There are still taxis, busses, commercial/city vans, muni, and other vehicles on Market; just not personal vehicles. To say it’s car free is hardly accurate.
Probably most ordinary people would consider a taxi to be a car, so you raise a valid point with that, but I don't know why you mentioned all those other things that obviously aren't cars.
Pickup trucks are OK to drive down Market St. They're registered as commercial vehicles in CA. You can tell because they have only a single letter on their license plate.
Missed that. Regardless you are agreeing with the OP that they are the worst things humans invented while acknowledging we need them some places is a bit contradictory.
Yeah, it is to some extent. (Also, the OP actually said "personal vehicles", which is definitely way broader than I'm meaning to argue. Bicycles are personal vehicles.)
A better formulation: Cars in their current form and predominance are terrible. Done right, we would still have pickups for moving heavy loads, and some speedy form of transport for moving around individuals, but would it be two tons of steel?
Imagine a world with no cars where you make this proposal: each person gets a two-ton machine that can go up to 100 mph, its direction determined by a driver-controlled steering wheel. We're going to have people as young as 16, with maybe 30 hours of training drive it on a curvy 20-foot-wide road. Now the machine's only ~six feet wide, so we'll divide this road into two 10-foot lanes separated by a painted line down the middle. People will go 55 mph on one side while other people go 55 mph in the opposite direction just on the other side. It's safe, because people know to stay on their side of the line, except sometimes when they're expected to cross over briefly if they think someone else is going too slowly. As mentioned, the vehicle can go 100 mph. The only thing keeping it at 55 is that the driver is expected to press and hold a pedal at just the right pressure.
This proposal would be shot down so hard. Someone would probably object that this crazy idea is likely to end up being the leading(?) cause of death for people under the age of 30.
We're in a situation where it's the best we have in rural areas, but if we really thought about it, we could come up with something better. We need them in this world, because we built this world to need them.
Dirtbikes, ATVs are better at traversing the terrain and we wouldn't need roads. If you want to get anywhere you need to go fast. The problem is speed kills. Even with all of the gear it's significantly safer to be a two ton steel cage. Personal helicopters would be ideal but that seems cost prohibitive and amateur flight isn't legal. The allure of the car is independent transportation. I suppose self driving cars would help the safety issue if they work but they still need roads.
City dwellers would change their tune on ban all cars if it really happened. Imagine no short term car rentals for trips to wilderness outside of the city. Are you going to ride your bike 200 miles or take your kid on a motorcycle?
And not to mention that like everywhere else in San Francisco, there will likely be in no enforcement of these traffic rules whatsoever, so in practice private vehicles will still he allowed too.
Also, traffic on all cross streets is still open, and on most of them it’s common convention to trail red lights by ten seconds or more, well into the start of pedestrian signal as it’s changed for the perpendicular direction — an extremely dangerous practice blessed by the city’s authorities (again, by refusal to ever enforce infractions).
I’m glad we’re at least trying to make some forward progress here, but strongly suspect that Market St will still feel extremely dangerous for dangerous for pedestrians and bicyclists alike well into the foreseeable future. IMO, we should be more careful about letting city officials claim bold and innovative successes (as in the headline) while not really having changed much of consequence.
They did just approve a 600 million dollar construction package to rework market. A protected bikelane and new sidewalks will help a lot, but it takes time. Enforcement in general is for sure still a huge issue in the city.
Every pickup truck registered in California is also considered a commercial vehicle. They're exempt from the "car ban" on Market. The car ban also extends to motorcycles.
Since electric kick scooters are allowed, would electric motorcycles be OK? Is there an electric motorcycle class on the books? Existing moto laws define based on engine displacement.
'A "commercial vehicle" is a vehicle which is used or maintained for the transportation of persons for hire, compensation, or profit or designed, used, or maintained primarily for the transportation of property (for example, trucks and pickups). Vehicle Code Section 260.'
Does anywhere in the US have time-of-day restrictions?
The main pedestrian streets in Copenhagen have signs indicating delivery vehicles are only accepted between 4-11am. Hopefully this links correctly [1].
(Since the US doesn't use the international road sign standards...) The blue square with people means pedestrian area. The circular red cross with a blue background is a restriction on stopping (or parking) vehicles between 11:00-04:00.
Scrolling along the pedestrian street, I see Google used a bicycle to take these StreetView photos :-)
in Dallas we have a couple roads where the road changes from two-way to one-way (both directions) based on time of day.
For the morning commute the whole road is one way into downtown, in the afternoon it goes back to a two way road. Evening commute it turns into one-way out of downtown and after that back to two-way.
When it came online I figured it would be a death trap as people try to figure out what the signs and lights mean but it seems to be pretty successful.
There are a lot of places where specific turns are prohibited, but I don't think I've ever seen a street that was entirely blocked to cars based on the time of day.
The part of Market Street where there are now no private cars typically doesn’t have that many private cars on it. However, this is the right move for the city.
BART and Caltrain are always going to be cheaper than driving into the city. People who drive into San Francisco aren't the ones who don't live in the city because they can't afford it.
I did this for 5 years, 2 of them into the area around the Transbay Terminal. I'm an engineer, so showing up at 10:30 is workable, and the roads are at least moving by then. I also do the peninsula commute; any commute using a bridge is significantly worse.
I can definitely afford to live in SF (one of the lots I parked in was $500/month), but never pulled the trigger on moving. I mostly drove because it was somehow lower stress than taking the train. I'd be standing half the time on Caltrain, and it only got me within a 25 min. walk to the office. Transferring to Bart made the walk OK, but added too much time to the commute. Oh, and Caltrain has an hour-plus delay at least monthly. I never had a driving delay that bad.
If your time is worth $0, yes. Depending on where you're coming from, it can easily turn a 45 minute commute into 2+ hours.
Probably the biggest lever here is to dramatically increase housing supply near the suburban train stations (e.g. SB 50). It's not the train ride itself that kills you, but the trek across suburbia.
Or the more people who will simply find alternatives to commuting into the city. Not a choice for everyone obviously but people do take commuting into account when choosing employers.
It's nice to see private cars not being able to drive down Market, but calling it "car free" is a dishonest title. Taxis, buses, commercial vehicles and muni will make it far from a pedestrians paradise.
Imagine not rewarding regulatory arbitrage! Let's ban personal vehicles except for if the personal vehicle is owned by someone who claims to be a taxi cab driver despite minimal training and questionable familiarity with the city, being pressured by their passenger to drive quickly and drop them off promptly or risk getting a 4* or lower rating that pushes them towards getting kicked off the service.
Taxis aren't exactly perfect but I've had some truly horrible experiences with unqualified Lyft drivers so anything that gets drivers of questionable skill away from pedestrians is fine with me. I use Lyft frequently and something like 80% of drivers make an illegal turn to get to my apartment because Google Maps tells you to do it, despite the fact that there's a super visible sign telling you it's illegal and unsafe. If I don't wave them away they love to pull into an exit only driveway, too.
I'd be in favor of banning taxis from the street too - maybe you should contact local representatives and push for that.
I don't know about corrupt. Uber and Lyft sidelined the regulations around taxis when they launched because "disruption".
There is no limit to the number of cars Uber and Lyft put on the road. And just about anyone can be a driver. So an Uber driver should be allowed to drive down these streets when carrying a passenger. But what about when they don't have one? How do you tell the difference between that and them just driving for their own purposes?
In short, what's to stop me signing up to be an Uber driver, putting my little decal on my car then driving through downtown SF, parking up and going to the office job I've always had? Street closures would be totally compromised by giant loopholes like that.
Uber and Lyft created this grey area, willingly. Unfortunately they now have to live in it.
And I'd personally be in favour of that. But is the argument really "taxis shouldn't be allowed to do X because the unregulated startup that ignored city regulations has worked itself into a position where it can't do X, and anything else is corrupt"?
If you see the old Taxi system and its regulations as deeply corrupt, you see Uber/Lyft as civil disobedience heroes for crushing an oppressive system.
You probably don't agree, but at least be aware of how we think.
No, I think the reasons for banning them both are the same. They both represent low-density car traffic in the same way that individual vehicles do. I don't see any reason that a taxi/uber/lyft should automatically get better treatment than any other random driver.
Why? Taxis are part of public transport regulated by the city itself. There's no contradiction with them granting taxis special status within the city infrastructure. There is a contradiction with allowing regular drivers to use a road closed for cars just so those drivers can earn some money.
If something is corrupt it's to do with the way permits are granted, not that those permits permit certain things.
> Uber and Lyft sidelined the regulations around taxis when they launched because "disruption".
This isn’t a reason to prevent them from being on Market Street as compared to taxis. Both serve the same function. Maybe I misinterpreted, but this sentence makes it sound like you think banning them from a street while not banning taxis is a reasonable way to apply regulations BECAUSE Uber and Lyft ignored regulations in the past.
I agree in principle with what you follow up with, that there isn’t a limit to the number of rideshare vehicles in SF at any given time (at least not with current technology, although it wouldn’t be difficult to do).
Uber is a ridesharing app. From the perspective of the government it's pure coincidence that the driver and the rider are going the same way and when the rider is paying he is merely splitting the gas bill and that means its a private car.
There are two things the government could have done:
1. Exempt anyone with the ridesharing app
2. Fully regulate ridesharing so that they are no longer classified as private cars.
1. means abolishing the car ban and Uber will fiercely fight 2.
This is a situation the ridesharing companies brought upon themselves so I don't see how you can describe the government as corrupt.
> From the perspective of the government it's pure coincidence that the driver and the rider are going the same way and when the rider is paying he is merely splitting the gas bill and that means its a private car.
I feel like this assumption is no longer true. Many local governments do regulate ride-sharing companies.
If you want to talk corruption, just look at the areas that changed. Notice that one block of Market north of Van Ness still allows cars in one direction? Know why? It's because that's where the SFMTA HQ is, and they all drive to work from the burbs/Richmond/Sunset. They have 1 floor in the neighboring building and have an outsized amount of parking for 1 floor.
tldr the SFMTA couldn't be bothered so carved out an area so they can still drive to work.
If that's true it sounds like some civil disobedience is in order. If some citizens helped police that section of road the SFMTA workers would get frustrated and just stop using it.
SFMTA is on the south intersection of Van Ness and Market. They turn right off of Van Ness then right on 11th to pull into the garages (in the SFMTA building and 1455 Market). Check out the overhead map of Van Ness/Market and it becomes glaring.
Ban private cars from all inner cities, at least in Europe where there's acceptable public transport and alternatives.
We need to reclaim our cities and revert the damage done by big auto. GM and others have screwed American city inhabitants for decades by actively destroying public transport projects through lobbyism and blackmail.
So, this is an extremely well-known claim for which you can find numerous reasonable-looking citations if you actually cared to spend the couple seconds to ask Google, but FWIW there is a lot of argument as to whether it is really true in such simple terms, despite so many sources and citations.
I think, more importantly, is why does it matter? We have the infrastructure we have now. Maybe GM should be held accountable for what they did, but what does that have to do with access to cities for people with cars today?
I see a lot of vitriol towards drivers in this thread, and any other time this topic comes up. We didn't make the world the way it is. It ultimately feels like classism. I'm glad these folks are able to take advantage of the privilege of living in a dynamic, multicultural city. But not everyone can afford that.
I am OP and quite the driver myself. However, I never drive in the inner city (~ 5km radius from city hall) in my town because:
a) it's annoying due to overloaded traffic
b) it's annoying due to parking
c) my job provides me with year-long public transport ticket and taking a car and paying for all certain and possible costs is economically disadvantageous
d) public transport is amazing, taxis work and ride sharing and car sharing exist on top of it for cases when public transport shuts down (during major incidents usually, e.g. finding yet another WW2 bomb at some construction site)
Just cut it down to business/public traffic and reinvigorate inner city life with more sensible things. It actually already happens from now and then for festivities and other events and people start using ALL of the space that cars uselessly take up.
I think it matters because people often think we "naturally" progressed to today's city arrangements because they're better than the alternatives. And this GM example highlights that it's not necessarily the case.
> I see a lot of vitriol towards drivers in this thread, and any other time this topic comes up.
Understand that it is a frustrating topic. Cars are one of the top killers in the U.S. both directly and indirectly. They make our places of living less safe and less pleasant. It's especially frustrating when people who live in the suburbs commute in to where we live, then complain about how unpleasant city living is—in large part because they're making it unpleasant.
> It ultimately feels like classism. I'm glad these folks are able to take advantage of the privilege of living in a dynamic, multicultural city. But not everyone can afford that.
