- Transpo - list.sfgreens.org

interesting article
by John-Marc Chandonia 14 Dec '06

14 Dec '06

----- Forwarded message from Jason Henderson <jhenders(a)sbcglobal.net> ----- Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2006 09:10:30 -0800 From: Jason Henderson <jhenders(a)sbcglobal.net> To: Carfreeliving(a)livablecity.org Subject: [Carfreeliving] Suburbia: Running on Empty? This is an excellent piece of which most of us are already familiar and well-versed. But meanwhile the the "liberal media" (i.e) Chronicle publishes Cox and Kotkin in their Op Ed pages, and the NYT Times runs Brooks. Question - how does this get into Pelosi's head? Suburbia: Running on Empty? By James Howard Kunstler, Salgamundi Posted on December 14, 2006, Printed on December 14, 2006 http://www.alternet.org/story/45418/ Reviewed: Sprawl: A Compact History by Robert Bruegmann (University of Chicago Press, 2005). There is a species of fatuous thinking these days in America which states, in so many words, that suburbia is fine and dandy because so many people like it. Variations on this theme range from the idea that suburbia is the highest expression of free markets, to the notion that it is the natural outcome of our democracy, to the belief that God has ordained it. This has been the reasoning of some public intellectuals such as New York Times columnist David Brooks, Joel Kotkin, of the New America Foundation, and the preposterous Peter Huber of Forbes Magazine and the Manhattan Institute. Now Robert Bruegmann, professor of art history, architecture, and urban planning at the University of Illinois, Chicago, weighs in from academia with essentially the same argument floated on barges of statistical analysis. That so many editors, foundation board members, and deans of faculty allow this obvious casuistry to pass as thinking at all says a lot about what a nation of morons we have become, and how deep the intellectual rot runs. The various above-named characters may differ somewhat in style, but they all employ the same specious logic in support of the status quo. Brooks functions as a cheerleader for successful yuppies like himself wishing to justify the blandishments they enjoy in going along with the suburban program. Kotkin is a highly-paid consultant to municipal governments who use him to rationalize the pernicious effects of their engrained practices. Huber gives aid and comfort to those who regard the public interest in any form as an affront to private gain. And now along comes Bob Bruegmann seeking to lend the imprimatur of empiricism to these arguments, so as to valiantly prove wrong for once and for all the peevish critics of suburbia (including yours truly) by driving the wooden stake of science through our superstitious and sentimental hearts. Despite his boatloads of statistics, Bruegmann is just flat-out wrong in many of his positions and virtually all of his conclusions. At the center of his thesis is the unquestioned assumption that the suburban project can continue indefinitely, that it is a good thing, that we will get more of it, and we ought to stop carping and enjoy it. His book fails entirely to acknowledge the fact that we are entering a permanent global energy crisis that will put an end to the drive-in utopia whether people like it or not. This singular harsh fact obviates all the rationalizations brought to the quixotic defense of suburbia. What Bruegmann and his homies overlook is that American-style suburbia, aka sprawl, was an emergent, self-organizing system made possible only by lavish and exorbitant supplies of cheap fossil fuels, and once those conditions no longer obtain, not only will there be no further elaboration of this development pattern, but all the existing stuff built according to that pattern -- which comprises more than eighty percent of everything ever built in America -- will drastically lose its usefulness and its relative "market" value. What's more, the discontinuities-to-come in the global energy picture will pose challenges so severe to industrial society that we will be lucky to salvage anything resembling civilized life altogether. It is necessary to insert right here that, contrary to a lot of wishful thinking and techgnostic wool-gathering rampant these days, no combination of alternative fuels or systems for using them will allow us to run America the way we currently run it, or even a substantial fraction of it. We are not going to run Wal-Mart, Walt Disney World, and the interstate highway system on hydrogen, coal synfuels, tar sand or oil shale distillates, bio-diesel, ethanol, recycled french-fry oil, solar electricity, wind power, or nuclear fission. The stark truth of the situation is that we are simply going to have to make other arrangements -- and I'm sorry to have to repeat that this will be the case whether we like it or not. Suburbia will be coming off the menu. We will no longer be able to resort to the stupid argument that it is okay because we chose it. Another very troubling aspect of Bruegmann's book is that his statistical salvos fail to address altogether the many questions of quality and character in our everyday environments. The sad truth is that most of America has come to be composed of places that are not worth caring about, and they may eventually (if not already) add up to a nation not worth defending, or a culture not worth carrying on. You can cite the population figures and density trend lines all day long and never come to the conclusion that Hackensack, New Jersey, has become a soul-sapping sinkhole of auto-centric crap with strikingly poor prospects for maintaining its value or utility in the not-too-distant future. When it is convenient, Bruegmann claims that the statistical analysis of his opponents fails to tell the story correctly. He writes: We can use the Chicago area as a typical example. For years, sprawl opponents trumpeted the "fact" that between 1970 and 1990 the metropolitan area grew in population by only 4 percent, but grew in land by 46 percent. This kind of statistic, juxtaposed with a photograph of a new subdivision under construction in a cornfield conjures up images of a juggernaut moving inexorably across the countryside, flattening farms and forest, replacing country roads with highways lined with wall-to-wall strip centers and an endless sprawl of large lot subdivisions. ... Even if the figures were accurate, they would not necessarily represent a crisis. There is no shortage of land in Illinois. All this promiscuous marshalling of statistics