San Francisco Bike Blog

Going to take a break. 2 days. 2 months. 2 years. We’ll see. Thanks for all the comments and thoughts.

I leave you in capable hands. (Should be online in the next few hours.)

Happy riding!

The lives of our betters are nothing like our lives:

Ford’s agency oversees the city’s public transit, parking enforcement, traffic regulation, pedestrian and bike operations. His current base salary is $315,140.

Not sure if LA is comparable to SF in terms of what the average income of bus riders is, but check this out:

The agency’s buses carry about 1.2 million people per weekday. [Los Angeles] MTA studies show the median income for bus riders, the majority of whom are Latino, is $12,000 a year.

Incredible. Enron-esque.

But not at all surprising.

The people who make decisions about public transportation usually don’t use public transportation. Proponents of BRT never ride the bus, and they won’t start riding the bus when a slightly-less-crappy bus service comes along. The lives of the people in charge bear no resemblance to the lives of folks who are stuck riding mass transit in this city every day.

Nat must be getting a bit worried about collecting all that cash. This move is nothing but self-preservation.

None of this will change unless we get organized.

Y’all know how much I hate cars. Even electric cars.

The thing is, I don’t just hate them because they intimidate, harass, injure and kill pedestrians and cyclists, but also because they’re bad for the environment. The Jevons Paradox (wiki) suggests that electric cars might actually be worse for the world than regular cars.

America could, in theory, see a drop in unhealthy smog and things of that nature, but overall energy consumption could jump, and more importantly, it could jump drastically around the world if we continue to work to make driving a viable option.

Here’s some introductory reading:

TreeHugger Part I

TreeHugger Part II

And this is a good, brief video on the Jevons Paradox:

Electric cars == bad.

So, Jevons Paradox says that on the micro level, energy efficiency is a good thing. On the macro level, disaster.

…What’s the fix, then? Every time you create an resource/energy efficiency fix, you have to also add a tax against that resource so that consumption of that resource does not go up. In this way, you actually get the desired effect of less energy use. Else, all you’ve done is effectively made energy less expensive, so supply and demand will kick in and could cause consumption to actually rise on a per capita basis — this is the Jevons Paradox in action.

One of the main arguments for rail-based solutions is ‘TOD’ - Transit-Oriented Development — i.e. if you build a nice transit system, then investors will build stuff near that transit system - that is, ‘development’ will take place - and that is good for people, the city/town, the environment, etc.

But what if you don’t need development to take place where you are trying to provide transit service?

I don’t know if this is one of the arguments for Geary BRT, but I guess it could be. It could be if folks like me who were pushing for rail on Geary were pushing for it based on the fact that it would bring new development to Geary. I’m not. At least, it doesn’t seem to be particularly important to me. San Francisco is already plenty dense, and Geary could certainly benefit from better, more efficient land use, but I’m not really arguing that to justify using real transit on Geary as opposed to buses.

TOD-type reasons could be something I use to advocate for rail-based solutions on Geary, but it would not be the primary reason.

My argument for rail on Geary, and rail anywhere, is that it offers dignified travel, and as such, it is suitable for human use. It’s kind of like that Barkley Right Guard commercial, ‘Anything less, would be uncivilized‘:

If we want folks to use public transit instead of their cars - for whatever reasons we might want that - then we need to offer them a viable alternative. Buses are not a viable alternative. (Just ask Barkley about that.)

If we want to talk about a luxury tour bus or something, then conceivably that type of bus service could be a form of civilized motor transport, but really, even that is doubtful.

There are plenty of other good reasons to support real transit - especially for us walkers and bikers. We want people to get out of their cars and re-join the human race, so we should give them the ability to do that - and that means real transit - sidewalks, bikes, rail, ferry - things like this.

But it’s a question of priorities and resources. We know rail solutions cost money, just like roads and lots of other important infrastructure like electric generation facilities and waste facilities and water facilities — it costs money to build worthwhile stuff. But what if there’s no real, short-term investment ‘payoff’ for developing rail - like has been the case with the Portland streetcar, our own T-Third line, etc.? Should we still build it?