And this is another piece of frustration. Yes, given current government incentives, it can be more affordable to live in the suburbs than in cities. But this is artificial. Urban dwellers ultimately subsidize those living in suburban/rural areas, thanks to government policy carried over from the cold war era. It's so bizarre that we live in a time/place where driving a personal automobile to work is seen as "lower class" than riding bicycles or taking the bus/train to work. Something's broken.
Because there's an argument that the way the world is currently arranged is the best, most ideal way because people are perfectly rational, etc. If it's obvious that someone made suboptimal choices in the past because of a profit motive, shouldn't we examine that and attempt to correct for it, rather than assuming that the status quo is as good as we can get? We may need to save ourselves out of a local maxima and that's not a painless process.
I am very aware of driving's safety statistics. And I'm not saying people shouldn't be able to design their spaces the way they see fit. It's on San Fransiscans to decide what is best for the city, and everyone outside can just deal. Buy neither is "GM blackmailed people" and excuse to treat drivers like murderers in these conversations.
It's a reference to the GM streetcar conspiracy (most notably retold in Who Framed Roger Rabbit).
While it's a decently well-known anecdote, most experts nowadays believe that the very real attempt to monopolize the selling of buses to city transit did not contribute in any significant way to the dismantling of the streetcars--the streetcars were already in rude health and dying, and their rapid dismantling happened even in cities where the bus transit companies were not involved.
GM is already laying the groundwork for the next bailout with their plans to stop building cars, they just don't realize it yet. As for the plan to ban cars from city centers, I am all for that. I want to see mass amounts of money invested in public transit.
Rude health isn’t really a common term. I interpreted it as poor health which seems rather obvious from the context. It does appear to actually mean good health but it’s pretty obscure.
You don’t have to subsidize me, bud. I paid my own money to get a well, get electricity service, no paved roads for miles. I actually can’t think of a government service I didn’t pay for!
Of course you don't. That doesn't mean they don't exist but it is certainly believable that they are conveniently--so conveniently--outside your mental orbit.
Who subsidized your electrical company's build-out of the long-haul transmission lines to get electricity out to you? Do the payers of those subsidies see an ROI from long-haul transmission lines to economically minimal areas?
Ditto telco?
Where do you buy groceries? Who disproportionately paid for all of the utilities and transportation necessary to make that work?
How about delivery? Mail is hugely subsidized, particularly for rural routes, and commercial carriers use all those roads-'n-stuff to get to you. Your last mile, or even last miles, might be dirt--y'all certainly aren't paying proportionally for the highways to get even close enough.
I grew up in rural areas. Lots of people sneered a lot about The Gubmint. And even in that weird epistemic closure not a one paid out what they took. Which is fine; that's how it's supposed to work, and there's an argument for some subsidy of rural living for a number of both moral and practical reasons. But leaving the disingenuity in the closet where it belongs and showing some basic respect for the process that allows it is at least polite.
Due to agricultural monocultures and climate limitations, most rural areas are not self-sustaining either. A given rural locale may contribute certain products to cities, but it is also a net recipient of other products from elsewhere – and the logistics of getting all those products to the given rural locale may well have been managed within cities.
So? That doesn't make them any less necessary. If anything, it just reinforces how necessary they are, since different rural areas need to specialize in different raw materials and foodstuffs.
My comment wasn't a reply to why we should do away with cities, it was a reply to why rural areas should "be subsidized" (I'm assuming road construction here, and maybe social welfare for impoverished).
People in Urban and suburban areas are perfectly aware their food come from mostly rural areas.
Almost everything else in your home; your car; the technology they depend on; the road, telecom, hospital, etc infrastructure and the technology they depend on come almost entirely from cities and suburbs.
HN? The device you use to access it? Almost all the tech news on it? The network infrastructure you use to lower its comment quality? The language its written? The computers it runs on? Not from rural areas.
> Ban private cars from all inner cities, at least in Europe where there's acceptable public transport and alternatives.
A more constructive/less destructive model would be for SF to actually built decent public transport and get cars off the street by offering better alternatives.
Of course, SF long ago lost its ability to build things. So only banning remains in the toolbox.
We can restrict cars and build public transit. Cars are the #1 killer of Americans under the age of 25. It only falls to #2 at the next age range because of overdose deaths.
Cars are deadly and inefficient. Electric cars are still cars.
Except that most vehicular deaths don't occur in cities [1]. Banning cars in metro areas would do basically nothing to change the things you mention. Banning cars where deaths actually happen is a complete non-starter.
Great, how many vehicular deaths is that exactly, and how many are cars instead of other vehicles not banned? For comparison, let's also make sure to check the number of CalTrain and BART deaths each year (at least 20 last year)[1].
New York City sees ~200 traffic deaths every year, the good majority of them pedestrians, and it's traumatic every time it happens. Sure, as a percentage of our population, we have fewer people dying from car crashes than Montana, but so what? Does that mean the 200 deaths per year is acceptable, especially when we can do a lot more to bring down the number of deaths than Montana can because we're dense enough for people to use alternatives?
It would make a real difference in NYC, so why wouldn't we do it. I'm always a little bit on edge when crossing intersections on foot, and especially when biking, because so many drivers are so erratic and dangerous. We don't need to put up with it.
What does "traffic deaths" mean and what are the detailed stats on that? I'd love to see a source because I strongly suspect a large portion of those are not private passenger vehicle collisions.
Also, every transportation method includes accidents. From [1] describing NYC subway safety, "There were nearly 900 incidents last year [2017] in which someone was on the tracks or was hit by a train after getting too close while on the platform." Should we also ban subways because people die as a result of them?
The majority of those are people on foot or on bike who get run over by cars and trucks. The rest are people in cars and trucks who die either in single vehicle crashes or in crashes with other vehicles. This doesn't include subway deaths; that's a separate stat. I'm not playing semantic games here.
As for the subway, that's a separate topic. I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish with your whataboutism. Yes, of course it can and should be made safer. One obvious way to do so would be to add platform gates as many other subway systems worldwide have. But the subway is already a lot safer than on-street vehicle traffic, and no, of course we shouldn't ban it.
Your NYT article does not provide any actual detailed statistics on type of vehicle involved, let alone whether the drivers were always at fault.
And I'm pointing out the issues with transportation safety in general because people such as yourself demonize cars specifically when it's not at all clear that cars are the real problem, let alone the biggest one. Look at Tokyo for example. Cars are all over the city, but pedestrian fatalities are extremely low because affordances are given to pedestrian traffic (ex. elevated crosswalks). If you want to sell people on banning personal vehicles in cities, the burden of proof is on you that 1) cars are the best problem to focus on, 2) the only way to solve the problem is to ban cars, and 3) the available alternatives are actually better than cars
> let alone whether the drivers were always at fault
Why is this relevant? If the city has a 60mph highway running through a dense neighborhood, and a toddler walks into the street, and is killed by a driver (not the driver's fault), that hardly absolves the city of addressing this problem.
I suspect this kind of thinking is what adds to a lot of the friction. Nobody is demonizing drivers. What many of us are upset with is our cities' planning, giving far too much leeway to vehicles and too little to human beings living there.
> Look at Tokyo for example. Cars are all over the city, but pedestrian fatalities are extremely low because affordances are given to pedestrian traffic (ex. elevated crosswalks). If you want to sell people on banning personal vehicles in cities, the burden of proof is on you that 1) cars are the best problem to focus on, 2) the only way to solve the problem is to ban cars, and 3) the available alternatives are actually better than cars
Tokyo has a lower car ownership rate than every city in the U.S. So... although cars may be "all over the city", they're still relatively uncommon.
And what problems do you think we're focused on here? It's not just about safety from car accidents. It's also:
- Is cheaper to not build / maintain roads/streets/bridges/parking lots that would otherwise be unnecessary.
- More pleasant for city residents (fewer honking horns, less sitting in traffic, more space for parks and greenery, more walking -> healthier residents, etc.)
- More environmentally friendly from both a localized air pollution standpoint and a global climate one.
Besides the other commenter pointing out that Tokyo has low car ownership rates, so if that's your ideal model then you too are essentially on the same side as getting rid of most of the cars, there's a telling fact in your suggestion to remove people from the urban streetscape entirely by removing them to elevated walkways. Cities are for people. Why are cars so important that they should take over everything? Why ban people from the streets instead of banning the cars? I don't want to have to take stairways and bridges everywhere, and then have huge numbers of vehicles whizzing by constantly at ground level emitting lots of pollution (yes, even EVs emit brake and tire dust). That sounds like a dystopian nightmare city, not a pleasant city.
And I don't know what to tell you, but I've been to Tokyo, and it's nothing like what you're describing. You sure you went to the right place? The most busy pedestrian crossing in the world, the Shibuya scramble, is in Tokyo, and it's an at-grade intersection. You know why it's safe? Because pedestrians are prioritized over vehicles, and the longest part of the light cycle stops all the car traffic entirely and lets people walk everywhere. And also, the Japanese are simply more communally-minded than Americans. Simply put, their drivers are better-behaved. They generally won't park in marked bike lanes (same as in Amsterdam) because of the social stigma of doing so. Meanwhile, in the US, drivers don't give a shit, and so we need a solution that isn't social stigma -- building more physical protection and removing cars entirely from many spaces, since people can't and won't operate them safely.
And the discussion of "fault" is entirely missing the point. It doesn't matter who's at fault in any given fatal crash. What matters is that we have 40k deaths per year in the United States caused by vehicles, more than almost any other cause, and we need to fix it. The fault if anything is a systems problem; we have way too many cars, not enough alternatives to them, and the built city environment prioritizes cars too much and doesn't do enough to separate vulnerable people who aren't in cars from them entirely.
Does "vehicular deaths" include deaths caused by air pollution? I think I've read that cars cause more deaths through air pollution than through collisions.
I think it's the "We" that Senior BurningFrog is talking about. The central subway debacle ought to give one pause about the clowns in San Francisco government building anything, ever. 2 billion dollars for 2 miles of subway and counting over the last decade or two; I can't remember how long this has been in the works. Meanwhile Russian barbarians able to add subway stops at will, even during collapse of the Soviet Union.
IMHO, facts don't sell anything. Defining an option as better isn't sufficient. Disincentives for the status quo are not necessarily taxes or legislation. A powerful disincentive is "missing out" on a "movement" or "being left behind". Adding busses doesn't feel like a "movement", but car-less cities has a nice Green Dream ring to it that might garner support from the right demographics by allowing a moral high ground. There will be increasing disincentive pressure against neighborhoods that allow cars, by a migration of commercial business to car-less areas, perhaps, or a loss of property values in those car-packed areas. But for those disincentives to be effective, they should be given time in the spotlight.
This only works if better alternatives don’t impact the existing means.
For instance if you want a good cable car system or dedicated bus lanes, bike paths, it will go through reducing or removing private car lanes.
In general it’s both effects in one go: transform/reduce the existing infra into the new one, automatically making the new one better when it lands (and inconveniencing everyone until it lands)
Fast buses are difficult if they are stuck in car traffic. Remove the cars and the bus can move much faster. If the bus moves faster and can more accurately predict a schedule, more people may use it, which allows more frequent runs, and so on.
Buses also need to be safe in SF. If its just me riding, I sometimes will grab one rather than driving. If I am going somewhere with my son, I typically just use the car.
You should look up train deaths in the 19th and early 20th century. It doesn't matter what mode of transportation, if it is popular, you get large numbers of deaths.
If personal jetpacks became the de facto mode of transportation then personal jetpack deaths would become a major "public health" issue.
Build better alternative works only when combined with a prohibition on cars. Otherwise as soon as the traffic situation improves (as in more people taking bus), car becomes even more faster and convenient. There has to some artificial constraint on the other side - whether it is outright ban or fee/tax or permits is to be seen
Please include delivery vehicles into your wish, if you are earnest. Or restrict your wish to through-traffic. Otherwise, you are just calling for a ban of other people traffic.
Edit: would the downvoters care to explain why their prime delivery or their coffee beans are necessary traffic while, e.g., a mother driving their kids is not?
Maybe cities should try to build public transport that mothers with children prefer to their private cars?
If cities cannot offer something better, they will never convince. So they must restrict. Then at least they should forbid the better for everyone not just for people their voters do not care about. It is quite revealing that the myriad of small, cheap, and flexible transporters that provide all these services inside cities are nearly always exempt from traffic policies.
Mothers with children already have an alternative: Use public transport, or use an uber, or a taxi. There's no reason to own a car.
