool people and artists and service-workers and people of color just bull-dozed out of this town to make room for more mini little yuppies who treat San Francisco as a suburb of Silly-clone Valley.

And now you don’t see people like me when I was 19, just moving out to San Francisco chasing a dream. There was a time when the vitality of the underground was maintained by entire bands moving here as a unit. Everybody from MDC and the Dicks to DRI and later, Zen Guerilla, the only one I can think of in recent years, who dare tried to relocate to San Francisco were I believe No Doctors and Sixteen Bitch Pile-Up, and I’m not sure either one of them exist at this point. Maybe they all packed up and left. A lot of that underground fire, and that’s not just confined to rock of course, but a lot is going on in Oakland now.

SFBG Yeah, I’ve had a lot of bands telling me they can’t afford San Francisco anymore, so they’ve been moving to the East Bay or beyond…

JB I mean, I’d hate to see San Francisco turn any further into a giant Aspen, Colorado, or even Boulder, Colorado, which is where I fled from in order to come here [in ’78.]

SFBG Are there current East Bay or San Francisco bands that you feel like are doing good things?

JB Of course I always brain-fart on this question. Well, of course I’m going to support my label bands, I love Pins of Light.

SFBG How involved are you with Alternative Tentacles? Are you going out and finding bands?

JB Well I’m still the absentee-thought-lord, the buck stops with me. Someone deeply suspicious of capitalism has wound up owning a business by default, whether I should or not. Luckily there’s still money to pay a shrinking staff and to make sure we can keep putting out cool things. But it’s becoming harder and harder because of the combination of a crashed economy, rents going through the ceiling all over country, and file-sharing on the other hand. Of course, one feeds the other when people don’t have any money.

That doesn’t mean I support these misguided efforts, these major label RIAA scams to blackmail people and sue them for file-sharing. They’ve raked in over a hundred million dollars doing that and no artist has seen a penny. That’s not the way to solve this.

On the other hand, when I see one of the best bands we’ve seen in years like the Phantom Limbs break up way too soon, I can’t help but wonder whether file-sharing might be a part of the problem, with so many people going crazy over them and going to their shows all over the place, and then hardly anybody buys the album.

When you’ve got people in the age of high housing and transportation cost trying to keep themselves fed or also sustain a family, that hurts. I wonder how many people save up money from their shitty jobs for years in order to make some really cool piece of music only to find that nobody actually gives anything back; they’re that much more likely to quit making anything.

Maybe the solution is, for people who want to get their friends into really cool music, don’t just send them the whole album, pick some favorites and send them a little teaser package, a little file to inspire them to check out them more.

Not to mention, be conscious of whose file you’re sharing. Major labels go so far out of their way to rip off their artists anyways, with an army of lawyers to back them up. But when it’s an underground artist or label, that’s different. I never would have thought that GSL would’ve stopped, for example. Or that Touch and Go would draw mainly into reissues and back catalogue. It’s not just the economy and music industry crashed that’s to blame, it’s also people who don’t think artists should get any of their support.

SFBG Do you still love performing in front of a crowd? Do you have any recent performances with this band that you’ll take with you?

JB I’m not sure I’d be doing it if there wasn’t this inner need to do it. I’m really greatful that at my age anybody even cares about what I have to say, or new stuff I’ve been making.

We’ve been able to play a lot of places Dead Kennedys weren’t, because countries hadn’t opened up yet and they were still under the boot of Communist dictators or Latin American military or whatever. And we get to play for people in those places now. I don’t have the kind money where I can go jet-setting around to these places, I have to play my way to places like Buenos Aires or Slovenia, or I’ll never get there.

Bringing these musical riffs in my head to life and to have them actually work and getting to play them for people, that’s always pretty cool.

Some of the stranger moments were last time we were in Geneva we had a stage-diver in a wheelchair. The crowd was very gentle with him, passing him around, and making sure he was reunited with the chair, which was floating somewhere else in the crowd. Three or four songs later, he’d be back again! That was good.

Also, being able to scrape together just enough of my high school Spanish to be able to talk to people in Buenos Aires from the stage about some songs that were written with them in mind. I mean, “Bleed for Me,” the old Dead Kennedys song, was written about the Dirty Wars. And this was the first time I could actually dedicate “Bleed for Me” to the Desaparecidos in Argentina and explain it a little bit.

Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine
With D.I., the Divvys, Girl-illa Biscuits
Fri/26, 9pm, $15
Uptown
1928 Telegraph, Oakl.
www.uptownnightclub.com

Street Fight: Plan Bay Area falls short of a worthy goal

Sasha Cuttler
-
20
Street Fight: Plan Bay Area falls short of a worthy goal

Last week’s adoption of Plan Bay Area by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission was a watershed moment in regional planning. The plan links regional planning to state policies mandating reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and aims to limit future sprawl by accommodating 2.1 million people, 1 million jobs, and 660,000 housing units largely within the existing built-up areas of the nine-county region.

Newly designated priority development areas (PDAs) will enable modest-density, walkable development in city and suburb alike, while preserving both existing single-family neighborhoods and open space. In a time of urgent need to address global warming, the Bay Area has once again proved a leader by enabling compact housing around transit, and its supporting studies expect the per capita greenhouse gas emissions from driving to decline by 15 percent in 2040.

This will not save the world and it’s not without some challenging byproducts — such as preventing displacement of low-income residents from San Francisco and other urban centers — but it is a start. And in a nation hell-bent on denying the urgency of global warming, it is refreshing and inspiring that someone, somewhere, is trying to do something.   

Yet the transportation component – the lynchpin and impetus of Plan Bay Area, according to many local leaders –is mediocre, uninspiring, and inadequate.  Despite land use policies enabling compact development, 80 percent of all travel in the Bay Area will still be in cars in 2040, not much different from today, and far short of the real change that is needed in this time of urgency. With 2 million more people, this is a recipe for gridlock, inequity, and ecological disaster – not sound public policy. 

 It should be no surprise that a big part of the problem is funding. The MTC, charged with assessing future regional transit potential, identifies just $289 billion between now and 2040 for roads, bridges, and transit — far short of what’s needed.  At $10.3 billion a year that may seem like a lot, but upwards of 87 percent of this is already committed to maintenance of existing roads and transit– not transit capacity expansion.  New homes and jobs might be focused around BART and Caltrain stations, but because there’s no real capacity expansion, the current iteration of Plan Bay Area can’t even reach its own modest goal of 74 percent of trips by car in 2040. 

With 2 million more people, cumulative emissions from driving will actually increase by 18 percent because so few new residents will be able to squeeze onto our already crowded transit systems.  Today BART is breaking ridership records but it is crowded. Extensions to far flung suburbs might be worthwhile but they don’t expand capacity in the system’s core. What we need is a second BART line and/or Amtrak service between San Francisco and Oakland, but this is absent from the plan. Meanwhile, most mainline Muni buses and railcars are currently jam-packed, yet San Francisco is somehow expected to absorb 92,000 housing units in Plan Bay Area.

Supervisors David Campos and Scott Weiner, representing San Francisco in the Plan Bay Area process, are to be commended for drawing attention to the transit problem and for asking MTC staff to show how to meet future funding gaps. By broaching the subject, they show that San Francisco might be poised to lead on this critical issue. But Campos and Weiner, working within the “fiscally constrained envelope” as framed by MTC planners, were only seeking to cover deficits for existing service – not visionary expanded service.  In the end, there was no real vision for adequate transit capacity expansion.

This foretells a troubling transit future – and one that will likely be more and more private. While many San Franciscans decry the proliferation of Google buses and other private corporate shuttles hogging Muni stops, these buses do lay bare the transit conundrum in the Bay Area. Without well-funded, visionary capacity expansion of public transit, those with the means (and high wage jobs) will shift to private buses while everyone else is left to duke it out on crowded highways, buses, and trains.

This conundrum demands that progressives in the Bay Area ramp up their transit politics to lead locally and nationally. The debate about transit finance needs to be redirected – away from regressive local sales tax measures (which often include more roads) back towards more progressive measures, such as transit assessment districts – which could require developers who profit from Plan Bay Area’s growth incentives to adequately finance transit expansion.

The debate needs to move away from demonizing public transit employees to a discussion of the role and responsibility of corporate health care, banks, and the real estate industry in causing economic instability (which has harmed public transit finance more in the last decade than a bus driver expecting a living wage and healthcare). The debate needs to move away from creating new roadway capacity, such as exclusive toll lanes, and focus on how to convert existing highway lanes into transit-only lanes with fast, frequent, reliable regional bus service open to all.

