February 2008 - Sustainability

[Sustain] Fwd: Sign the Carbon-Free, Nuclear-Free statement
by Don Eichelberger 09 Feb '08

09 Feb '08

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[Sustain] Fwd: SF Chronicle Attacks Free Muni
by Eric Brooks 01 Feb '08

01 Feb '08

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2008/01/29/MNFQUNU4C.DT… Free ride? Fat chance: Muni fares will stay Rachel Gordon, Chronicle Staff Writer <mailto:rgordon@sfchronicle.com> Tuesday, January 29, 2008 Mayor Newsom has abandoned his idea to eliminate fares on... <http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/c/a/2008/01/29/MNFQUNU4C.DT…> Passengers will continue to have to pay to ride San Franc... <http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/c/a/2008/01/29/MNFQUNU4C.DT…> Eliminating fares on San Francisco's Municipal Railway - an idea Mayor Gavin Newsom wanted explored - would worsen delays, overcrowding and financial burdens on the already strained transit system. That bleak assessment by private consultants who evaluated the free-rides idea has led Newsom to quietly abandon the concept, top administration aides told The Chronicle on Monday. "It's not something that we plan to pursue at this time," said Stuart Sunshine, the mayor's top transportation aide. Newsom asked transit officials in March to study a no-fare system, saying at the time, "If it could happen here, it could happen anywhere." His suggestion was aimed at luring people out of their cars to reduce air pollution and traffic. The consulting team hired by the city, led by Sharon Greene & Associates, looked at what happened when other jurisdictions adopted free transit programs. In larger cities, such as Austin, Texas, Trenton, N.J., and Denver, ridership increased by nearly 50 percent. If that happened to Muni, which now provides nearly 700,000 trips on an average day, the annual operating and maintenance costs would rise by nearly $69 million. Muni's annual budget is about $670 million. The extra costs would come from paying more drivers, maintenance and cleaning crews, supervisors and security guards. In addition, the city would have to add an estimated 267 buses and streetcars to its fleet of about 1,000 at a cost of approximately $537 million. New storage and maintenance yards also would be needed to accommodate the new vehicles. Muni also would have to figure out how to run more streetcars through the tunnels. The consultants warned of bottlenecks and added delays. The system already has problems running on schedule. Muni currently needs an estimated $100 million to $150 million more a year to make the significant service improvements voters demanded in 1999 but have yet to see. Even if the money were available, it would take five to 10 years to purchase the new equipment and expand the maintenance capacity. City Controller Ed Harrington, a veteran City Hall fiscal watchdog who also chairs a special mayor's panel looking at ways to stabilize Muni's finances, said the notion of free Muni should be shelved because it likely would attract hundreds of thousands of new riders and prove detrimental. "The odds are," Harrington said, the initiative "would become so successful that you'd destroy the system." The consultants' draft report, a copy of which was obtained by The Chronicle, said, "Conceptually, fare-free service would appear consistent with San Francisco's 'transit-first' policy, which requires the city to promote alternatives to car travel. However, without significant improvements made to the system's infrastructure in order to increase reliability, fare elimination alone may actually make public transit a less viable alternative to other modes of travel." Newsom, in asking for the study, speculated that the amount of money Muni now spends collecting and counting fares isn't much different than it gets at the fare box. But actually, the consultants found, the difference is considerable. Costs related to fare collection add up to about $8.4 million a year. Muni collects nearly $112 million a year in fare revenue. Muni charges $1.50 for a regular cash adult fare - $5 for a cable car ride - and $45 for a standard monthly FastPass. Discounts are offered to the disabled, seniors and youth. Many transit agencies across the country have offered free rides - some systemwide and some in limited geographic areas, such as the programs in Portland, Ore., and Seattle that let people board for free in the downtown areas. The experiments in Trenton, Austin and Denver were abandoned, and higher costs were cited as just one reason. Another reason: Drivers and longtime passengers complained that the free rides attracted rowdy and destructive joyriders. Only a handful of systems that began a systemwide free-boarding program within the last 20 years continue to offer the service, the consultants found. All of them, in such places as Logan, Utah, and Clemson, S.C., are relatively small operations. Closer to home, the East Bay city of Emeryville provides free bus shuttle service around town and to and from an Oakland BART station. *In Bay Area:* The president of the Board of Supervisors demands that the mayor return transit money used to pay the salaries of mayoral aides. *D5* ** Muni at a glance -- Average daily ridership: almost *700,000* ** -- Annual operating budget: *$670 million* ** -- Annual revenue from fares: nearly *$112 million* ** -- Annual cost to collect fares: *$8.4 million* ** /E-mail Rachel Gordon at rgordon(a)sfchronicle.com <mailto:rgordon@sfchronicle.com>./ -- "I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves." -- Che Guevara