It's all about utilization: An uber cab will probably see 10%-90% utilization (passenger count / time in transport), while a privately owned car is utilized only a few minutes of the day, by only 1/5th of the passanger capacity. Most of the time it collects rust on a parking spot that could be utilized for a better purpose. Parks, street food stands, benches.
Same for delivery: If the alternative is that everyone oes out and pollutes supermarkets, streets and public transport to get their freshly ground coffee, don't you think that having a vehicle that delivers on the last mile to the customer is much more efficient?
In cities that invest into bike lanes, obviously cargo bikes are becoming a real alternative for delivery services.
Yes, public transport has to be improved, too, nobody argued otherwise.
Now why is utilization suddenly a concern for cars but not for cargo bikes or exotic consumer goods like coffee? Let me guess, you don't own a car, but a bike and you like to drink coffee? How about your bed, could that not be utilized much more efficiently? I bet 16 hours or so it just stands there collecting dust.
In a city, everything that needs space is scarce. You can ask for a "fair" price for a parking space, but then don't complain about a "fair" rent and a "fair" premium on every service that also utilizes space. The thing is that "fair" can look very different to different people.
Yeah great, i also suggest, as a French, that you come and enjoy our great public transport and the kind of people in it, especially at night.
Oh and also try walking under 35°C dressed as an executive
I think the idea is that walking around the city dressed in a heavy suit when it's very hot outside is uncomfortable and sweaty.
I'd argue that requiring your employees to play an archaic game of dress-up is the real problem, but if I'm being honest, it can be pretty uncomfortable to walk around a sweltering city even in street clothes. (That being said I don't think the tradeoff is worth destroying your city with car-centric design)
Dedicated lanes and car restrictions make buses acceptable public transit pretty cheaply. They can at least serve as a bridge in cities that are borderline ready for restrictions to get the ball moving faster.
> Ban private cars from all inner cities
> We need to reclaim our cities
Cities have a responsibility that extends beyond their own defined borders. Cities act as the cultural, legal, and commercial nexus for the surrounding rural and suburban area – sometimes that can include the entire state.
That responsibility includes the ability for outsiders to be able to access it.
That's ridiculous, I'm from Europe, I like moving around city in a car and I don't mind other cars, but a) there should be only underground parking lots; b) there should be bike lanes everywhere where there are roads; c) parking in illegal spots should be severly punished and d) diesel cars (and petrol when electric cars become mainstream) should be banned from entering city center. I don't understand the mentality that "I don't want cars in MY city so we should ban all cars!" - I don't like some things in my city as well but I understand that it's hard to please all so we should simply aim for moderation.
> We need to reclaim our cities and revert the damage done by big auto. GM and others have screwed American city inhabitants for decades by actively destroying public transport projects through lobbyism and blackmail.
> Eventually, argues Slater, the operating costs could not be ignored. Just before World War II the operating costs for buses were 20 percent less per seat than for streetcars. After the war even a trolley-friendly city like San Francisco found buses cost 37 percent less to operate per hour. This wasn't just the case in the land where General Motors was king; in England, too, passenger costs had leveled out or started to favor buses by the 1930s.
> A case study can be made of Los Angeles, where Snell focused a good deal of his attack. But contemporary accounts suggest that a transformation from streetcars to buses was underway long before GM and its affiliates entered the scene circa 1940. As early as 1923, the Pacific Electric rail line was buying buses to replace some of its routes. The city's board of public utilities encouraged this trend — calling the use of motor buses "a foregone conclusion" — and by 1930 the city's big bus conglomerate carried 29 million riders a year.
More generally, you're overlooking the utter failure of public transport systems in the U.S. What lobbying was responsible for DC's and New York's subway systems literally falling apart, despite ample funding? Is GM lobbying responsible for it costing 5-7x as much to build a mile of subway in New York as compared to London or Paris? https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
What killed transit in the U.S. is a combination of cheap gas prices and ample land making car-dependent sprawl economical, and government incompetence making transit uneconomical. Here in Maryland, the State is building a 26 km light rail line through the suburbs for $7 billion. The Swedish city of Uppsala is building 17 km of light rail through their downtown for 340 million Euro. That cost differential is utterly fatal. For transit to be useful it needs to go where people are. If it costs 10 times as much to build a kilometer of rail, you simply can't build enough transit to make it a viable competitor to driving.
The cost disease likewise makes it impossible to quickly fix problems that make people not want to ride transit. DC's Metro ridership is declining due to low quality of service. We need a new rail station at Roslyn because that is causing a bottleneck. The estimated cost in 2012 was $1 billion for a new underground station on an existing line. By contrast, Stockholm is planning to extend its underground system by 11 km, including 11 new stations for $3.3 billion. A similar new underground line in DC (which is desperately needed to relieve congestion on the Orange/Blue/Silver tunnel) would be a $20 billion project.
At the end of the day, Americans are voting totally rationally, and "lobbying" has nothing to do with it. They see $10 billion projects that provide transit to a handful of people, and quite rationally say "fuck it, let's build more highways." I can guarantee you that if the Uppsala light rail project was going to cost $3.4 billion Euro and take 15+ years to build, like it would here in the U.S., the Swedes wouldn't vote for it either.
Ugh... Building the M4 in Budapest was plagued by scandals, delays, and cost overruns, and ridiculed for having cost a whopping €1.6 billion for the entire line. Salaries over here are perhaps a fourth or a fifth of what they are in the US, but it still boggles the mind that building one metro station would cost $1 billion.
How do prices get that high in the US? Are private contractors too intent on pocketing fat profits? Or is it related to health, tort, or other insurances, or a privately funded pension system?
Nobody knows. "Fat profits" doesn't seem to be it. The contractor for the Maryland light rail, Fluor Corporation, has a 2.6% profit margin according to audited public disclosures. One big thing is environmental laws. Government projects in the U.S. must follow something called NEPA, and create an environmental assessment of the project. In practice, every sentence of that report is subject to litigation. The average environmental report for a transit project therefore takes more than six years to prepare.
The Purple Line in Maryland was tied up in years of litigation:
> n August 2016, U.S. District Court Judge Richard J. Leon found that the Maryland Transit Administration and the Federal Transit Administration did not study whether Metro's maintenance issues and ridership decline would affect the Purple Line.[53] Judge Leon decided to vacate the Purple Line's federal approval.[53] A federal funding agreement cannot be signed without the reinstatement of the environmental approval, and Maryland has said it cannot afford to build the Purple Line without sufficient federal funding.[53][54] On August 21, 2017, despite the ongoing court case over the environmental analysis, $900 million of federal funding was granted for the light rail project.[55] On December 19, 2017, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled in favor of the Purple Line, specifically stating that declining ridership on the Washington Metro system does not require Maryland to complete a new environmental study for the Purple Line.[13] This federal appeals court ruling allowed for construction to continue and effectively ended the three-year legal battle surrounding the 16-mile light-rail line project.[12]
This not only adds to the cost--contractors must build in tons of padding because projects can be litigated even after construction starts. But it makes it impossible to build sustained public support for transit projects. People get worked up about a project, vote for funding, and then literally nothing visible happens for half a decade or more while paperwork gets done. It kills momentum completely.
The article is also incorrect on one detail. Market south of 10th to Van Ness is closed. Only the northbound lane is open from Van Ness to 10th. This is so the SFMTA employees can still drive to work and park in their garages every day.
Regardless of how you frame it not forcing different classes of traffic to cross each other at the same grade is almost always (i.e. always but I'm sure there's exception or two out there) improvement for both but projects like that rarely happen in this day and age.
As someone who doesn't live in SF but has visited many times I'm not really sure what the issue with Market Street and cars is. It's always seemed fine to me. Compare this to say Oxford Street in London (where I lived at the time congestion pricing was first introduced), which was clearly an issue. But sure, I'm on board.
Although I'm not sure why taxis need an exemption. I guess it's another way to prop up a dying industry. Having caught cabs in SF before, I never will again, even if they can drive down Market Street.
The article also mentions 14th Street in NYC, which I live near and am very familiar with. This has been a contentious issue. Originally the L was planned to shutdown for 15-18 months and there was a plan to make 14th street sort of car free. I say sort of because cars were allowed to turn onto 14th Street but had to make the next right turn. This plan is now moot.
But a big concern was that it would just push car traffic to 13th and 15th streets, which are "residential".
I'm honestly not sure why 14th Street needs a dedicated busway as it does have the L. Compare this to say 23rd and 34th street that have no cross Subway (42nd does).
But the elephant in the room here is that you can still park on 14th street. If you're serious about increasing the traffic flow (of buses or otherwise) the obvious thing to do is free up 2 lanes by getting rid of the parking. But weirdly free street parking is sacrosanct in NYC politics. Why people who live in downtown Manhattan need this huge public subsidy is beyond me.
I think this was just a transparently corrupt handout. I have trouble getting too worked up about it though: a car-free Market St is a dream come true incremental step.
Maybe because people believe all this valuable public space can be better used than as a Thruway for ferrying individuals in massive steel cages from one part of town to another.
Re: the 14th street busway, The “fears” about 13th and 15th street turned out to be unfounded. In the meanwhile, thousands of people who used the bus are benefitting with much faster and more reliable service (to the point that buses on 14th street are now waiting at stops because they are arriving too fast).
Car traffic has basically been unaffected.
Pedestrians find it much better and safer.
People who live and work there have it much better with the massively reduced air and noise pollution.
And you’re right that this should be replicated throughout the city. If it works on 14th street, which as you rightly point out already has a train, it will be a much bigger success on other streets.
Similarly in SF besides the quality of life improvements you have reclaimed valuable space that was being given away for no good reason.
My vote is 34th Street next, but that's probably a fantasy. Getting crosstown at 34th would be so much better with a busway. It might even make the nightmare that is Herald Square/Penn Station slightly less bad.
Well, to be fair, the busses and streetcars which will still be prevalent on Market are also massive steel cages used to ferry individuals from one part of town to another. But certainly much more efficient and effective massive steel cages with regard to their use of the space, which will result in a much more pleasant public space.
The noise pollution thing is huge. Private car owners love their god damned horns. Beep beep. Like children. Drives me fuckin crazy. I'm at the corner of 2nd and Howard. Easily 5% of my day is spent daydreaming about ways to get those cars to shut the fuck up. Paintballs, HERF gun, signs. I'll never do anything but I'll continue to daydream my way through the honking.
Oh man, if you think honking in SF is bad, in NYC it’s a damn 24 hour chorus. I mean even at 4 am I have heard honking (park ave is NOT congested then so I can’t even imagine the need to honk then)
I one time watched a disabled kids school bus stop and kneel and deploy its ramp for a kid in a wheelchair to get on, on a residential street in Brooklyn. Throughout the WHOLE process, a car behind the bus was slamming the horn. It was like 2 minutes of beeping lol.
This is NYC in general. It has a police force rivaling the armies of some countries and the lowest crime in decades so I'm not sure what they're doing now but whatever it is, it isn't traffic enforcement.
Running red lights ("but it was amber 15 seconds ago!"), honking at cars in front who are waiting on pedestrians who have right of way, block intersections preventing cross traffic (every Saturday afternoon you see dumbasses do this and traffic going to the Holland Tunnel backed up to Midtown), turning at red lights (illegal in the five boroughs), deciding to enter an intersection to block an emergency vehicle that has its sirens going, not getting out of the way of emergency vehicles and so on.
In nine years living in NYC I think I've seen a driver pulled by the NYPD exactly twice.
And what does the state legislature do? It tries to pass laws to make it illegal to detain taxi drivers who kill pedestrians [1] (luckily vetoed by the Governor).
Private auto traffic on Market St. has always been marginal; the vast majority of the steel cages to contend with as a bicyclist are buses. There is no big dramatic transformation here. There will be in later phases of the project when bikes finally get separation from buses.
I'm on 14th St most days. Have you never taken a M14A/D bus? It's much more convenient than taking the L or walking two or three avenues, especially if you already have an unlimited Metrocard. L trains on the weekend are usually too packed to fit more people on because of the 20-minute headways. Buses help to relieve some of this congestion.
That being said, 23rd and 34th could also certainly use busways. NYC (meaning CBD Manhattan) is far too dense to accommodate single-pax vehicles. Luckily, we seem to be making progress toward eliminating them.
Busses can move a LOT faster without cars in the way and can be much more timely. Also, higher usage means that they can run more frequently, which also improves the usage rate.
> As someone who doesn't live in SF but has visited many times I'm not really sure what the issue with Market Street and cars is.