Yes. Of course. Unless you like living among cars and all the horrors they bring.

No. But neither will rail. Generally speaking. But rail presents a much lower barrier to entry for people. Everywhere rail opens in the next couple of years, we’ll continue to see their ridership numbers explode. For BRT, things will stagnate, and the people will generally dislike the bus experience - as the top-of-the-line, state-of-the-art, all-in-bet Cleveland BRT is already showing.

Just to be clear, when I and others speak about ‘getting people out of their cars,’ we mean that the totality of transit commute experience has to be better than the totality of the car commute experience if we want people to choose public transit over their personal cars — that’s it. And it’s not just ‘ride quality’ or ‘ride experience,’ it’s all of the associated costs, speed, efficiency, reliability, intangibles, etc.

So, when you yell and scream at people of modest means - that is, people who have a choice - to leave their cars at home and take the bus — they will tell you, rightly, what to do with your bus.

If, on the other hand, you provide those people of modest means with real public transportation, they can, will, do, and will continue to flock to it much more readily than they will to the bus.

If you are a walker or cyclist, you should support real transit — it’s not just in the best interests of would-be riders — it’s in your best interests.

We should all get behind the idea of ‘Open Government‘.

I thought of this when I read this article. Some of the dudes from EveryBlock are bikers and reporters and advocates for open government data and better bike facilities and better reporting and all sorts of stuff.

And it is really just the larger picture of getting transit agencies to release their schedule data and the like. People want planning reviews posted online. Every agency of government should have an RSS feed with every new posted document. There should be rules in place to specify when documents have to be posted, etc.

Similar terms are ‘Sunshine Laws’ and ‘Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) Requests‘.

If you’ve been in the transit biz a while, this is more than obvious to you, but I still want to make the case - to help fix public transit, we need to end homelessness, and fix the healthcare problem.

Muni Diaries is one of those websites that likes to get off on making fun of homeless people, but it does serve as a constant reminder that even people who can be extraordinarily crude have reasons to want to end homelessness. Advocates should note this and make it work for our causes - improving public transit by ending homelessness and providing universal healthcare. I’m not claiming to be cruelty-free myself, either.

But it’s not just this ’selfish’ aspect of ending homelessness that is important in terms of selling public transportation, it’s the idea that while racism is very real, it can’t be blamed for the complete failure of public transit in most of the United States — as many folks want to do. There are plenty of reasons that people won’t use public transportation - racism is but one of them.

We should keep in mind that people will still not want to ride the bus - even if we paint it gold, but ending homelessness and providing health care to those in need, in general, will help get people out of their cars - and that’s good for us bicyclists and that’s good for transit folks, too. This is why homelessness and health care are issues that bicycle and transit advocates should pay attention to if they want to be taken seriously as…bicycle and/or transit advocates.

Any of us who has taken transit know that craziness abounds, too - people who are homeless often have one or more serious forms of mental illness. We can’t afford to treat them, we’re told, because HMO’s are busy taking our money. The cost of healthcare is easily affordable if we cut out the profit-taking. We spend, what, five times as much per-capita on health care than other industrialized nations and still have crap coverage? It’s ridiculous. And it hurts transit, keeping people in their cars, where they continue to hunt and haunt cyclists and pedestrians.

People who are all about promoting cycling and transit should get to know people who are all about ending homelessness and providing universal health care. Sometimes there exists near-perfect alignments between seemingly-dissimilar interest groups - this is one of those times. It doesn’t matter who calls who first - just get it done.

Thinking about the nature of the relationship between homelessness and low use of mass transit reminds me of Emily Oster’s TED Talk about AIDS in Africa and its causes. Oster took an ‘economics view’ towards the disease instead of the typical ‘policy view,’ suggesting that we needed to better understand how people reacted to the disease (e.g. did they change their sexual behavior once they knew they had AIDS?) before we continued to spend all our money on policies that we thought, possibly mistakenly, were fixing the problem. Often times our assumptions overpower logic, common sense, and data. Oster suggests that five major preconceptions we have about AIDS in Africa are straight up wrong — that’s no small claim. She also suggests that there could be non-conventional solutions to the epidemic, like investing resources towards the goal of decreasing infant mortality rates among all babies, including babies who are not born with AIDS — this would incentivize women to engage in less risky sexual behavior, thus lowering AIDS transmission rates.