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[Sustain] Fwd: Beyond Chron - Free Muni
by Eric Brooks 01 Feb '08

01 Feb '08

http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/Free_Muni_Free_San_Francisco__5327.html Free Muni! Free San Francisco! by Marc Norton, Feb. 01, 2008 Matier and Ross, San Francisco's premier political gossips, say that Mayor Gavin Newsom plunked down $55,000 for a report <http://co.sfgov.org/webreports/details.aspx?id=660> telling him that making Muni free would get a lot of people to use public transit. Hey, Gavin, anybody on the street could have told you that for zip. But what really takes the cake is that the well-paid consultants who wrote this report concluded that getting more people to use Muni would be a BAD thing. The consultants estimate that free Muni would increase ridership by 35-40%. With around 700,000 boardings in an average day, that would mean something like 250,000 more trips. Think about that. Thousands and thousands of people getting out of their cars. Thousands and thousands more people going places in the City they couldn't afford to get to before. Less traffic congestion, less pollution, more people out and about enjoying themselves and probably spending money in SF businesses. How horrible! Why would this be so BAD? Because it would cost Muni money. Wow. We paid $55,000 to learn that? We all know Muni needs money. I mean, Muni chief Nathaniel Ford is worth every penny of that $336,000 salary we pay him. Then there are all those mayoral staffers (Willie called them "special assistants") being paid by Muni to buff the Mayor's policy-wonk image. Good thing we passed Supervisor Aaron Peskin's Prop A. The consultants also tell us that free Muni would create a need for more buses, streetcars and trains, not to mention more drivers and mechanics. Holy cow, Batman! Perhaps we should let these consultants in on a little secret -- Muni already needs more buses, streetcars and trains, not to mention more drivers and mechanics. Anybody who has ever tried to get to work in the morning on Muni knows that. Here's my favorite argument against free Muni put forward by our esteemed consultants -- it "could adversely impact movement towards an integrated SMART-card based electronic fare collection system in the Bay Area." Talk about putting the cart before the horse! But the consultants have a solution to this problem: we could all use our SMART cards when we board Muni "solely as a means to count riders." How high-tech and cool, don't you think? The consultants carefully delineate all the costs associated with free Muni in their 138-page report. But somehow they never get around to talking about the financial and societal benefits of taking thousands of cars off the streets every day. Nor do they consider the financial and societal benefits of less pollution, or of much greater mobility for thousands of San Franciscans. Some "transit-first" city! Hurrah for our "Green Mayor!" And here is a little gem that didn't make it into the Chronicle's front-page hit piece against free Muni. According to the report, elimination of various identified "fare related projects that would no longer be required... would result in a savings of approximately $255 million over the period of 2007-2037." That's in addition to the modest estimate that Muni would save $8.4 million per year in fare collection costs. Okay, okay, you ask, where would we get the money to pay for free Muni? I'm glad you asked. A couple of months ago, one of those blue-ribbon panels that mayors like to appoint delivered a preliminary blue-ribbon report on how to get more money for Muni. But, before they even began, they wantonly jettisoned the one and only real idea that makes any sense: taxing downtown big business and downtown landlords. I confess, here I go again. How do all those downtown businesses, hotels, and landlords make their bucks? Off of people who come downtown to spend money, or to work for them, or both. And what makes downtown possible? Why, Muni of course. Take Muni out of the equation, and downtown is just one big highrise ghost town. And who pays for Muni now? Why, everybody except downtown businesses, hotels and landlords. Apparently, that is the natural order of things. Right now we are building downtown a small empire of vertical gated communities for millionaires and billionaires. I say we turn those skyscrapers upside down and shake some moola out of those rich dude's pockets. If they don't like it, let them buy a condo in Fresno. If Don Fisher can plunk down $100 million or more just to display his art collection at the Presidio, let's expropriate those millions to buy buses, streetcars and trains, and hang his art in Muni Metro where everybody can see it -- for free of course. Free Muni! Free San Francisco! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ /Copyright © 2008 by Marc Norton Marc Norton is a bellman at a small hotel in downtown San Francisco. Contact him at nortonsf(a)ix.netcom.com, or through his website at www.MarcNorton.us <http://www.marcnorton.us>./ -- "I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves." -- Che Guevara

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