Funny you say that. I've been to SF about a half-dozen times for work and Market St stands out to me as a nightmare to cross on foot. Tons of fast-moving cross-traffic, cars turning across crosswalks, and tons of pedestrians fighting all that. I'm glad to hear there's less traffic there (though honestly, if I have the choice, I will also be glad if I never have to visit SF again).
One of the problems with Market is that you basically have two grids coming together at an angle so you have a lot of sort of weird complex intersections. Plus it’s just a very busy and congested area that has also had lots of construction going on for ages.
I used to look forward to visiting SF. I’m much more ambivalent these days.
I visit San Francisco multiple times a year and have likewise had cause to cross Market Street on foot.
It has never crossed my mind that Market Street was some kind of special hell for pedestrians. It's a busy street in the middle of a city and there are cross walks. I don't know what people would otherwise expect.
It depends where on Market. The section where cars have been completely banned had already been highly restricted for years. It was difficult to turn onto Market east of Van Ness as at most intersections you could only cross--turns were disallowed. Most cars on Market in the Financial District were either ride sharing, tourists who got lost, or people who disobeyed a turn restriction. The "ban", as it is now, is mostly a formalism, so all the praise and hand wringing is years late.
If and when the ban moves west of Van Ness, then it'll be notable. Although there are already turn restrictions at a few dangerous intersections.
I dont quite understand how bad “private” cars really were on market.
I bike commuted throughout the city for a decade, and my biggest problem on market were muni buses and the cheese grater.
As a driver, there is a little black hole to get to via private car easily and thats the marriott marquee and target.
It takes an extra while to loop past markrt back around to get to marriott in certain circumstances.
Also, i once tested taking muni down from mission and duboce to embarcaderro vs how long it would take on bicycle; muni bus took 40 minutes. Bike to 7.
Although muni was plagued by little swarms of ticket cops causing massive delays to check tickets and hassle people. (They spent many minutes engaging in not productive discussion with people and arguing with them over tickets, which only delayed the rest of the bus longer)
I lived in San Francisco 15 years ago, and last visited about six years ago. I know a lot can change in that time frame, but when I was there, there wasn't much car traffic on that section of Market. I don't object to the car ban, but I don't think it will change much. Looks like another victory of PR over practical impact. This is a cheap and easy way to gain good press without addressing any of San Francisco's core transit problems.
This article closes with a really interesting quote:
“For most of the 20th century, there was a belief that the primary function of our transportation infrastructure was reducing congestion. Most people would agree that those efforts failed,” said Tumlin. “If we want cities to exist, we have to to use our abilities to cut emissions through transportation.”
I can only see this making traffic worse throughout FiDi and SoMa. Ubers/Lyfts will have a harder time twisting around to get to pickup spots as they are forced deeper into the mostly-one-way streets around market. BART continues to be decrepit with no new capacity nor reach nor increases in reliability. And people will still drive into downtown because SF is incapable of allowing large increases in the number of in-city housing units. All those people from East Bay and South Bay and the peninsula have to get into the city somehow.
I love car-free initiatives and wish SF could be less choked by vehicles during rush hour especially, and maybe this is a start of a bigger revolution, but I’m not holding my breath.
PS As everyone else pointed out, nice carve-out to prop up the taxi industry.
Good? Fidi and soma are pretty densely connected by transit; excluding the disabled and families, most people taking an Uber around the area are doing so without good reason. I take Ubers fairly often in the western half of the city, but there's often no need downtown.
Would love see this expanded to include most of the city. Manhattan too. I don't think people need to drive around cities in cars, perhaps with some exceptions (like people with disabilities). Roads are a huge waste of real estate, and more than half of the surface area could be replaced with greenspace to increase the amount of clean air and proximity to nature.
NYC =/= Manhattan. People owning cars in the other boroughs is another ball game, but there's few reasons outside of disability for a Manhattanite to need a car.
While true, I wonder what fraction of those automobiles are used to get into the areas below Central Park on a regular basis. I've always had a romantic idea of making all the surface streets below 96th street between 2nd Ave and 10th Ave bus/taxi only, perhaps with special zones for residents to own cars, and repurposing large swaths as pedestrian/greenspace... But it's an unlikely dream.
Remember that it is impossible to enter or exit Long Island (including Brooklyn and Queens) by car without driving through either Manhattan or the Bronx, and most freight enters the city by semi truck.
I believe the real political problem is that the city government all have cars and get unlimited free parking in the city, thanks to the placards they and other city workers give themselves (and their families/friends) and use completely unchecked[0].
If you are a cop/firefighter, or friends with one, you can drive around the city like a reckless asshole with almost complete immunity. If you are a cyclist that inconveniences a cop that has never traversed the city outside of a car (commutes from staten/long island to park on the sidewalk by the precinct and then hops in the squad car), you get a big fat ticket.
People don't need to drive between destinations within the parts of the city served by rail. Many people do need to get from the their home to the freeway to go elsewhere, though.
You really need a road to every building for moving stuff to and from the building. Maybe one could put them all underground? Support the Boring company idea?
Lots of cities already did this in the previous millennium. Nice to see that 40 years later word is finally starting to get around to the likes of NYC and SF.
I'll tell you what -- they may say Market Street is car-free, but drive a car on it and no one will stop you. SFPD is so understaffed (and frankly uninterested) to properly police the streets of SF that you can pretty much do anything and unless you stab someone, you're not going to get a ticket for pretty much anything. We have tons of "bus-only" lanes, or bike lanes, and the rules are broken every other car with no penalties. Apparently, just like in tech, we think that some rules, paint stripes, and people's intentions won't require any significant human administrative monitoring or intervention.
Compare it to NYC where you commonly see beat cops walking the street and patrolling every other block. And more importantly, giving out tickets with an apparent belief that people should get penalized for committing minor offenses. SF Police is just not present or interested in doing this, or resourced to do so. They can't even stop people from breaking into cars, and you think they're going to be ticketing people for driving in a partial pedestrian zone?
I chalk it up to incompetent city government (which frankly right now, is actually hostile to proper policing -- with a DA who has openly said such, and a public who mistakenly thinks this is good to assuage their guilt), a lack of strong police culture, and the incredible cost of hiring people in California, that keep us from having the right amount of police. Honestly, this cost (driven by housing by the way) leads to our crime rate also.
I don't know US law, but in the UK this would be entirely a civil matter for the local authority - the police aren't involved in regulating things like bus lanes.
> I chalk it up to incompetent city government (which frankly right now, is actually hostile to proper policing -- with a DA who has openly said such ...
The DA has said no such thing. The new DA did run of a platform of not convicting when it doesn't do any good to - an evidence based legal philosophy that was made very clear on his website, sources included.
But he is pretty easy to pin a Communist red letter on and is the favorite punching bag of conservatives. He's a sort of "mascot of all that is wrong with Bad Communist San Francisco." "First they're a sanctuary for illegal immigrants, then they're a sanctuary for BURGLARS and BAD GUYS!!!"
The police union and conservative media often oversimplify his platform, I don't know why. The union could only stand to benefit from increased officer safety from policies that evidently reduce crime, but I think they want to believe the only solution to crime is throwing people in jail. As for conservative media I have no idea why we're the chosen target but whatever.
I'd say it has everything to do with the current state of affairs in SF. I don't think it's the post-apocalyptic hellhole that many make it out to be but property crime here is really out of hand.
Police don't take anything less than a stabbing serious (I had my motorcycle stolen and the police came by 6 hours after I called them and then jetted off to stabbing within 2 minutes of arriving). I called the police 6 times in the first few years I was here, every time they arrived at least an hour later and provided absolutely no help. Last time my motorcycle was stolen and I found the guy parting it out on Craigslist, they were of zero help. I just don't bother anymore.
One of my friends that lives on Capp street witnessed burglars in an obviously stolen car with stolen goods, divvying up those goods in the middle of the night, and then went into a neighboring house. My friend was on the phone with the police as it was happening and they recorded the whole ordeal on video. Police slowly cruised by an hour later and that was that.
I understand that jailing people won't magically fix all of our issues, but the approach we have been taking is obviously not working. We need to try something new. I personally like the idea of hiring more police and getting them to constantly patrol their beat so that they are in-tune with their community and the community feels the police presence. Because at the moment, parts of SF, especially the Mission, feel lawless as fuck.
I wasn't speaking about this DA in particular, but more about the conservative portrayal of the city and its failure to effectively deal with crime through liberal policies.
I've seen a great deal of conservative shrieking about "liberal policy" in san francisco, I've yet to see anybody effectively draw a line between policy and property crime in SF.
Property crime happens in every city I've lived in. Houston felt a better target for "liberal policy" being a liberal haven in a conservative state, and yet nobody jumped on them for their car breakins.
Basically, I'm skeptical of the political motivations of criticism of SF. If someone can provide an evidence based argument of bad policy I'm all ears. In the meantime I'm going to continue to vote for candidates, such as Chesea, with actual plans for tackling property crime.
SF hasn't had a "tough on crime" DA in the last 60 years. To think that Boudin would be a huge change from the previous do-nothing predecessors is laughable. He simply played up the compassion angle to court the socialist and progressive vote to defeat Loftus, who had the backing of the mainstream democratic party machine.
To what end? You're throwing around words like "socialist" and "progressive" as if these aren't all SF citizens that are facing the same crime issues as the ten conservatives in the city lol.
Ok, but what's the point of getting elected to simply not do anything? You seem to be implying the goal was to act socialist enough to get elected and then I guess sit in the DA's office with his feet on the desk? Which is a strange accusation to make as a Chesea detractor, given that typically people like to point to his very socialist history and background.
You must be a bit innocent to think that a DA's priorities and stated goals of moving away from incarceration will not flow down to an understanding among police that they are being told to "look the other way" and that their efforts to arrest lawbreakers (their primary tool) are being made hollow and pointless by lack of follow through on the prosecution end.
"...Boudin said he will end cash bail and “tough-on-crime” sentencing enhancements, launch a unit to consider the immigration consequences of prosecutions and stop filing cases stemming from “illegal searches” after a minor traffic violation." -- https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/citys-new-progressive-da-che...
Immigration consequences of prosecutions -- just what do you think this means? People not getting prosecuted.
> just what do you think this means? People not getting prosecuted.
Seems a pretty big leap to me.
> cases stemming from “illegal searches” after a minor traffic violation."
Sounds constitutional to me.
> Boudin said he will end cash bail
Sounds fair to me.
> “tough-on-crime” sentencing enhancements
Sounds like evidence-based legal strategy to me.
I've yet to see any indication that effective prosecution will go down. In fact, part of Chesea's platform was increasing prosecution for felonies such as DWI.
We have the same problems everywhere in NYC. We have an unbelievable number of police on the force (corresponding to much higher crime levels of the past), yet there's very little traffic enforcement. People routinely drive recklessly, enter areas they're not supposed to, park illegally in travel lanes, bike lanes, or sidewalks, etc., and there's little risk of anything happening. Even worse, we have a huge placard abuse crisis where many tens of thousand of different government employees (cops, firefighters, teachers, city workers, etc.) get these ridiculous placards that essentially make them immune to parking enforcement, even when driving their personal vehicles in non-emergencies. The police (who largely live outside the city and drive to work) thus see this as one of their perks and they are loath to do anything to fix it.
So the only solutions that will work are those that don't require the police to do their job. We need red light cameras at every intersection and speed cameras on every road (they'd very quickly pay for themselves), and we need physical protection installed everywhere so that cars cannot even enter bike lanes or drive up onto sidewalks. It's sad that this is what it's come to, but absent getting a non-car-based police force who live in the city who are actually interested in protecting us against drivers, I don't see it changing.
Yes. The placard abuse vehicles are essentially immune, while other vehicles rarely get tickets that are nowhere high enough in cost or frequency to prevent the behavior.
I'm all for stronger traffic enforcement as much as the next concerned citizen, but honestly things like surveillance/speed/red light cameras don't actually make anyone safer. If you google "Red Light Cameras Safety" You'll see plenty of articles like this one that state plenty of reasons why these cameras don't help as much as initially thought.
Instead, it would probably be much more effective to fine people for these transgressions as a percentage of their income. A $500 speeding ticket or a $100 parking ticket isn't really going to bother a person driving a $140,000 Tesla as much as its going to bother someone who is driving a $1500 Toyota Camery. We can probably actually continue to have the police selectively enforcing like they do now, but if people actually fear the consequences of breaking boneheaded traffic laws because they'll have to pay $15000 for a speeding ticket, then they'll be a lot less likely to break those laws.