What if it turned out that we were wrong about all the reasons people don’t bike or take transit? The Bicycle Scholar, John Pucher, has suggested this was exactly the case up until pretty recently in the U.S. We had spent a ton of money on bike infrastructure with just about nothing at all to show for it. Now he’s told the bicycle world exactly what it needs to do to increase cycling mode share, and towns that are now using the conclusions drawn from his research are seeing results. Are the transit folks listening to their researchers?

Do transit folks even have their own ‘Transit Scholar’ the way we have our ‘Bicycle Scholar’ (we actually have a bunch of them)? If they did, and they were listening, I don’t expect there would be so many transit ‘advocates’ talking about improving bus service as a way of getting people out of their cars. Can you say, BRT?

Stewards for Affordable Housing for the Future (SAHF) is a member of the Transportation For America Coalition. SAHF knows that transportation costs are often the second largest cost for many households. Many folks choose to keep either their car or their house, and may eventually end up losing both. Some will end up on MUNI buses and trains. This will keep other people driving their cars, where they can continue to destroy our cities and towns. As advocates, we always need to be thinking about ways we can work together to help each other achieve our respective goals.

Think about what it might be like to get attacked, possibly murdered, on your everyday morning commute. It’s a devastating act in itself, and completely predictable and avoidable — but think about what it does to folks who were contemplating taking transit. The idea of ‘improved transit service’ needs to start taking a more holistic view towards transit.

Unsafe At Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile was the book that launched Ralph Nader to national prominence. In 1965, before many of us in the Livable Streets movement were even born, Ralph published this anti-car, pro-pedestrian screed that would help change the auto industry, and may have helped to save countless lives of both drivers and pedestrians in the process.

I was reminded of Nader’s role in trying to clean up the auto industry when I saw his appearance on the best news show in the world, where he gave some background on the auto bailout. I decided to look up his book, Unsafe At Any Speed, but couldn’t find the text free, online - not even a way to search parts of it, as you can with some books on Amazon and Google Book Search - so I finally gave in and went to the library. I found it, skimmed it, took some notes — it’s awesome — an absolutely brutal take-down of an absolutely brutal industry.

Keep in mind that the excerpts that follow are from a book published over 40 years ago. This fact alone is incredible when we look at the state of the industry today and see how much damage the auto industry has done over the decades since Ralph first started alerting the public to the brutal mix of money and politics and power from the auto industry executives and lobbyists to the politicians in Washington, DC and around the U.S.

Ralph Nader, to me, represents one of the earliest heros of the Livable Streets movement.

On the deaths caused by the automobile — p. 87:

But in 1951, the Air Force made a simple statistical comparison which revealed that it was losing more men–dead and injured–in automobile accidents than in combat in Korea.

On the preference for GM to style their cars aggressively and dangerously at the expense of humans — p. 222:

In the October 1964 issue of Automotive Industries, Mr. Bordinat had approvingly described the Lincoln Continental’s flush-mounted parking light in the “leading edges of the blade-like front fenders.”

…

The callousness of the stylists about the effects of their creations on pedestrians is seen clearly in the ase of William Mitchell, chief stylist at General Motors and the principal creator of the Cadillac tail fin. This sharp, rising fin was first introduced in the late forties, soaring in height and prominence each year until it reached a grotesque peak in 1959 and gradually declining thereafter until it was finally eliminated in the 1966 models.

…

His two favorite saying are, “Seeing is selling,” and “The shape of things shape man.”

The matter of Cadillac tail fins, however, transcends the visual world of Mr. Mitchell. Fins have been felt as well as seen, and felt fatally when not seen. In ways that should have been anticipated by Mr. Mitchell, these fins have “shaped” man.