really demonstrates is that the story is hardly about statistics anymore than it is about the magical operations of markets or the wonders of democracy. The appropriate lesson of the sprawl era is that societies can make extremely unfortunate collective decisions, and the losses incurred are irreversible. This is really the central conflict between the sprawl champions and those of us who do not view sprawl as any kind of boon. Sprawl is, and always has been, to put it as plainly as possible, a living arrangement with no future -- and to regard it as anything else is a disservice to our fate. It is self-evident that human beings enjoy living in settings of domesticated nature -- and no accident that the archetype for this is the Garden of Eden -- but note that there is no mention of parking lots in the standard accounts of it. The suburbia of our time, which even Bruegmann identifies as "sprawl," is something of a new and different order, not adequately described by sheer compilations of numbers. Because he is allergic to any consideration of the non-empirical, Bruegmann manages to misunderstand some important elements of the suburb in history. Yes, it is true that ancient Rome had extensive suburbs. It was an urban organism of roughly a million people in the time of Trajan and a substantial elite occupied villas in its hinterlands. They did it because they could -- because this elite enjoyed fabulous imperial wealth, and because the enormous power of the empire allowed civil security to extend outside the city, indeed throughout Italy, where wealth enjoyed protection. Even the mild weather of the region favored these arrangements. But was life there comparable in quality and character to Hackensack? And what kind of empirical data might demonstrate the difference? You could say that suburban Romans owned fewer automobiles per capita as compared to the denizens of Hackensack, and that would be correct -- but would it be meaningful? When Rome fell apart, nothing like it was seen again until the beginning of the early industrial age. The gothic, medieval, and even Renaissance cities were designed more or less as extensive fortifications because political security was so dicey, and to be outside the protective walls was not advantageous. The industrial age marked a sharp change in the organization of cities and their relations to their hinterlands. The differences in the development of the industrial cities themselves has a pertinence to the consequent development of suburbs that Bruegmann seems to misconstrue. He writes: "In nineteenth century, London exploded outward as developers threw up mile upon miles of brick terrace houses. ... The resulting cityscape horrified highbrow British critics of the time, who considered the new districts to be vulgar, cheap, and monotonous. Nevertheless, the houses continued to be built because so many middle class inhabitants of central London saw them as a vast step upward for their families. In the second half of the twentieth century, highbrow opinion came around, and today they are widely considered to be the very model of compact urban life. Ironically, they are today often considered the antithesis of sprawl." The redevelopment of Paris in the same period took a quite different form. The heroic renovation of the city by Louis Napoleon and George Eugene Haussmann, the prefect (i.e. mayor) of the city, was based typologically on the apartment building for the growing middle class rather than the private row house. These apartment buildings, generally seven stories and under, were zoned vertically by income, with the wealthy occupying the lower floors above the shop fronts and the less well-off above them, and finally servants and poor folk tucked under the mansard roofs. The result was a substantially different quality of city life, more compact and lively than London, with people of all social ranks thrown into proximity, and a rich mix of culture and commerce at street level. Returning to compare them today, in the 21st century, one could easily conclude that the seemingly endless, sprawling, row house neighborhoods of London are indeed monotonous to an extreme, tending to be income-segregated ghettos, with retail services and cultural amenity deployed often at an inconvenient remove. In American cities, you got a mix of both patterns. New York went crazy for Paris-style apartment living and eventually elaborated it into the skyscraper, while other places like Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore stuck almost exclusively to the row house. In Chicago and San Francisco, you got some of both. In any case, the industrial growth of American cities was furious and resulted in an urban ecology with the ambience of a gigantic machine. Little of the pre industrial scale survived, and once you got west of Chicago, it barely existed in the first place. The ensuing discomfort and revulsion inspired an intense nostalgia for the non-city, for country living, for the garden. Rural land outside these American cities was plentiful, cheap, and unencumbered by entailments beyond fee-simple ownership. So as the Civil War concluded, the new railroads facilitated a ready escape from the awful industrial city into the hinterlands and the American suburbs were born. The suburban evolutionary sequence moved quickly from the railroad through the brief but exuberant streetcar phase to the drive-in utopia based on universal democratic car ownership, and the development pattern changed with it. Eventually, it resolved into the dendritic roadway system we see today, of cul-de-sac income-segregated housing tracts, commercial collector boulevards with the familiar chain retail, and the activity pods of the mall and the office park, tied together by limited access freeways -- all of it predicated on the rationalized insanity of single-use zoning. The automobile and all of its requisite infrastructure, of course, would not have developed the way it did without ready supplies of cheap oil, and America coincidentally had vast supplies easily obtainable inside our own borders. Europe had to rely on much more distant supplies of oil. Meanwhile, their societies were savagely disrupted by two world wars, with after-effects lasting for decades. On top of that, they had age-old land-tenure laws that did not favor real estate subdivisions. So, it was not so easy for them to suburbanize. They got into the game late, never enjoyed cheap gasoline, and did not sprawl even close to the extent that we did, or the way we did -- a