This is an interesting argument, but I've heard it said that the 8th Amendment's prohibition on excessive fines could make such legislation difficult to implement.
United States v. Bajakajian[0] is in play here.
> Thus the Court declared that, within the context of judicial deference to the legislature's power to set punishments, a fine would not offend the Eighth Amendment unless it were "grossly disproportional to the gravity of a defendant's offense".
A $15,000 speeding ticket is absolutely disproportional to the gravity of the offense of speeding, unless you find a way to argue that the offense is greater because of the net worth of the person committing it.
I don't think anyone is arguing that the offense is greater - I think they'd argue they're putting the "proportion" back in proportional - making the fine proportional to the income, so that it has more equal impact.
I understand, I'm just saying that there is text in the Constitution that says you can't do that. "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."
If speeding is an equal offense for all people, then fining someone more for it would be excessive.
I saw a source that believes it's a solvable problem, but any conversation about this issue has to solve that problem.
I think we'd just have to have a chat about the definition of what's excessive? Fining me $1m for something would be excessive, fining AT&T $1m for the same thing would be trivial. "excessive" is relative.
The GPDR is an example of what I mean; where fines are written as €x or y% of revenue, whichever is higher - which is intended precisely to make fines proportional. There's little sense levying the same dollar fine against Google and my local corner shop - a figure that Google wouldn't notice would destroy the other.
I'd love to see lights that somehow indicate they're about to go from green to yellow in 5-10 seconds or something like that. I hate the feeling when the light turns yellow when you're very close to the intersection -- a snappy decision to brake strongly could stop you in time before entering the intersection, but that might feel too sudden for comfort; but then continuing through probably means it'll be red when you're in the middle. It's even worse when you've seen that it's been green for a while, but don't know if it's going to be green long enough for you. There's going to be a temptation to accelerate, or at least maintain a high speed close to the intersection..
Likewise, I feel that more early indication for going green would make sitting in red lights less stressful.
Alternatively, they could just make the yellow stay yellow a bit longer.
Also, consider the huge profits to be made from automating policing! People are already accustomed to redlight cameras, so it won't be weird to start ticketing them for other things. They did break the law, after all. If we just install cameras in all public thoroughfares, where people don't have privacy assumptions, we could easily use facial recognition to automatically punish aberrant behavior.
Big money -- and we make the city safer by catching criminals. Win win!
Making this change will force the removal of the Market Street routing from all digital mapping apps:
Waze, Google Maps, Apple Maps, Uber driver app, Lyft driver app, etc.
Whether or not some tiny fraction of a percent violate the ban, the vast majority of drivers will no longer route through this section of the street on their way to somewhere else.
I rode a bicycle yesterday on market Street and there were cops everywhere.
I'll let you know today.
Typically there are a lot of police up and down Market street.
I will personally stop my bicycle in front of private cars and guide them off market as well. Other bicyclists I've talked to are saying the same. We often do this for no-right-on-red to guarantee that the bike lane's right of way is protected.
Market street will remain private car free.
As for your comments on chesea, they are cartoonishly bad faith. His platform is clear, he won't be ignoring crime, he will be focusing on evidence based solutions. He continues to explain his reasoning behinds his decisions with evidence and continues to get flack from the police union and their lackeys that boils down to "commie LIKES CRIMINALS IN YOUR BACKYARD!!!"
I don't think it's in bad faith to say Chesa wants less policing. He has repeatedly said so. His position is that more policing doesn't actually make us safer in the long term because it draws more people into the prison system, which can permanently derail someone's life.
Other people feel that not enforcing "quality of life" crimes a) makes life worse for residents (there's a reason we have those laws in the first place, and it's not solely racially based) b) could snowball into worse crimes.
His election is the people of SF trying something new, and that new thing is focusing the attention of the police force elsewhere.
I'm not really seeing anything on his platform about not persecuting quality of life crimes. An entire page is devoted to his plan for policing car break ins, for example. I do see a section about drawing the court's attention away from misdemeanors so they can focus on felonies.
I do it by riding slowly in front of them and pointing. Their options are to try to swerve left around me and get hit by a bus, jump the curb, or run me over.
I've not tried it in SF, this is me speaking of my experience in Houston.
In SF I'll block cars from making an illegal right by simply standing in front of them.
I look forward to seeing whether the traffic behavior lasts and to what extent policing will enforce it.
On Boudin, you must be a bit innocent to think that a DA's priorities and stated goals of moving away from incarceration will not flow down to an understanding among police that they are being told to "look the other way" and that their efforts to arrest lawbreakers (their primary tool) are being made hollow and pointless by lack of follow through on the prosecution end.
"...Boudin said he will end cash bail and “tough-on-crime” sentencing enhancements, launch a unit to consider the immigration consequences of prosecutions and stop filing cases stemming from “illegal searches” after a minor traffic violation." -- https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/citys-new-progressive-da-che...
Immigration consequences of prosecutions -- just what do you think this means? People not getting prosecuted.
I don't understand why uber-liberal thinking desires not to have our laws enforced.
> I don't understand why uber-liberal thinking desires not to have our laws enforced.
I don't understand where you're getting this strawman from. Which party is at this very moment attempting to enforce rule of law for the executive branch?
You're kidding right? There's SFPD/SFMTA workers everywhere diverting traffic. There's even a long thread on reddit of everyone thanking everyone out there doing all this work.
I rode in this morning and they were all there again so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yesterday was also the first day. The real question is, will there be enforcement 6 months, 20 months, 90 months from now when it's no longer in the headlines.
Serious question -- and hopefully it doesn't get bound up in useless left/right rhetoric -- but what is San Francisco doing wrong?
They're clearly flush with cash: The budget has grown by leaps and bounds despite a static population.
I do realize that San Francisco imports the homeless problem from much of the rest of the country (nice weather, good people...if you're homeless it certainly seems better than NYC), and that has to have costs, but it seems like a city that should have gold-plated services.
I was careless with wording, but I don't mean that a bus-load of homeless people are ferried out to San Francisco. Instead that the weather, people, and connections has a drawn a lot of people with a very laissez-faire attitude towards life, and that invariably conflicts with raw capitalism in a way that can have negative outcomes.
This loose attitude on life pretty much defined San Francisco for a couple of decades.
I don't think that SF is better than NYC for the homeless.
A big difference between SF and NYC is that NYC provides shelter for people that can't afford housing and SF does not. Only 5% of homeless people in NYC are unsheltered compared with 67% in the Bay Area.
Legally, NYC is required to provide shelters for anyone who needs it, while SF shelters have waitlists of over a month.
I have no idea, but a lot of non-profits around the Tenderloin provide services to the homeless that might be harder to capture. There's also less urgency to shelter because it doesn't freeze.
> Apparently, just like in tech, we think that some rules, paint stripes, and people's intentions won't require any significant human administrative monitoring or intervention.
This certainly is one problem that could be solved with tech and very little human interaction; no reason at all not to install cameras on Market that text you about your violation immediately and mail you a bill for the ticket.
Those "beat cops" are most certainly not doing traffic enforcement. At best you'll see a handful of parking citations.
I have a pet theory that they don't bother controlling bad drivers, simply because there's nowhere to pull them over; stop anyone in the middle of the street and you've created an instant traffic jam. But really our mayor and DA set the agenda and they think traffic is just dandy.
[edit] A prominent NYC cycling blogger made a similar point just a minute ago. In the wake of news that NYC issues more traffic violations to cyclists (responsible for two deaths last year) than truck drivers (400+), he said, "I suspect NYPD ticketing stats are a meaningful measure of only one thing: how easy it is to stop the vehicle."
> We have tons of "bus-only" lanes...and the rules are broken every other car with no penalties
They're somewhat ill-conceived because need to enter them to turn right, so there's judgement calls on what's acceptable. And they are enforced. I think Muni has forward-facing cameras in buses to catch people in these lanes.
> They can't even stop people from breaking into cars, and you think they're going to be ticketing people for…
One is a cost, the other a revenue source. Yes, my experience is that there’s a city employee to tend the meter within five minutes, but good luck getting a response to a crime within four hours. The priorities are clear.
You don't need cops. You need more aggressive cyclists.
People will turn onto Market Street for two reasons:
1. Somehow they missed that it's a car-free zone. They don't need a ticket; they need to discover their mistake and not repeat it.
2. They think it'll save time and fuck bikes anyway. Any cyclist can block them. What are they going to do, run you over?
Last driver I came face-to-face with in the separated bike lane on my commute ended up hopping the curb to get around me. Next time he'll probably take a car lane.
We have the same problem in Boston. There is no one traffic enforcement division for the BPD, and it instead done on a district-by-district basis, often being tasked to just one or two officers [1]. We, too, have plenty of bus-only lanes where the red paint has completely faded, and they are back to general purpose lanes. One of my favorite examples you can clearly see the faded red paint, "bus only" signs, yet plenty of regular cars on Google Streetview [2].
As someone who lives and walks to work in downtown Boston, it is also a cultural issue. During rush hour, there is effectively no such thing as a moving violation. I walk through some of the busiest intersections on a daily basis, and just about every single time, some traffic law is broken.
No right on red is a complete joke. People will actually honk at you if you are stopped at a red light with a "no right on red" sign. Don't block the box? If you don't block the box, traffic coming from the other way will, and you won't make it through the _next_ light cycle. Red lights are just a suggestion at many intersections, with 2, even 3 cars running through _after_ the light has turned.
The joke I always say is that if BPD enforced all moving violations for just one day downtown, they'd raise enough revenue to fund another Big Dig. Not true, of course, because even the cops themselves don't follow the traffic laws. Why should they?
Just get cameras. I don't know why this isn't done anywhere else, but in DC, cops won't pull you over for a moving violation (and I'm glad they don't) but the cameras will get you if you're running red lights or not yielding on right on red.
I suspect we don't have those because it's politically unpopular. The disregard for traffic laws is so deeply ingrained and I also believe single occupancy vehicle is still the main mode of commute here. Also, the comments "what about the jaywalkers", "what about those pesky cyclists always blowing red lights", etc. come up ad nauseam.
Checked it out at lunch yesterday and the roadway seemed noticeably emptier to me. Yes, still buses and street cars but felt much less hectic. As a bikeshare user I’ll be more excited to use Market to get around downtown.
I bike or scooter on Market almost daily, so I’ve been excited about this change.
I think it was to some degree over-hyped, because this stretch of market was already fairly restrictive to cars, and even after the change they’re still letting all city vehicles and taxis use the street, so I didn’t expect a big change.
Nevertheless, commuting yesterday was noticeably calmer and quieter, with a lot more bikes and scooters out. I was hoping to find the numbers from the bike traffic counters they have on the street, but I didn’t see them. My unscientific guess, then, is 30-50% more bikes.
It’s a nice change. I just wish they’d extend it deeper into the city, and specifically create a firm connection to Golden Gate Park. As-is, “the wiggle” gets you there, but the stretch from Haight to the Panhandle feels dangerous to me.
I’d love to see Page St. pedestrianized, caveat somehow allowing residents car access to their block only. It’s a perfect connector except for a couple really steep blocks. Perhaps a rope tow to help the less athletic (me) get up the hill? :)
> I’m surprised no one yet mentioned it in this long thread
Probably because it's off topic for the thread, which is about the restrictions on private cars on market Street specifically and transit strategies in general, not a pile-on for SF criticism.
The money was allocated for transportation improvement. It would be illegal to spend it otherwise.
Lots of money is being spent on the homelessness crisis. Shelters are being built. It's being worked on.
I respectfully disagree. The articles and discussion here specifically talk about the enjoyment of Market street for pedestrians and cyclists.
I am not suggesting to use money allocated for transportation on something else. I’m suggesting the money should have been allocated on something else.
This article[0] claims that $300M is spent annually on the crisis. The $600M would triple that investment.
335 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 345 ms ] threadA better formulation: Cars in their current form and predominance are terrible. Done right, we would still have pickups for moving heavy loads, and some speedy form of transport for moving around individuals, but would it be two tons of steel?
Imagine a world with no cars where you make this proposal: each person gets a two-ton machine that can go up to 100 mph, its direction determined by a driver-controlled steering wheel. We're going to have people as young as 16, with maybe 30 hours of training drive it on a curvy 20-foot-wide road. Now the machine's only ~six feet wide, so we'll divide this road into two 10-foot lanes separated by a painted line down the middle. People will go 55 mph on one side while other people go 55 mph in the opposite direction just on the other side. It's safe, because people know to stay on their side of the line, except sometimes when they're expected to cross over briefly if they think someone else is going too slowly. As mentioned, the vehicle can go 100 mph. The only thing keeping it at 55 is that the driver is expected to press and hold a pedal at just the right pressure.