In the year of its greatest height, the Cadillac fin bore an uncanny resemblance to the tail of the stegosaurus, a dinosaur that had two sharp rearward-projecting horns on each side  of the tail. In 1964 a California motorcycle driver learned the dangers of the Cadillac tail fin. The cyclist was following a heavy line of traffic on the freeway going toward Newport Harbor in Santa Ana. As the four-lane road narrowed to two lanes, the confusion of highway construction and the swerving of vehicles in the merging traffic led to the Cadillac’s sudden stop. The motorcyclist was boxed in and was unable to turn aside. He hit the rear bumper of the car at a speed of about twenty miles per hour, and was hurled into the tail fin, which pierced his body below the heart and cut him all the way down to the thigh bone in a large circular gash. Both fin and man survived this encounter.

The same was not true in the case of nine-year-old Peggy Swan. On September 29, 1963, she was riding her bicycle near her home in Kensington, Maryland. Coming down Kensington Boulevard she bumped into a parked car in a typical childhood accident. But the car was a 1962 Cadillac, and she hit the tail fin, which ripped into her body below the throat. She died at Holy Cross Hospital a few hours later of thoracic hemorrhage.

…

“…The ability of the sharp and pointed tail fins to cause injury when they contact a pedestrian is visually apparent.” Wakeland gave details of two recent fatal cases that had come to his attention. In one instance, an old woman in New York City had been struck by a Cadillac which was rolling slowly backward after its power brakes failed. The blow of the tail fin had killed her. In the other case, a thirteen-year-old Chicago boy, trying to catch a fly ball on a summer day in 1961, had run into a 1961 Cadillac fin, which pierced his heart.

…

Recent models avoid these particular ornament designs, not for pedestrian safety but to conform to the new “clean look” that is the trademark of current styling.

Systematic engineering design of the vehicle could minimize or prevent many pedestrian injuries. The majority of pedestrian-vehicle collisions produce injuries, not fatalities. Most of these collisions occur at impact speed of under twenty-five miles per hour, and New York City data show that in fatality cases about twenty-five percent of the collisions occurred when the vehicles involved were moving at speeds below fourteen miles per hour. It seems quite obvious that the external design and not just the speed of the automobile contributes greatly to the severity of the injuries inflicted on the pedestrian. Yet the external design is so totally under the unfettered control of the stylist that no engineer employed by the automobile industry has ever delivered a technical paper concerning pedestrian collision. Nor have the automobile companies made any public mention of any crash testing or engineering safety research on the problem.

But two papers do exist in the technical literature, one by Henry Wakeland and the other by a group of engineers at the University of California in Los Angeles.

Nader did all this stuff back in the day. We should take up the cause today. The auto industry is not going to go quietly, with so many of the American workers - up to 15% or so - somehow dependent on the auto industry for jobs. Still, we have to continue to make it as expensive as possible for the industry to continue to harm us.

And we should not restrict our efforts to making just cars and buses and trucks safer for pedestrians and cyclists, but trains and trams and streetcars and anything and everything else that threatens us.

Yes.

Ride across the Potomac on the Yellow Line:

Or it might be a full-on ‘Tour Train’:

On a semi-related note, there is a whole series of ‘Metro In A Day’ videos for the major DC metro lines. Here’s one for the red green line:

Bus travel will rarely, if ever, be uplifting. Riding your bike is almost always uplifting, but also almost always terrifying. Hopefully we can work on building real transit, uplifting transit, so people will use it instead of their cars.

Our military occasionally hands out not just bombs, but bikes. Nice.

It got me thinking - the new 100-acre outpost - how do people get around?

One hundred acres is not necessarily the size of the land mass of Australia, but it’s not exactly small either.

Is it moral to advocate for bicycles at our embassy location in Iraq? Technically, those 100 acres are now sovereign American land, right? So that would be advocating for bicycles on U.S. land — non-occupied land — I think. So confused.