Plan Bay Area is a living document, a work in progress. Within the next four-five years it will need to be revised and can be improved.  The current version of the plan, weak on transit funding, has been dominated by a loud, irrational mob of Tea Party cranks bent on sabotaging anything that hints of progressive ideas. They were successful in diluting Plan Bay Area. While a smattering of progressive transit activists showed up and attempted to shape the plan, next time the plan needs a broader progressive movement — including housing, social justice, and environmental activists — to demand a truly visionary transportation plan.

 

Jason Henderson is a geography professor at San Francisco State University and the author of Street Fight: The Politics of Mobility in San Francisco. We’ll be sharing his perspective regularly in the Bay Guardian.

Events: July 17 – 23, 2013

Michael Redmond
-
0

 

On the Cheap listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Selector.

WEDNESDAY 17

Kim Deitch Booksmith, 1644 Haight, SF; www.booksmith.com. 7:30pm, free. The graphic novelist presents The Amazing, Enlightening and Absolutely True Adventures of Katherine Whaley, accompanied by a screening of the 1915 silent film The Hypocrites, plus a slide show highlighting Deitch’s underground cartoon work.

Stephanie Lehmann Books Inc, Laurel Village, 3515 California, SF; www.booksinc.net. 7pm, free. Also Thu/18, 6pm, free, Towne Center Books, 555 Main, Pleasanton; www.townecenterbooks.com. The author reads from Astor Place Vintage, a novel set in turn-of-the-20th-century New York City.

THURSDAY 18

“Shipwreck: Competitive Erotic Fanfiction for Literary Perverts” Booksmith, 1644 Haight, SF; www.booksmith.com. 7pm, $10. Six writers “destroy one great book, one great character at a time,” with the end results read aloud in dramatic fashion (and the audience choosing a winning author). Target this go-round is J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

FRIDAY 19

“Friday Nights at the de Young: Sights and Sounds of Mexico” de Young Museum, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden, Golden Gate Park, SF; deyoung.famsf.org. 5pm, free (access to permanent collections and special exhibits requires admission fee). Jazz and pop fusion with Ilan Bar-Lavi and Sonex, plus a lecture on photographer Rose Mandel. Plus, the de Young’s 144-foot observation tower stays open until 8pm.

“Friday Nights @ OMCA” Oakland Museum of Art, 1000 Oak, Oakl; www.museumca.org. 5-9pm, half-price admission for adults ($6); 18 and under free. This month’s theme is “Indie Rock,” so you can wager a guess as to what type of music will be filling this family-friendly night market. Also: art workshops for kids, food trucks, foodie talks, and more.

SATURDAY 20

“Exploratorium Market Days: Local Motion” Public plaza outside the Exploratorium, Pier 15, SF; www.exploratorium.edu. 11am-3pm, free. The science museum kicks off a monthly series of free outdoor events with “a celebration of the myriad ways people, machines, and animals get around.” On tap: a bionic suit, a personal submarine, a dragon boat, a pedal-powered Ferris wheel, and a chicken foot dissection.

“Pedalfest” Jack London Square, Broadway at Embarcadero, Oakl; www.jacklondonsquare.com. 11am-7pm, free. More than 20,000 bike fans are expected to cycle through this event, which features daredevil and stunt performances, a BMX competition, a children’s bicycle parade, a bike rodeo, live music, “pedal-powered food,” and more.

“San Francisco Waterfront Labor History Walk” Meet at 75 Folsom, SF; www.laborfest.net. 10am, free. Labor historians lead this walking tour that focuses on SF’s maritime industry from 1835-1934, with additional discussion of the 1901 transportation strike.

SUNDAY 21

“Off the Grid SF: Picnic at the Presidio” Main Post Lawn, Presidio, SF; offthegridsf.com/picnic. 11am-4pm, free. Food trucks converge to sell tasty treats (added bonus: gorgeous bay views) from local hotspots like Humphrey Slocomb, Hog and Rocks, Namu Gaji, and more. Pro-tips: bring blankets for seating, and get there early to line up for your favorites — the best stuff tends to sell out well before 4pm.

TUESDAY 23

Nyna Pais Caputi Koret Auditorium, San Francisco Main Library, 100 Larkin, SF; www.sfpl.org. 6:30-7:30pm, free. The director of Petals in the Dust: The Endangered Indian Girls screens a trailer for her film and discusses current efforts by activists to end violence against women in India.

C.W. Gortner BookShop West Portal, 80 West Portal, SF; (415) 564-8080. 7pm, free. The author reads from his second book in the “Elizabeth I Spymaster Chronicles,” The Tudor Conspiracy.