point that Bruegmann obscures with a blizzard of statistics about relative city densities in late 20th century Europe that would have the reader think that the Ile de France today is not substantially different from Nassau County, Long Island. Something strange happened to American suburbia as it went through its phases of development. It started out as country living, the sovereign antidote to the industrial city. Then it became a rigorously domesticated variant of country living. Then, after World War Two it mutated into something insidiously different: a cartoon of country living in a cartoon of the country (in a cartoon of a country house). This sad fact explains why the chronic disappointment of suburbia inspires ridicule even among those who live in it. It hasn't delivered very well on its promises for a long time now. In its florid, climactic incarnation today -- the McMansion precincts of Dallas, Atlanta, or Northern Virginia -- it presents the worst elements of urban and rural life in the same package, with few of the benefits of either. The megaburbs have all the congestion of a city and none of the human contact. They have all of the isolation of the country, but no real connection to nature. The issue at the heart of Bruegmann's book is whether this is, after all, a good thing. He writes: ...[S]prawl has been beneficial for many people. ... Even where sprawl has created negative consequences, moreover, there seems to be very little evidence that for most people sprawl itself has precipitated any kind of crisis. The vast majority of Americans have responded to a whole battery of polls year after year saying that they are quite happy with where they live. ...I would argue that worries about sprawl have become so important not because conditions are really bad, as critics suggest, but precisely because conditions are so good. What Bruegmann leaves out of the picture is the same thing that the mandarins of American municipal planning have left out for half a century: any consideration of quality and character of place, and the means for achieving it. This is evinced most dramatically in the issue of the public realm, the part of our everyday world that belongs to everybody and that everyone ought to have access to most of the time. In postwar America, the public realm was trashed, relegated purely to the needs of the automobile until America became a nearly uniform automobile slum from sea to shining sea. It didn't even matter whether you were in a rich place or a poor place anymore -- the parking lots of Beverly Hills weren't any more rewarding to the human spirit than the parking lots of Hackensack. More to the point perhaps, the very methods of the municipal planners, which produced the ghastly sprawl environments of our time, are based on exactly the same kind of statistical methods employed by Bruegmann, instead of the one thing that might have mitigated or constrained the mess, namely artistry in design. The public realm has two crucial roles in our collective existence. First, it is the physical manifestation of the common good. Second, is literally the dwelling place of civic life. And so if you fail to design the public realm with deliberate artistry, and by so doing degrade and dishonor the public realm by turning it into a uniform automobile slum simply to accommodate x-number of cars, you will automatically degrade the quality of civic life and the public's collective ability to conceive of a common good beyond incessant motoring. These are issues which do not yield to strict empiricism and cannot be comprehended by it. The result in American suburbia today is a set of places where private luxury is exalted and public space is grievously dishonored, damaged, and diminished, places where there are more bathrooms per inhabitant than any other society on earth, but where public space is so debased that the only place children can find to play beyond their back yards is the berm between the WalMart and the Winn Dixie. We flatter ourselves to think that the shopping malls are an adequate substitute for real main streets. We saw an interesting case locally here a couple of years ago, in Albany, New York's Crossgates Mall, where a man bought a T-shirt in one of the mall's shops with an anti-war slogan printed on it, and was then arrested for wearing it in the mall corridor when security guards hassled him and called the police. Because Bruegmann's analysis omits entirely the issues of physical form and its quality, it cannot comprehend the additional problem with suburbia today: that it is a development pattern with no future because of the looming global energy crisis. All matters pertaining to physical form Bruegmann wrongly identifies (and denigrates) as "aesthetic" issues. This allows him to argue that physical form (including development patterns) are simply differences in taste, which takes us back to the fallacy that an appraisal of suburbia is simply a sum of opinions, or a set of poll numbers, or the mere fact that at a given time in history, any number of people chose tragically to invest their life savings in a particular kind of house because they mistakenly believed that current conditions would continue forever. We're about to find out the hard way that life is tragic and history is merciless and that reality doesn't care what we like or don't like. The suburban system we have come to think of as "sprawl" is going to fail spectacularly. We will be desperate to make other arrangements, and all the statistical bullshit in the world will not avail us to bargain our way around it. The global oil crisis we face, in combination with climate change, is about to bring on perhaps the greatest discontinuity that the human race has ever faced. If there are any historians left to unearth this book centuries from now, they will marvel that anyone ever thought that simply liking something was enough to guarantee its existence. Reprinted with permission of the author. James Howard Kunstler is author of The Long Emergency. Visit his site at Kunstler.com. ? 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/45418/ _______________________________________________ Carfreeliving(a)livablecity.org mailing list to facilitate and promote car-free living in SF To unsubscribe: mailto:Carfreeliving-request@livablecity.org?subject=unsubscribe or, for all options, go to: http://livablecity.org/mailman/listinfo/carfreeliving_livablecity.org ----- End forwarded message ----- -- John-Marc Chandonia (jmc(a)sfgreens.org) http://sfgreens.org/