This proposal would be shot down so hard. Someone would probably object that this crazy idea is likely to end up being the leading(?) cause of death for people under the age of 30.
We're in a situation where it's the best we have in rural areas, but if we really thought about it, we could come up with something better. We need them in this world, because we built this world to need them.
Also, traffic on all cross streets is still open, and on most of them it’s common convention to trail red lights by ten seconds or more, well into the start of pedestrian signal as it’s changed for the perpendicular direction — an extremely dangerous practice blessed by the city’s authorities (again, by refusal to ever enforce infractions).
I’m glad we’re at least trying to make some forward progress here, but strongly suspect that Market St will still feel extremely dangerous for dangerous for pedestrians and bicyclists alike well into the foreseeable future. IMO, we should be more careful about letting city officials claim bold and innovative successes (as in the headline) while not really having changed much of consequence.
Since electric kick scooters are allowed, would electric motorcycles be OK? Is there an electric motorcycle class on the books? Existing moto laws define based on engine displacement.
Edited for clarity.
Can I still ride a Vespa down this stretch of Market Street to the office?
> "Confirmed by SFTMA: Vespas not permitted. No private motorcycles either."
https://www.kqed.org/news/11798594/market-street-is-now-car-...
Commercial vehicles are exempt from the ban. Pickup trucks are commercial vehicles in CA. It's that simple.
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/online/fee_calc/veh...
'A "commercial vehicle" is a vehicle which is used or maintained for the transportation of persons for hire, compensation, or profit or designed, used, or maintained primarily for the transportation of property (for example, trucks and pickups). Vehicle Code Section 260.'
The main pedestrian streets in Copenhagen have signs indicating delivery vehicles are only accepted between 4-11am. Hopefully this links correctly [1].
(Since the US doesn't use the international road sign standards...) The blue square with people means pedestrian area. The circular red cross with a blue background is a restriction on stopping (or parking) vehicles between 11:00-04:00.
Scrolling along the pedestrian street, I see Google used a bicycle to take these StreetView photos :-)
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@55.6816155,12.5756814,3a,26.5y,...
For the morning commute the whole road is one way into downtown, in the afternoon it goes back to a two way road. Evening commute it turns into one-way out of downtown and after that back to two-way.
When it came online I figured it would be a death trap as people try to figure out what the signs and lights mean but it seems to be pretty successful.
I can definitely afford to live in SF (one of the lots I parked in was $500/month), but never pulled the trigger on moving. I mostly drove because it was somehow lower stress than taking the train. I'd be standing half the time on Caltrain, and it only got me within a 25 min. walk to the office. Transferring to Bart made the walk OK, but added too much time to the commute. Oh, and Caltrain has an hour-plus delay at least monthly. I never had a driving delay that bad.
Probably the biggest lever here is to dramatically increase housing supply near the suburban train stations (e.g. SB 50). It's not the train ride itself that kills you, but the trek across suburbia.
Taxis aren't exactly perfect but I've had some truly horrible experiences with unqualified Lyft drivers so anything that gets drivers of questionable skill away from pedestrians is fine with me. I use Lyft frequently and something like 80% of drivers make an illegal turn to get to my apartment because Google Maps tells you to do it, despite the fact that there's a super visible sign telling you it's illegal and unsafe. If I don't wave them away they love to pull into an exit only driveway, too.
I'd be in favor of banning taxis from the street too - maybe you should contact local representatives and push for that.
There is no limit to the number of cars Uber and Lyft put on the road. And just about anyone can be a driver. So an Uber driver should be allowed to drive down these streets when carrying a passenger. But what about when they don't have one? How do you tell the difference between that and them just driving for their own purposes?
In short, what's to stop me signing up to be an Uber driver, putting my little decal on my car then driving through downtown SF, parking up and going to the office job I've always had? Street closures would be totally compromised by giant loopholes like that.
Uber and Lyft created this grey area, willingly. Unfortunately they now have to live in it.
The non corrupt version is of course that Taxis are not exempt from the car ban.
You probably don't agree, but at least be aware of how we think.
It warms my heart in several ways :)
If something is corrupt it's to do with the way permits are granted, not that those permits permit certain things.
This isn’t a reason to prevent them from being on Market Street as compared to taxis. Both serve the same function. Maybe I misinterpreted, but this sentence makes it sound like you think banning them from a street while not banning taxis is a reasonable way to apply regulations BECAUSE Uber and Lyft ignored regulations in the past.
I agree in principle with what you follow up with, that there isn’t a limit to the number of rideshare vehicles in SF at any given time (at least not with current technology, although it wouldn’t be difficult to do).
Taxi drivers used to be natives and typically older. You get ridesharing drivers from Orinda downtown and they do crazy stuff.
There are two things the government could have done: 1. Exempt anyone with the ridesharing app 2. Fully regulate ridesharing so that they are no longer classified as private cars.
1. means abolishing the car ban and Uber will fiercely fight 2.
This is a situation the ridesharing companies brought upon themselves so I don't see how you can describe the government as corrupt.
This seems like the obvious solution to me.
I feel like this assumption is no longer true. Many local governments do regulate ride-sharing companies.
tldr the SFMTA couldn't be bothered so carved out an area so they can still drive to work.
We need to reclaim our cities and revert the damage done by big auto. GM and others have screwed American city inhabitants for decades by actively destroying public transport projects through lobbyism and blackmail.
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2013/06/be-careful-ho...
I didn't see any mention of blackmail in that article? Which bit were you referring to?
I see a lot of vitriol towards drivers in this thread, and any other time this topic comes up. We didn't make the world the way it is. It ultimately feels like classism. I'm glad these folks are able to take advantage of the privilege of living in a dynamic, multicultural city. But not everyone can afford that.
a) it's annoying due to overloaded traffic
b) it's annoying due to parking
c) my job provides me with year-long public transport ticket and taking a car and paying for all certain and possible costs is economically disadvantageous
d) public transport is amazing, taxis work and ride sharing and car sharing exist on top of it for cases when public transport shuts down (during major incidents usually, e.g. finding yet another WW2 bomb at some construction site)
Just cut it down to business/public traffic and reinvigorate inner city life with more sensible things. It actually already happens from now and then for festivities and other events and people start using ALL of the space that cars uselessly take up.
> I see a lot of vitriol towards drivers in this thread, and any other time this topic comes up.
Understand that it is a frustrating topic. Cars are one of the top killers in the U.S. both directly and indirectly. They make our places of living less safe and less pleasant. It's especially frustrating when people who live in the suburbs commute in to where we live, then complain about how unpleasant city living is—in large part because they're making it unpleasant.
> It ultimately feels like classism. I'm glad these folks are able to take advantage of the privilege of living in a dynamic, multicultural city. But not everyone can afford that.
And this is another piece of frustration. Yes, given current government incentives, it can be more affordable to live in the suburbs than in cities. But this is artificial. Urban dwellers ultimately subsidize those living in suburban/rural areas, thanks to government policy carried over from the cold war era. It's so bizarre that we live in a time/place where driving a personal automobile to work is seen as "lower class" than riding bicycles or taking the bus/train to work. Something's broken.
While it's a decently well-known anecdote, most experts nowadays believe that the very real attempt to monopolize the selling of buses to city transit did not contribute in any significant way to the dismantling of the streetcars--the streetcars were already in rude health and dying, and their rapid dismantling happened even in cities where the bus transit companies were not involved.
You can't be both in rude health and dying at the same time! They mean the opposite thing!
It’s too crowded.”
Especially please don't go into personal attack.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you'd please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Who subsidized your electrical company's build-out of the long-haul transmission lines to get electricity out to you? Do the payers of those subsidies see an ROI from long-haul transmission lines to economically minimal areas?
Ditto telco?
Where do you buy groceries? Who disproportionately paid for all of the utilities and transportation necessary to make that work?
How about delivery? Mail is hugely subsidized, particularly for rural routes, and commercial carriers use all those roads-'n-stuff to get to you. Your last mile, or even last miles, might be dirt--y'all certainly aren't paying proportionally for the highways to get even close enough.
I grew up in rural areas. Lots of people sneered a lot about The Gubmint. And even in that weird epistemic closure not a one paid out what they took. Which is fine; that's how it's supposed to work, and there's an argument for some subsidy of rural living for a number of both moral and practical reasons. But leaving the disingenuity in the closet where it belongs and showing some basic respect for the process that allows it is at least polite.
My comment wasn't a reply to why we should do away with cities, it was a reply to why rural areas should "be subsidized" (I'm assuming road construction here, and maybe social welfare for impoverished).
Almost everything else in your home; your car; the technology they depend on; the road, telecom, hospital, etc infrastructure and the technology they depend on come almost entirely from cities and suburbs.
HN? The device you use to access it? Almost all the tech news on it? The network infrastructure you use to lower its comment quality? The language its written? The computers it runs on? Not from rural areas.
Again, I'm not saying cities aren't important, only replying to a comment asking for justification for rural living.
I love cars as well, it doesn't mean they should dominate areas where other alternatives make more sense in all aspects but subjective preference.
A more constructive/less destructive model would be for SF to actually built decent public transport and get cars off the street by offering better alternatives.
Of course, SF long ago lost its ability to build things. So only banning remains in the toolbox.
Cars are deadly and inefficient. Electric cars are still cars.
[1] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2015/10/the-geography...
[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/09/28/as-deaths-rise-on-bay...
It would make a real difference in NYC, so why wouldn't we do it. I'm always a little bit on edge when crossing intersections on foot, and especially when biking, because so many drivers are so erratic and dangerous. We don't need to put up with it.
Also, every transportation method includes accidents. From [1] describing NYC subway safety, "There were nearly 900 incidents last year [2017] in which someone was on the tracks or was hit by a train after getting too close while on the platform." Should we also ban subways because people die as a result of them?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/17/nyregion/nyc-subway-track...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/01/nyregion/nyc-biking-death...
As for the subway, that's a separate topic. I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish with your whataboutism. Yes, of course it can and should be made safer. One obvious way to do so would be to add platform gates as many other subway systems worldwide have. But the subway is already a lot safer than on-street vehicle traffic, and no, of course we shouldn't ban it.
And I'm pointing out the issues with transportation safety in general because people such as yourself demonize cars specifically when it's not at all clear that cars are the real problem, let alone the biggest one. Look at Tokyo for example. Cars are all over the city, but pedestrian fatalities are extremely low because affordances are given to pedestrian traffic (ex. elevated crosswalks). If you want to sell people on banning personal vehicles in cities, the burden of proof is on you that 1) cars are the best problem to focus on, 2) the only way to solve the problem is to ban cars, and 3) the available alternatives are actually better than cars
Why is this relevant? If the city has a 60mph highway running through a dense neighborhood, and a toddler walks into the street, and is killed by a driver (not the driver's fault), that hardly absolves the city of addressing this problem.
I suspect this kind of thinking is what adds to a lot of the friction. Nobody is demonizing drivers. What many of us are upset with is our cities' planning, giving far too much leeway to vehicles and too little to human beings living there.
> Look at Tokyo for example. Cars are all over the city, but pedestrian fatalities are extremely low because affordances are given to pedestrian traffic (ex. elevated crosswalks). If you want to sell people on banning personal vehicles in cities, the burden of proof is on you that 1) cars are the best problem to focus on, 2) the only way to solve the problem is to ban cars, and 3) the available alternatives are actually better than cars
Tokyo has a lower car ownership rate than every city in the U.S. So... although cars may be "all over the city", they're still relatively uncommon.
And what problems do you think we're focused on here? It's not just about safety from car accidents. It's also:
- Is cheaper to not build / maintain roads/streets/bridges/parking lots that would otherwise be unnecessary.
- More pleasant for city residents (fewer honking horns, less sitting in traffic, more space for parks and greenery, more walking -> healthier residents, etc.)
- More environmentally friendly from both a localized air pollution standpoint and a global climate one.
And I don't know what to tell you, but I've been to Tokyo, and it's nothing like what you're describing. You sure you went to the right place? The most busy pedestrian crossing in the world, the Shibuya scramble, is in Tokyo, and it's an at-grade intersection. You know why it's safe? Because pedestrians are prioritized over vehicles, and the longest part of the light cycle stops all the car traffic entirely and lets people walk everywhere. And also, the Japanese are simply more communally-minded than Americans. Simply put, their drivers are better-behaved. They generally won't park in marked bike lanes (same as in Amsterdam) because of the social stigma of doing so. Meanwhile, in the US, drivers don't give a shit, and so we need a solution that isn't social stigma -- building more physical protection and removing cars entirely from many spaces, since people can't and won't operate them safely.