“Slave Labor, Free Labor, and Working People Today” 518 Valencia, SF; www.laborfest.net. 7pm, free. CUNY lecturer Carol Lang charts the links with the fight against slave labor (2013 marks the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation) with the fight for workers’ rights around the world today.

“Strange Invaders: Ants, Termites, and Bedbugs” SoMa StrEat Food Park, 428 11th St, SF; www.askascientistsf.com. 7pm, free. Ask a Scientist and Wonderfest co-present this discussion of creepy-yet-common household invaders. Eeek! *

 

A community-based coalition, a trio of supervisors and a very special mediator helped seal CPMC deal

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
-
0

The takeaway message from a July 11 press conference held in the Mayor’s office touting legislation authorizing California Pacific Medical Center’s construction of two new San Francisco hospitals was seemingly this: Everyone hearts Lou Giraudo.

A part owner of Boudin Bakery and former president of the San Francisco Police Commission, Giraudo was called in last year to help mediate a deal that seemed doomed when CPMC, city officials, and a coalition of labor and community organizations were unable to hash out an agreement that was acceptable to all sides.

Negotiations have been contentious over the past year due to early indications that CPMC would not guarantee that St. Luke’s, a health care facility relied upon by many low-income San Franciscans, would keep its doors open as a condition of moving forward with the new Cathedral Hill facility, a centerpiece of CPMC’s $2.5 billion project.

Enter Lou Giraudo, everybody’s favorite public servant who was, according to a not-so-subtle hint dropped by former Mayor Willie Brown in his San Francisco Chronicle column last year, “quietly brought in” by the mayor’s office to fix the half-baked mess that the CPMC deal had evidently devolved into.

“He’s often said he’s just a businessman. A baker, if you will,” Lee said during yesterday’s press conference. But Giraudo came to the table with the right “recipe” and the “main ingredients” for a successful deal, Lee added.

Sup. David Campos also sang Giraudo’s praises, saying, “I have yet to meet a finer public servant,” and calling Giraudo “a real hero of mine.” 

Giraudo himself told the Guardian that his strategy was “to de-politicize the process and get people to think about the community.”

Board President David Chiu, who worked closely with Sups. David Campos and Mark Farrell to negotiate with CPMC and other parties on behalf of the Board, went so far as to compare Giraudo to Batman. He even joked that he was going to shine a bat signal the next time a negotiator was needed, in hopes that Giraudo would save the day.

Presumably, when this happens, Giraudo will dust the flour off his apron after toiling away at some sourdough bread shaped like an alligator, duck into a Boudin Bakery bathroom to squeeze into a superhero costume, strap on his jet pack and take off for the gold-capped dome.

Giraudo may have provided the catalyst needed for a deal, but it was community advocates who ensured that the public at large benefitted from the CPMC plan more than they would have otherwise – since the mayor’s office seemed willing to go along with the health care giant’s original terms.

Long before Giraudo’s involvement, a coalition of labor and community organizations waged a campaign to rebuild CPMC “the right way,” holding strong on the issue of St. Lukes and refusing to agree to anything that would leave open the possibility that the hospital, a critically important facility for low-income patients, would be shuttered.

“That coalition has been working for quite some time … to save St. Lukes,” Campos said yesterday. The diverse coalition of community and labor leaders, who formed under the name San Franciscans for Healthcare, Housing, Jobs and Justice, commissioned studies on the need for health care services for low-income populations, studied housing and transportation impacts, and developed a broad base of support for a better deal than what was originally floated by the healthcare giant. “It kept working for many years,” Campos noted.

Under the terms of the agreement that was ultimately agreed upon, St. Luke’s will have a number of specified services to ensure it remains a full-service hospital, and CPMC will commit to providing services to 30,000 charity care patients and 5,400 Medi-Cal managed care patients per year. CPMC will also contribute $36.5 million to the city’s affordable housing fund, and it will pay $4.1 million to replace the homes it displaces on Cathedral Hill.

But wait, one last thing we’ve just learned about Giraudo: Did you know he also served as chairman at Pabst Brewing Company? The next time you get drunk off PBR while gorging yourself on sourdough baked into the shape of a teddy bear, or for that matter receive emergency medical care at St. Luke’s after an unsuccessful attempt at building a DIY jetpack, you’ll know who to thank.

1...8910...38Page 9 of 38

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org