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Request for Green Party support of street cleaning
by Susan King 06 Dec '06

06 Dec '06

Hi all, This is a summary of a local issue in Cole Valley involving parking and street cleaning. Organizers in favor of more frequent cleaning would like the Green Party's support of this action. The opposition (as you can see from the summary below) is based on the loss of month long free parking in the neighborhood. In an odd twist, the opposition is claiming that more frequent street sweeping (making cleaning weekly, rather than the current once per month schedule) is BAD for the environment as it forces long term parkers to move their cars more frequently. As we know, abundance of parking (esp free parking) induces car ownership and driving. On a positive note in support of weekly cleaning, Cole Valley is a destination neighborhood and major transit corridor (N Judah, which carries over 120,000 people per day). The streets in the neighborhood are often filled with garbage constantly, as the streets are only cleaned once per month. Weekly cleaning will vastly improve the appearance of the neighborhood, and reduce the incidence of sewer back ups on rainy days (due to accumulated trash clogging the drains). Our support will help encourage DPW to clean this area weekly, as is done in almost every other neighborhood in the city. I am hoping that the Transportation WG can weigh in on this, but the hearing is next week, so I am also putting this out to the full active list: About 140 people on Carl Street, from Clayton to Arguello, signed a petition to request that DPW change the mechanical street cleaning from monthly to weekly. Weekly street cleaning will benefit us in many ways: ¨ Carl Street, which is a major transportation corridor, will be cleaner; ¨ A weekly street cleaning day is easier for most people to remember rather than "the first Thursday of the month"; ¨ When people don't remember to move their car, that section of the street is then not cleaned for two months; ¨ The will be less stockpiling of cars on the street since the cars need to move at least once a week; ¨ Less stockpiling means more parking spaces for people who need them. On Wednesday, November 8 hearing three neighbors on Carl Street were there in support of the change along with Regina Dick-Endrizzi, speaking for Supervisor Mirkirimi. Five spoke in opposition to the change - all gave as the reason that parking would be more difficult. Three of the five did not live on Carl Street but on nearby streets. In a bizarre twist, the hearing officer chose to ignore the petition of over 120 Carl Street residents and postponed the hearing for 30 days to give the opponents time to collect signatures against the street cleaning! The new hearing date is set for December 13 at 9am in room 400 of City Hall.