And the discussion of "fault" is entirely missing the point. It doesn't matter who's at fault in any given fatal crash. What matters is that we have 40k deaths per year in the United States caused by vehicles, more than almost any other cause, and we need to fix it. The fault if anything is a systems problem; we have way too many cars, not enough alternatives to them, and the built city environment prioritizes cars too much and doesn't do enough to separate vulnerable people who aren't in cars from them entirely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_timeline_of_the_Mosc...
Usually a better alternative will make the old thing obsolete without any disincentives.
For instance if you want a good cable car system or dedicated bus lanes, bike paths, it will go through reducing or removing private car lanes.
In general it’s both effects in one go: transform/reduce the existing infra into the new one, automatically making the new one better when it lands (and inconveniencing everyone until it lands)
https://thefrisc.com/the-ballad-of-geary-brt-b70ac45d0a4e
Functioning major cities build subways, a much bigger undertaking.
Our roads are fairly wide for a city, I think busses are ok. They're way cheaper too.
Stop the motorist murder spree.
If personal jetpacks became the de facto mode of transportation then personal jetpack deaths would become a major "public health" issue.
Try to not be such a fool.
Edit: would the downvoters care to explain why their prime delivery or their coffee beans are necessary traffic while, e.g., a mother driving their kids is not?
Why should the city build public transport, if mothers with children won't use it?
If cities cannot offer something better, they will never convince. So they must restrict. Then at least they should forbid the better for everyone not just for people their voters do not care about. It is quite revealing that the myriad of small, cheap, and flexible transporters that provide all these services inside cities are nearly always exempt from traffic policies.
It's all about utilization: An uber cab will probably see 10%-90% utilization (passenger count / time in transport), while a privately owned car is utilized only a few minutes of the day, by only 1/5th of the passanger capacity. Most of the time it collects rust on a parking spot that could be utilized for a better purpose. Parks, street food stands, benches.
Same for delivery: If the alternative is that everyone oes out and pollutes supermarkets, streets and public transport to get their freshly ground coffee, don't you think that having a vehicle that delivers on the last mile to the customer is much more efficient?
In cities that invest into bike lanes, obviously cargo bikes are becoming a real alternative for delivery services.
Yes, public transport has to be improved, too, nobody argued otherwise.
In a city, everything that needs space is scarce. You can ask for a "fair" price for a parking space, but then don't complain about a "fair" rent and a "fair" premium on every service that also utilizes space. The thing is that "fair" can look very different to different people.
I'd argue that requiring your employees to play an archaic game of dress-up is the real problem, but if I'm being honest, it can be pretty uncomfortable to walk around a sweltering city even in street clothes. (That being said I don't think the tradeoff is worth destroying your city with car-centric design)
Cities have a responsibility that extends beyond their own defined borders. Cities act as the cultural, legal, and commercial nexus for the surrounding rural and suburban area – sometimes that can include the entire state.
That responsibility includes the ability for outsiders to be able to access it.
What lobbying are you talking about? The most common story, regarding GM and street cars, has largely been debunked: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2013/06/be-careful-ho...
> Eventually, argues Slater, the operating costs could not be ignored. Just before World War II the operating costs for buses were 20 percent less per seat than for streetcars. After the war even a trolley-friendly city like San Francisco found buses cost 37 percent less to operate per hour. This wasn't just the case in the land where General Motors was king; in England, too, passenger costs had leveled out or started to favor buses by the 1930s.
> A case study can be made of Los Angeles, where Snell focused a good deal of his attack. But contemporary accounts suggest that a transformation from streetcars to buses was underway long before GM and its affiliates entered the scene circa 1940. As early as 1923, the Pacific Electric rail line was buying buses to replace some of its routes. The city's board of public utilities encouraged this trend — calling the use of motor buses "a foregone conclusion" — and by 1930 the city's big bus conglomerate carried 29 million riders a year.
More generally, you're overlooking the utter failure of public transport systems in the U.S. What lobbying was responsible for DC's and New York's subway systems literally falling apart, despite ample funding? Is GM lobbying responsible for it costing 5-7x as much to build a mile of subway in New York as compared to London or Paris? https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
What killed transit in the U.S. is a combination of cheap gas prices and ample land making car-dependent sprawl economical, and government incompetence making transit uneconomical. Here in Maryland, the State is building a 26 km light rail line through the suburbs for $7 billion. The Swedish city of Uppsala is building 17 km of light rail through their downtown for 340 million Euro. That cost differential is utterly fatal. For transit to be useful it needs to go where people are. If it costs 10 times as much to build a kilometer of rail, you simply can't build enough transit to make it a viable competitor to driving.
The cost disease likewise makes it impossible to quickly fix problems that make people not want to ride transit. DC's Metro ridership is declining due to low quality of service. We need a new rail station at Roslyn because that is causing a bottleneck. The estimated cost in 2012 was $1 billion for a new underground station on an existing line. By contrast, Stockholm is planning to extend its underground system by 11 km, including 11 new stations for $3.3 billion. A similar new underground line in DC (which is desperately needed to relieve congestion on the Orange/Blue/Silver tunnel) would be a $20 billion project.
At the end of the day, Americans are voting totally rationally, and "lobbying" has nothing to do with it. They see $10 billion projects that provide transit to a handful of people, and quite rationally say "fuck it, let's build more highways." I can guarantee you that if the Uppsala light rail project was going to cost $3.4 billion Euro and take 15+ years to build, like it would here in the U.S., the Swedes wouldn't vote for it either.
How do prices get that high in the US? Are private contractors too intent on pocketing fat profits? Or is it related to health, tort, or other insurances, or a privately funded pension system?
The Purple Line in Maryland was tied up in years of litigation:
> n August 2016, U.S. District Court Judge Richard J. Leon found that the Maryland Transit Administration and the Federal Transit Administration did not study whether Metro's maintenance issues and ridership decline would affect the Purple Line.[53] Judge Leon decided to vacate the Purple Line's federal approval.[53] A federal funding agreement cannot be signed without the reinstatement of the environmental approval, and Maryland has said it cannot afford to build the Purple Line without sufficient federal funding.[53][54] On August 21, 2017, despite the ongoing court case over the environmental analysis, $900 million of federal funding was granted for the light rail project.[55] On December 19, 2017, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled in favor of the Purple Line, specifically stating that declining ridership on the Washington Metro system does not require Maryland to complete a new environmental study for the Purple Line.[13] This federal appeals court ruling allowed for construction to continue and effectively ended the three-year legal battle surrounding the 16-mile light-rail line project.[12]
This not only adds to the cost--contractors must build in tons of padding because projects can be litigated even after construction starts. But it makes it impossible to build sustained public support for transit projects. People get worked up about a project, vote for funding, and then literally nothing visible happens for half a decade or more while paperwork gets done. It kills momentum completely.
Fixed that for you.
Although I'm not sure why taxis need an exemption. I guess it's another way to prop up a dying industry. Having caught cabs in SF before, I never will again, even if they can drive down Market Street.
The article also mentions 14th Street in NYC, which I live near and am very familiar with. This has been a contentious issue. Originally the L was planned to shutdown for 15-18 months and there was a plan to make 14th street sort of car free. I say sort of because cars were allowed to turn onto 14th Street but had to make the next right turn. This plan is now moot.
But a big concern was that it would just push car traffic to 13th and 15th streets, which are "residential".
I'm honestly not sure why 14th Street needs a dedicated busway as it does have the L. Compare this to say 23rd and 34th street that have no cross Subway (42nd does).
But the elephant in the room here is that you can still park on 14th street. If you're serious about increasing the traffic flow (of buses or otherwise) the obvious thing to do is free up 2 lanes by getting rid of the parking. But weirdly free street parking is sacrosanct in NYC politics. Why people who live in downtown Manhattan need this huge public subsidy is beyond me.
I agree. Taxis are usually one of the most dangerous and impatient drivers in the city.
Re: the 14th street busway, The “fears” about 13th and 15th street turned out to be unfounded. In the meanwhile, thousands of people who used the bus are benefitting with much faster and more reliable service (to the point that buses on 14th street are now waiting at stops because they are arriving too fast).
Car traffic has basically been unaffected.
Pedestrians find it much better and safer.
People who live and work there have it much better with the massively reduced air and noise pollution.
And you’re right that this should be replicated throughout the city. If it works on 14th street, which as you rightly point out already has a train, it will be a much bigger success on other streets.
Similarly in SF besides the quality of life improvements you have reclaimed valuable space that was being given away for no good reason.
It's one traffic light! Just WAIT.
In Sydney, for comparison, it's quite rare.
Running red lights ("but it was amber 15 seconds ago!"), honking at cars in front who are waiting on pedestrians who have right of way, block intersections preventing cross traffic (every Saturday afternoon you see dumbasses do this and traffic going to the Holland Tunnel backed up to Midtown), turning at red lights (illegal in the five boroughs), deciding to enter an intersection to block an emergency vehicle that has its sirens going, not getting out of the way of emergency vehicles and so on.
In nine years living in NYC I think I've seen a driver pulled by the NYPD exactly twice.
And what does the state legislature do? It tries to pass laws to make it illegal to detain taxi drivers who kill pedestrians [1] (luckily vetoed by the Governor).
[1]: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2015/06/23/senate-passes-bill-to...
That being said, 23rd and 34th could also certainly use busways. NYC (meaning CBD Manhattan) is far too dense to accommodate single-pax vehicles. Luckily, we seem to be making progress toward eliminating them.
Funny you say that. I've been to SF about a half-dozen times for work and Market St stands out to me as a nightmare to cross on foot. Tons of fast-moving cross-traffic, cars turning across crosswalks, and tons of pedestrians fighting all that. I'm glad to hear there's less traffic there (though honestly, if I have the choice, I will also be glad if I never have to visit SF again).
I used to look forward to visiting SF. I’m much more ambivalent these days.
It has never crossed my mind that Market Street was some kind of special hell for pedestrians. It's a busy street in the middle of a city and there are cross walks. I don't know what people would otherwise expect.
It depends where on Market. The section where cars have been completely banned had already been highly restricted for years. It was difficult to turn onto Market east of Van Ness as at most intersections you could only cross--turns were disallowed. Most cars on Market in the Financial District were either ride sharing, tourists who got lost, or people who disobeyed a turn restriction. The "ban", as it is now, is mostly a formalism, so all the praise and hand wringing is years late.
If and when the ban moves west of Van Ness, then it'll be notable. Although there are already turn restrictions at a few dangerous intersections.
I bike commuted throughout the city for a decade, and my biggest problem on market were muni buses and the cheese grater.
As a driver, there is a little black hole to get to via private car easily and thats the marriott marquee and target.
It takes an extra while to loop past markrt back around to get to marriott in certain circumstances.
Also, i once tested taking muni down from mission and duboce to embarcaderro vs how long it would take on bicycle; muni bus took 40 minutes. Bike to 7.
Although muni was plagued by little swarms of ticket cops causing massive delays to check tickets and hassle people. (They spent many minutes engaging in not productive discussion with people and arguing with them over tickets, which only delayed the rest of the bus longer)
“For most of the 20th century, there was a belief that the primary function of our transportation infrastructure was reducing congestion. Most people would agree that those efforts failed,” said Tumlin. “If we want cities to exist, we have to to use our abilities to cut emissions through transportation.”
I love car-free initiatives and wish SF could be less choked by vehicles during rush hour especially, and maybe this is a start of a bigger revolution, but I’m not holding my breath.
PS As everyone else pointed out, nice carve-out to prop up the taxi industry.
Edit: 45% of New York City households owned at least 1 automobile as late as 2015 [0]. Ownership per household was 22% in Manhattan.
[0] https://edc.nyc/article/new-yorkers-and-their-cars
If you are a cop/firefighter, or friends with one, you can drive around the city like a reckless asshole with almost complete immunity. If you are a cyclist that inconveniences a cop that has never traversed the city outside of a car (commutes from staten/long island to park on the sidewalk by the precinct and then hops in the squad car), you get a big fat ticket.
[0] https://twitter.com/placardabuse
Lots of cities already did this in the previous millennium. Nice to see that 40 years later word is finally starting to get around to the likes of NYC and SF.