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call-in # for Wednesday TV show: 621-4472, 7 to 8 p.m., Channel 29
by susan_e_vaughan＠juno.com 29 Nov '06

29 Nov '06

Hello Everyone, If your interested in participating in a live call-in election recap on Wednesday, November 29, from 7 to 8 p.m., watch my show on Channel 29 and call: (415) 621-4472 My guests will be Erika McDonald, Krissy Keefer, Natasha Marsh of the League of Young Voters, and Nicole Derse of the SFPO. I may have one other guest. Sue ____________________________________________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail beta. http://new.mail.yahoo.com

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Re: [Transpo] Transpo Meeting: I'll Attend and Open Up the Office
by susan_e_vaughan＠juno.com 29 Nov '06

29 Nov '06

I forgot about this meeting and am only just checking my email now at 7:45 p.m. Sue -- Eric Brooks <brookse32(a)netscape.net> wrote: Hi John-Marc and all. I'll be there tonight and open up. Cheers, Eric jmc(a)sfgreens.org wrote: >Hi, > I can't make the Transpo WG meeting tonight as I'm still >getting over a bad cold. Is anybody else with an office key planning >to attend tonight (7-9)? The agenda is to plan our next steps for the >new year, particularly regarding MUNI. We should also find out what >the TJC is planning next year. > >JMC > > _______________________________________________ Transpo mailing list Transpo(a)sfgreens.org https://list.sfgreens.org/mailman/listinfo/transpo

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Transpo WG meeting tonight
by John-Marc Chandonia 28 Nov '06

28 Nov '06

Hi, I can't make the Transpo WG meeting tonight as I'm still getting over a bad cold. Is anybody else with an office key planning to attend tonight (7-9)? The agenda is to plan our next steps for the new year, particularly regarding MUNI. We should also find out what the TJC is planning next year. JMC -- John-Marc Chandonia (jmc(a)sfgreens.org) http://sfgreens.org/

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Re: [Transpo] Muni Abuses
by Eric Brooks 19 Nov '06

19 Nov '06

Let's be clear here. I showed the driver a valid pass, and he then demanded that I reboard the bus anyway. This is a ridiculous reason to shut down a bus line. The driver wasn't handling a problem, he was -creating- one. By the way all, on the side of the drivers, I have been told by some of them that they get into trouble if they don't enforce Muni's punitive rules. So what is happening here is that the elites who run the system are pitting the workers against the people, creating unnecessary tension and conflict. They are forcing drivers to be enforcers and teaching them that riders are dead beats, to divide us against eachother and purposely perpetuate a lousy system that everyone hates, so that most continue driving, thereby filling the pockets of the fossil fuel, auto, tire, and road construction corporations. Recent slanted studies performed by Muni, ostensibly showing that large amounts of money were being lost through fare evasion, were completely debunked before the Board of Supervisors, and Board President Peskin went boldly out of his way to openly deride Muni for their bullshit... (The conclusion was that at absolute most, 15% of fares were being evaded, and probably less. Muni was claiming around 70% at one point, and local newspapers ridiculously printed this as fact.) It is time to act. The planet is burning and universal mass transit would cut CO2 increases by a huge amount. Third time's a charm sounds good to me. Let's do it. Eric Brooks lucretiam2000(a)yahoo.com wrote: >Dear Eric, > > > Rita does not drive a car and has no drivers >license. She rides muni everyday and 5 days a week, >Bart to Oakland for work. She is a strong advocate >for public transportation and knows the muni system >inside and out. Don't make assumptions about people >you do not know. It is probably the same assumptions >you make about the muni driver who was trying to do >his or her job the best way he or she could. > > I have been on the N Judah many times and seen >drivers trying to handle huge crowds of people all >trying to jam on limited cars. That is not easy and >if you felt slighted by this particlular driver, write >a letter to muni with your complaints. I am amazed at >how cool under pressure these drivers can be given >some of the lines and over-crowededness that happens >especially on the weekends. >Nancy > >--- Eric Brooks <brookse32(a)netscape.net> wrote: > > > >>With all due respect. >> >>Do you actually ride the buses very often? >> >>I doubt that you do. >> >>It has been pretty much standard practice for most >>drivers to let people >>board on the back of the bus when there are long >>lines because it >>-massively- speeds up the running of the system. >>Also, many riders are extremely poor and cannot >>afford to pay to ride >>the bus. They routinely get on the back to avoid >>having to pay; and to >>avoid the deep indignity of having to beg the driver >>for a ride. >> >>The only time this situation changes is when Muni >>directors decide that >>they have to crack down on those who avoid fares, >>and declare that >>everyone has to board in front, to force as many to >>pay as possible, >>whether they can afford it or not. This puts an >>incredible slow down on >>the system as everyone is forced to slowly file into >>the front of buses, >>no matter how crowded. This leads to the inevitable >>huge service delays >>that are always a problem, especially under such >>punitive conditions. >>People get frustrated with such cattle car >>conditions, and stop riding. >>It also amounts to an extremely regressive tax on >>those who can least >>afford it. There are even drivers during these crack >>downs who force all >>riders to -leave- by the front of the bus at the >>-busiest stops- in >>order to keep people from getting on in the back and >>this -doubly- slows >>down an entire bus line each time it happens. >>Furthermore, poor riders >>caught boarding the back or without transfers have >>actually been fined >>and even assaulted by staff and police during the >>most recent fare crack >>downs. And all of this, especially with slower runs >>transporting fewer >>people, can actually -reduce- revenues. >> >>Muni should be funded by fuel and parking taxes >>which encourage people >>to abandon cars and trucks for -much- more >>environmental transit, not by >>poor riders who are already having enough trouble >>just making ends meet >>in this insane war economy in which federal and >>state governments are >>chopping the hell out of city supports, including >>transit supports. >> >>I purposely refused to go along with the driver's >>absurd request to make >>it extremely irritating to both the driver and Muni >>to implement such >>draconian policies which will inevitably hit the >>poor right in the gut. >> >>The harder all of us make it for them implement this >>'zero tolerance' >>policy the more likely they will be to give up on it >>quickly and search >>for -legitimate- funding sources which tax >>automobiles in order to get >>people to favor transit. >> >>Finally, we have this little list called the 'Ten >>Key Values'... I was >>upholding at least three or four of them with my >>protest action. >> >>*Many* more of us need to do the same, so we can get >>Muni off the backs >>of the poor, and after the tail of polluting auto >>drivers, where they >>belong... >> >>Eric Brooks >> >>ritagoldberger(a)yahoo.com wrote: >> >> >> >>>Hi Eric, >>> >>>I guess I don't see what your problem is. If you >>>don't want the fares to go up, then you should >>>be in favor of making sure that all people who >>>do ride pay. If the revenue from fare >>>collections went up, then maybe the fares >>>would not. >>> >>>Muni has a rule, except on the Metro lines, that >>>people need to get on at the front door to pay >>>their fare or show their pass or transfer. I do >>>not see why this is so bad. The driver can't make >>>an exception for you and not others. I do not >>>see why you think he was unreasonable. Is he >>>going to let you get on the back door because >>> >>> >>you're >> >> >>>white and showed him a transfer? If he lets you >>>get on the back door, then he has to let everyone >>>on. And I have seen crowds get on all at once at >>>some bus stops. The driver can't catch everyone >>>and get them to show him their transfer or pay >>>their fares. >>> >>>People complain about how nasty the bus riders >>>are, but is seems to me that they showed great >>>restraint in waiting patiently with you on that bus >>> >>> >>>for 10 minutes while you held them all up by >>>refusing to do what they all had done. >>> >>>And ultimately, you did have to get on the front >>> >>> >>door >> >> >>>of the next bus, anyway. >>> >>>Rita Goldberger >>> >>> >>> >>>--- Eric Brooks <brookse32(a)netscape.net> wrote: >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>>>Apparently the new Muni director has issued a >>>> >>>> >>crack >> >> >>>>down order on fare >>>>collections. >>>> >>>>I boarded a Muni 49 bus at Van Ness and Market >>>>tonight by the back door >>>>(with current pass in hand) because the front line >>>>was really long. >>>>The driver immediately started laying on a >>>>patriarchal authority figure >>>>routine, so I decided to go up and show him my >>>> >>>> >>pass. >> >> >>>>Even when I showed him the pass he demanded that I >>>>leave the bus and >>>>reboard in the front announcing "Nope. New policy. >>>>'Zero Tolerance' for >>>>people boarding in the back!" >>>>To which I replied that I had zero tolerance for >>>>Muni's idiotic rules, >>>>and I refused to reboard, instead going to the >>>> >>>> >>back >> >> >>>>of the bus and >>>>sitting down to talk to my mother on the phone. >>>>The driver then shut the bus down, holding both it >>>>and the 49 behind it >>>>(held at the other light) paralyzed for at least >>>> >>>> >>10 >> >> >>>>minutes; afterwhich >>>>I saw another bus that would get me to where I >>>>needed to go, left his >>>>bus and boarded the new one. >>>> >>>>Guys. We -must- organize a transit riders' union >>>>immediately to put a >>>>stop to this nonsense before it gets totally out >>>> >>>> >>of >> >> >>>>control -and- the >>>>fare goes up to $2 or even more. >>>> >>>>peace >>>> >>>>Eric >>>>_______________________________________________ >>>>San Francisco Green Party Active Members List >>>>To unsubscribe or edit your options, go here: >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >>https://list.sfgreens.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/active >> >> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >>>_______________________________________________ >>> >>> >>San Francisco Green Party Active Members List >>To unsubscribe or edit your options, go here: >> >> >> >https://list.sfgreens.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/active > > > > > > >____________________________________________________________________________________ >Sponsored Link > >Degrees online in as fast as 1 Yr >MBA, Bachelor's, Master's, Assoc >http://yahoo.degrees.info > >