It's designed for France but seems to work for San Francisco : http://villes.plus/San%20Francisco
Compare it to NYC where you commonly see beat cops walking the street and patrolling every other block. And more importantly, giving out tickets with an apparent belief that people should get penalized for committing minor offenses. SF Police is just not present or interested in doing this, or resourced to do so. They can't even stop people from breaking into cars, and you think they're going to be ticketing people for driving in a partial pedestrian zone?
I chalk it up to incompetent city government (which frankly right now, is actually hostile to proper policing -- with a DA who has openly said such, and a public who mistakenly thinks this is good to assuage their guilt), a lack of strong police culture, and the incredible cost of hiring people in California, that keep us from having the right amount of police. Honestly, this cost (driven by housing by the way) leads to our crime rate also.
I don't know US law, but in the UK this would be entirely a civil matter for the local authority - the police aren't involved in regulating things like bus lanes.
What did the DA say? Not familiar.
But he is pretty easy to pin a Communist red letter on and is the favorite punching bag of conservatives. He's a sort of "mascot of all that is wrong with Bad Communist San Francisco." "First they're a sanctuary for illegal immigrants, then they're a sanctuary for BURGLARS and BAD GUYS!!!"
The police union and conservative media often oversimplify his platform, I don't know why. The union could only stand to benefit from increased officer safety from policies that evidently reduce crime, but I think they want to believe the only solution to crime is throwing people in jail. As for conservative media I have no idea why we're the chosen target but whatever.
Police don't take anything less than a stabbing serious (I had my motorcycle stolen and the police came by 6 hours after I called them and then jetted off to stabbing within 2 minutes of arriving). I called the police 6 times in the first few years I was here, every time they arrived at least an hour later and provided absolutely no help. Last time my motorcycle was stolen and I found the guy parting it out on Craigslist, they were of zero help. I just don't bother anymore.
One of my friends that lives on Capp street witnessed burglars in an obviously stolen car with stolen goods, divvying up those goods in the middle of the night, and then went into a neighboring house. My friend was on the phone with the police as it was happening and they recorded the whole ordeal on video. Police slowly cruised by an hour later and that was that.
I understand that jailing people won't magically fix all of our issues, but the approach we have been taking is obviously not working. We need to try something new. I personally like the idea of hiring more police and getting them to constantly patrol their beat so that they are in-tune with their community and the community feels the police presence. Because at the moment, parts of SF, especially the Mission, feel lawless as fuck.
Property crime happens in every city I've lived in. Houston felt a better target for "liberal policy" being a liberal haven in a conservative state, and yet nobody jumped on them for their car breakins.
Basically, I'm skeptical of the political motivations of criticism of SF. If someone can provide an evidence based argument of bad policy I'm all ears. In the meantime I'm going to continue to vote for candidates, such as Chesea, with actual plans for tackling property crime.
Nothing will change.
> Nothing will change.
Bet.
He's certainly not pretending, lol.
"...Boudin said he will end cash bail and “tough-on-crime” sentencing enhancements, launch a unit to consider the immigration consequences of prosecutions and stop filing cases stemming from “illegal searches” after a minor traffic violation." -- https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/citys-new-progressive-da-che...
Immigration consequences of prosecutions -- just what do you think this means? People not getting prosecuted.
Seems a pretty big leap to me.
> cases stemming from “illegal searches” after a minor traffic violation."
Sounds constitutional to me.
> Boudin said he will end cash bail
Sounds fair to me.
> “tough-on-crime” sentencing enhancements
Sounds like evidence-based legal strategy to me.
I've yet to see any indication that effective prosecution will go down. In fact, part of Chesea's platform was increasing prosecution for felonies such as DWI.
So the only solutions that will work are those that don't require the police to do their job. We need red light cameras at every intersection and speed cameras on every road (they'd very quickly pay for themselves), and we need physical protection installed everywhere so that cars cannot even enter bike lanes or drive up onto sidewalks. It's sad that this is what it's come to, but absent getting a non-car-based police force who live in the city who are actually interested in protecting us against drivers, I don't see it changing.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/red-light-cameras...
Instead, it would probably be much more effective to fine people for these transgressions as a percentage of their income. A $500 speeding ticket or a $100 parking ticket isn't really going to bother a person driving a $140,000 Tesla as much as its going to bother someone who is driving a $1500 Toyota Camery. We can probably actually continue to have the police selectively enforcing like they do now, but if people actually fear the consequences of breaking boneheaded traffic laws because they'll have to pay $15000 for a speeding ticket, then they'll be a lot less likely to break those laws.
United States v. Bajakajian[0] is in play here.
> Thus the Court declared that, within the context of judicial deference to the legislature's power to set punishments, a fine would not offend the Eighth Amendment unless it were "grossly disproportional to the gravity of a defendant's offense".
A $15,000 speeding ticket is absolutely disproportional to the gravity of the offense of speeding, unless you find a way to argue that the offense is greater because of the net worth of the person committing it.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighth_Amendment_to_the_United...
If speeding is an equal offense for all people, then fining someone more for it would be excessive.
I saw a source that believes it's a solvable problem, but any conversation about this issue has to solve that problem.
The GPDR is an example of what I mean; where fines are written as €x or y% of revenue, whichever is higher - which is intended precisely to make fines proportional. There's little sense levying the same dollar fine against Google and my local corner shop - a figure that Google wouldn't notice would destroy the other.
Likewise, I feel that more early indication for going green would make sitting in red lights less stressful.
Alternatively, they could just make the yellow stay yellow a bit longer.
Big money -- and we make the city safer by catching criminals. Win win!
This is very effective at saving lives, and more enforcement is no substitute.
Waze, Google Maps, Apple Maps, Uber driver app, Lyft driver app, etc.
Whether or not some tiny fraction of a percent violate the ban, the vast majority of drivers will no longer route through this section of the street on their way to somewhere else.
there are bound to be many people who aren’t aware of it yet.
I'll let you know today.
Typically there are a lot of police up and down Market street.
I will personally stop my bicycle in front of private cars and guide them off market as well. Other bicyclists I've talked to are saying the same. We often do this for no-right-on-red to guarantee that the bike lane's right of way is protected.
Market street will remain private car free.
As for your comments on chesea, they are cartoonishly bad faith. His platform is clear, he won't be ignoring crime, he will be focusing on evidence based solutions. He continues to explain his reasoning behinds his decisions with evidence and continues to get flack from the police union and their lackeys that boils down to "commie LIKES CRIMINALS IN YOUR BACKYARD!!!"
Other people feel that not enforcing "quality of life" crimes a) makes life worse for residents (there's a reason we have those laws in the first place, and it's not solely racially based) b) could snowball into worse crimes.
His election is the people of SF trying something new, and that new thing is focusing the attention of the police force elsewhere.
How does a bicyclist guide a car driver?
Is there something special or specific about bicyclists an/or drivers in San Francisco? Is one or the other especially aggressive or poorly skilled?
I've not tried it in SF, this is me speaking of my experience in Houston.
In SF I'll block cars from making an illegal right by simply standing in front of them.
On Boudin, you must be a bit innocent to think that a DA's priorities and stated goals of moving away from incarceration will not flow down to an understanding among police that they are being told to "look the other way" and that their efforts to arrest lawbreakers (their primary tool) are being made hollow and pointless by lack of follow through on the prosecution end.
"...Boudin said he will end cash bail and “tough-on-crime” sentencing enhancements, launch a unit to consider the immigration consequences of prosecutions and stop filing cases stemming from “illegal searches” after a minor traffic violation." -- https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/citys-new-progressive-da-che...
Immigration consequences of prosecutions -- just what do you think this means? People not getting prosecuted.
I don't understand why uber-liberal thinking desires not to have our laws enforced.
> I don't understand why uber-liberal thinking desires not to have our laws enforced.
I don't understand where you're getting this strawman from. Which party is at this very moment attempting to enforce rule of law for the executive branch?
I rode in this morning and they were all there again so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Surely you can't believe that level of enforcement will last. Anyone who's ever been on market street knows that "bus lane" never meant anything.
They're clearly flush with cash: The budget has grown by leaps and bounds despite a static population.
I do realize that San Francisco imports the homeless problem from much of the rest of the country (nice weather, good people...if you're homeless it certainly seems better than NYC), and that has to have costs, but it seems like a city that should have gold-plated services.
Most homeless are from the area and due to mental, housing, and drug issues.
This loose attitude on life pretty much defined San Francisco for a couple of decades.
A big difference between SF and NYC is that NYC provides shelter for people that can't afford housing and SF does not. Only 5% of homeless people in NYC are unsheltered compared with 67% in the Bay Area.
Legally, NYC is required to provide shelters for anyone who needs it, while SF shelters have waitlists of over a month.
https://medium.com/@josefow/new-york-decided-to-end-street-h...
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-homeless-uns...
https://sfpublicpress.org/news/homelessness/navigation/2017-...
This certainly is one problem that could be solved with tech and very little human interaction; no reason at all not to install cameras on Market that text you about your violation immediately and mail you a bill for the ticket.
I have a pet theory that they don't bother controlling bad drivers, simply because there's nowhere to pull them over; stop anyone in the middle of the street and you've created an instant traffic jam. But really our mayor and DA set the agenda and they think traffic is just dandy.
[edit] A prominent NYC cycling blogger made a similar point just a minute ago. In the wake of news that NYC issues more traffic violations to cyclists (responsible for two deaths last year) than truck drivers (400+), he said, "I suspect NYPD ticketing stats are a meaningful measure of only one thing: how easy it is to stop the vehicle."
They're somewhat ill-conceived because need to enter them to turn right, so there's judgement calls on what's acceptable. And they are enforced. I think Muni has forward-facing cameras in buses to catch people in these lanes.
One is a cost, the other a revenue source. Yes, my experience is that there’s a city employee to tend the meter within five minutes, but good luck getting a response to a crime within four hours. The priorities are clear.
People will turn onto Market Street for two reasons: 1. Somehow they missed that it's a car-free zone. They don't need a ticket; they need to discover their mistake and not repeat it. 2. They think it'll save time and fuck bikes anyway. Any cyclist can block them. What are they going to do, run you over?
Last driver I came face-to-face with in the separated bike lane on my commute ended up hopping the curb to get around me. Next time he'll probably take a car lane.
As someone who lives and walks to work in downtown Boston, it is also a cultural issue. During rush hour, there is effectively no such thing as a moving violation. I walk through some of the busiest intersections on a daily basis, and just about every single time, some traffic law is broken.
No right on red is a complete joke. People will actually honk at you if you are stopped at a red light with a "no right on red" sign. Don't block the box? If you don't block the box, traffic coming from the other way will, and you won't make it through the _next_ light cycle. Red lights are just a suggestion at many intersections, with 2, even 3 cars running through _after_ the light has turned.
The joke I always say is that if BPD enforced all moving violations for just one day downtown, they'd raise enough revenue to fund another Big Dig. Not true, of course, because even the cops themselves don't follow the traffic laws. Why should they?
[1] https://www.wgbh.org/news/local-news/2019/03/13/boston-city-...
[2] https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3524301,-71.0622098,3a,75y,5...
I think it was to some degree over-hyped, because this stretch of market was already fairly restrictive to cars, and even after the change they’re still letting all city vehicles and taxis use the street, so I didn’t expect a big change.
Nevertheless, commuting yesterday was noticeably calmer and quieter, with a lot more bikes and scooters out. I was hoping to find the numbers from the bike traffic counters they have on the street, but I didn’t see them. My unscientific guess, then, is 30-50% more bikes.
It’s a nice change. I just wish they’d extend it deeper into the city, and specifically create a firm connection to Golden Gate Park. As-is, “the wiggle” gets you there, but the stretch from Haight to the Panhandle feels dangerous to me.
I’d love to see Page St. pedestrianized, caveat somehow allowing residents car access to their block only. It’s a perfect connector except for a couple really steep blocks. Perhaps a rope tow to help the less athletic (me) get up the hill? :)
The homelessness crisis is. I’m surprised no one yet mentioned it in this long thread. $600 million might be better spent there.
Probably because it's off topic for the thread, which is about the restrictions on private cars on market Street specifically and transit strategies in general, not a pile-on for SF criticism.
The money was allocated for transportation improvement. It would be illegal to spend it otherwise.
Lots of money is being spent on the homelessness crisis. Shelters are being built. It's being worked on.
I am not suggesting to use money allocated for transportation on something else. I’m suggesting the money should have been allocated on something else.
This article[0] claims that $300M is spent annually on the crisis. The $600M would triple that investment.
[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.sfchronicle.com/politics/am...