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Re: [Transpo] [SFGP-A] We Must Act -Now- On Muni Abuses
by John-Marc Chandonia 19 Nov '06

19 Nov '06

The standard conservative talking point is that all MUNI's problems are due to fare evaders, and therefore the solution is to hire more fare inspectors. The union and management are united against the riders in this regard, as it's a great distraction from the real problems with both groups. They have backed this assertion up using flawed studies (such as one done by the Examiner a couple years ago)--an invariable feature of these "studies" is that they count all people getting on the back door as fare evaders, without checking to see how many had actually paid. In reality, a large percentage of MUNI riders (about half?) have fast passes. An unbiased survey would probably show that fare evasion is relatively insignificant and mostly limited to youth who would pay a reduced fare other people who wouldn't take MUNI if they had to pay. The people who have fast passes or transfers are doing all MUNI riders a favor by speeding up boarding. For exactly this reason, the SFGP's transportation platform encourages the expansion of "proof of payment" to all MUNI lines. In this case, fare inspectors (or police, if they ever rode MUNI) could ask people boarding through the back to show their pass or transfer. The drivers shouldn't be involved in fare inspection; their job is hard enough as it is. The TWG meets the 4th Tuesday of the month from 7-9 pm. Our next meeting is on Nov 28th. By the way, as another Atlantan expat, I completely agree with what Kathy had to say about Ford. JMC -- John-Marc Chandonia (jmc(a)sfgreens.org) http://sfgreens.org/

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We Must Act -Now- On Muni Abuses
by Eric Brooks 19 Nov '06

19 Nov '06

Apparently the new Muni director has issued a crack down order on fare collections. I boarded a Muni 49 bus at Van Ness and Market tonight by the back door (with current pass in hand) because the front line was really long. The driver immediately started laying on a patriarchal authority figure routine, so I decided to go up and show him my pass. Even when I showed him the pass he demanded that I leave the bus and reboard in the front announcing "Nope. New policy. 'Zero Tolerance' for people boarding in the back!" To which I replied that I had zero tolerance for Muni's idiotic rules, and I refused to reboard, instead going to the back of the bus and sitting down to talk to my mother on the phone. The driver then shut the bus down, holding both it and the 49 behind it (held at the other light) paralyzed for at least 10 minutes; afterwhich I saw another bus that would get me to where I needed to go, left his bus and boarded the new one. Guys. We -must- organize a transit riders' union immediately to put a stop to this nonsense before it gets totally out of control -and- the fare goes up to $2 or even more. When is the next Transportation WG meeting? peace Eric

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Celebrate Krissy's fabulous campaign!!!!
by susan_e_vaughan＠juno.com 07 Nov '06

07 Nov '06

Celebrate Krissy Keefer's Awesome Campaign!!! Come to Cafe La Boheme at 3318 24th Street at 8 p.m. on November 7, 2006 and break rum cake with Krissy and sip champagne ... Whatever the outcome of Krissy Keefer's candidacy for the 8th congressional district -- whether she gets seven, 14, 25, or 65 percent of the vote -- Keefer, the colorful and energetic Green Party candidate for the 8th congressional district, plans to get down with her friends and supporters on Tuesday night -- and inaugurate the next phase of her campaign. What??? Did you all expect the troops to be home by Tuesday night, global warming to be stopped, and George W. Bush and company to be impeached by the time the polls close at 8 p.m. on November 7? No???? Then come and join Krissy Keefer and friends at Cafe La Boheme at 3318 24th Street at Mission at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, November 7 as she plots her next move. Oh, and by the way, she will also be celebrating her awesome campaign. She and her campaign walked hundreds of precincts, fliered at countless transit stops, distributed close to 150,000 pieces of literature, and annoyed the heck out of the San Francisco Chronicle for its biased coverage of Nancy Pelosi (the most well-known of Keefer's opponents in her race for Congress). They organized teams of people to put signs together on sticks, and then go around town and post those signs in commercial areas. They coordinated lit drops with other campaigns. And they rode a San Francisco Trolley through the streets of the 8th congressional district two times. On October 31, Taiko drummers aboard the trolley pounded to the rhythm of "Impeach Bush ... for Halloween." Keefer and her campaign also got on to television by staging events such as a "Silent Vigil" outside a fundraiser that Nancy Pelosi co-hosted with Bill Clinton and through the efforts of public access television producers. They got her name into the print and Internet media. "I'm voting for Krissy thanks to Youtube," has become a common remark on the streets of San Francisco these days ... They also organized spectacular cultural happenings with poet laureate Jack Hirschman; performance artist Guillermo Gomez Pena; Wilmington, Delaware Green Party congressional candidate Michael Berg; musical groups Grupo Raiz, Jou Jou, and Illary; dancers Ramon Ramos Alayo, Jose Navarrete, Ellen Bepp, Anne Bluethenthal, Amara Tabor-Smith, Sue Li-Jew, Debby Kajiyama, Kimberly Valmore and others; Taiko drummers Bruce Ghent, Jimi Nakagawa, Kallan Nishimoto, Dakini Daiko, Debbie Lammam and Lena Gatchalian; former Green Party congressional candidate and playwright/performer Terry Baum with Scrumbly Koldewyn; Hip Hop artist Allan "Big Poppa" Frias; singers Ronnie Gilbert (of the Weavers), Austin Willacy, and Melanie DuMore; District Five Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi; housing rights activist Christina Olague; founding members of the California Green Party Barbara Blong and Betty Traynor; and so many more ... Please join Krissy as she celebrates her spirited campaign and thanks her energetic volunteers ... and plans her next move to get the troops out of Iraq, stop global warming, and impeach George W. Bush. Rum cake and champagne for energy to provided ...

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Pelosi puff pieces in the SF Comical -- please write letters to the ed itor
by susan_e_vaughan＠juno.com 06 Nov '06

06 Nov '06

Hello Everyone, On the eve of the election, the SF Chronicle has seen fit to run three puff pieces about Nancy Pelosi and SF values one day after the other. They are failing to run letters to the editor that reveal the truth about Pelosi's voting record in Congress. It would be great if as many of you as possible could crank out letters and send them to the SF Chron. The email is letters(a)sfchronicle.com In your letter you could point out the following items: 1) Nancy Pelosi orchestrated the precedent-setting privatization of the Presidio National Park; 2) Nancy Pelosi voted FOR the USA Patriot Act in 2001 -- and then the SF Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance forbidding city employees from cooperating with the execution of that act; 3) Nancy Pelosi has defied the will of the San Francisco voters when the passed Proposition N in 2004, which called for the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq. She has voted for every penny of war money that George W. Bush has demanded -- unlike Barbara Lee, Pete Stark, Lynn Woolsey, and others. And she voted AGAINST the May 2005 Woolsey Amendment, calling for the creation of a timetable for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. Furthermore, when John Murtha of Pennsylvania proposed the withdrawal of troops from Iraq in late 2005, she responded, "Representative Murtha speaks for himself." 4) Two weeks ago she appeared on Sixty Minutes and told the nation, "Impeachment is off the table." And yet there is an impeachment measure on our ballot now that is very likely to pass in San Francisco. Is she prepared to defy the will her constituents yet again? 5) She has opponents in her race for reelection and the Green Party candidate, Krissy Keefer, arguably best represents the values of SF in that she is calling for the immediate withdrawal of US troops, wants to make a huge legislative issue out of global warming, and is calling the impeachment of Bush and others. Keep your letter to 200 words or less -- it's possible. I've done it many times. Sue

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