Such a flawed budget should be rejected by the BOS (Contact your supe here)

After that happens firm, loud pressure needs to be applied to the MTA board to get it right the next time.

No proposed fare increases have been defeated

Fares have risen 50% over the past 10 years with no corresponding increase or improvement in service frequency or reliability.

The advocacy community was unable to fast track the 1997 Bicycle Plan EIR since the plan was enjoined in 2005, and we still await certification and relief from the court.

No bicycle facilities have built for almost five years.

Bicycling over the past five years has become more and more dangerous, both due to lack of new facilities, lack of enforcement, unreliable transit and general driver rage.

Success means winning, not fucking up and delaying progress for half a decade.

The burden of funding Muni has not been shifted to autos.

Prop E service standards have not been achieved.

Prop A was a sock full of shit that did much more harm than good.

Labor got their wage floor and advocates did not get any work rule reform in return.

T-Third suffered massive cost overruns.

The Muni meltdown was an implementation glitch in a single system, not a structural depreciation of the system, and should not be used as a benchmark.

Portland gets a B+ as do Seattle, Davis and Chicago. NYC gets an A. Boston, Philly and Baltimore get B's.

Many more jurisdictions are much more advanced than we are, and we tend to misoverestimate our own outcomes as successes. The problem is that the advocates get paid whether or not they succeed.

-marc

You're complaining about Muni objectives that exist on a different level of difficulty, politically and administratively, than fairly managing service cuts.

None of your examples involve the MTA running rampant counter to the wishes of the voting public. So I still don't understand where your fear is coming from.

Some do involve MTA inefficiency, laziness, and lack of political will, but that's par for the bureaucratic course.

Can bicycle advocates claim success in working with the MTA over the past seven years as measured by on the street?

Yes. Bicycle advocates have been remarkably successful in SF, to the point where they overreached (legally speaking) and got further plans frozen by the court. The bike plan EIS has been fast tracked.

Have advocates been successful at pressuring the MTA to live up to even the eviscerated promises, such as service standards and DPT facilitating transit, made in Prop E?

Not entirely, but things have gotten much better since the Muni Meltdowns. Legislating 98% service standards was a pipe dream anyway. Small steps.

Were advocates successful in fashioning Prop A in 2007?

Don't know what that means -- it was passed, and the anti-transit Prop H was defeated.

Has Market Street been reconfigured according to the 2002 study?

Was this ever put in law?

Have advocates successfully forestalled fare increases?

Yes. Despite SF's cost of living, fares are still lower than in the rest of the country. Monthly fares, too.

Have advocates been effective at shifting the burden from transit to autos?

Yes, but hopelessly general. Ridership is up, without a corresponding population increase.

When you're tallying successes, don't forget:

Citywide NextBus (the country's largest and most advanced transit tracking system, and one of the rare examples of an American transit agency doing something world-class)

Early Google Transit compatibility

T-Third delivered nearly on time

311 well-executed complaint system

Translink nearly being operative.

I agree that you need a government that's on your side advocating for livable cities. We have one, mostly. It's just not fully competent yet.

It takes organizations a while to achieve competence. Once they've reached it, it takes a while to attract high-quality employees who can maintain that competence (and for low-quality employees to change or leave). Muni is no TFL. No US transit agency is.

Is there any US city you'd give above a D+? By your standards, I can't think of any.

By what measure have advocates pressuring the MTA been able to restrain their worst excesses over the past 10 years?

Can bicycle advocates claim success in working with the MTA over the past seven years as measured by on the street?

Have advocates been successful at pressuring the MTA to live up to even the eviscerated promises, such as service standards and DPT facilitating transit, made in Prop E?

Were advocates successful in fashioning Prop A in 2007?

Has Market Street been reconfigured according to the 2002 study?

Have advocates successfully forestalled fare increases?

Have advocates been effective at shifting the burden from transit to autos?

We can get into the "whys" but these are the key elements in the case against the nonprofit/enviro model of livable streets advocacy.

The real test is the answer to this question: By what measure does San Francisco favorably compare with other similarly situated jurisdictions when it comes to meeting the livable streets test based on the record?

I give us a D+

The first step towards recovery is admitting that you've got a problem.

-marc

The point of the TEP was to cut some lines, but also ADD service to other lines to be more efficient and pick up the slack. Doing the former without doing the latter is typical half-assed management, an almost sacred tenet in San Francisco.

On the other hand, procrastinating in the face of a budget crisis until we run straight over the cliff is a sacred tenet statewide, especially in Orange County.

Sh*t happens. The state yanked a ton of transit funding for 5 years. The rest of the city budget is hosed. It's wishful thinking for you to even pretend the TEP could go forward as planned.

Fortunately, the TEP gave us the data we need to make cuts and consolidate stops in the fairest way possible. So I'm not going to complain.

I don't understand where your fear of a rampant MTA is coming from. Do you have some specific example you'd like to share?

It's usually impossible to take positive change in SF because of the power of a NIMBY backlash. Just look at the Whole Foods development at Haight & Stanyan. It only squeaked through because Mirkarimi got enough cover from the public that he could beat back the Haight-Ashbury Stagnancy Council.

I'm not worried that if you give the MTA an inch, they'll take a mile -- the local organizers will take care of that.

I'm much more worried that we'll miss a rare opportunity to improve the Muni system at a time when people can be convinced that sacrifices should be made.

We can all respectfully disagree, as in stop reduction, on equity, political viability, complexity and feasibility, but I understand that folks are coming at it because they want to strengthen transit not because they want to screw the transit dependent. I've done enough work trying to shoehorn good ideas into public policy to see pitfalls facing such proposals and won't pretend to myself that they don't exist. Some take that as attacking motive of objective legitimacy of a proposal, but that is not the case.

Likewise, we come together around transit first and livable streets principles, and it naturally follows that most of us will coalesce around policies that shift the burden to private autos from transit. "Right" as in correctness, within this context is defined by the principles of unity of our coalition, not by what people with different values propose.

We are right and they are wrong, based on our principles of unity.

-marc

Little did the CA know that inaction on bike policy earned the SFBC double the members than they'd had before stasis set in.

The Mayor is not able, under Section 8A of the Charter to remove an MTA director other than for cause. The Mayor requested resignations from all commissioners prior to his second term, and the decision of MTA directors, Planning Commissioners and members of the Board of Appeals to accede to the Mayor's requests were all their own.

Shahum's actions in accepting the City Attorney's gag order on bike policy at the MTA and her resignation from a protected seat at the Mayor's behest speak better than anything to the values and principles she brings to participation and obliterates even the facade of status of the MTA as an independent agency.

Do I need to bring up again the fact that the SFBC received just under $500K in grant dollars from the MTA associated with the 2002 Bicycle Plan Update and the consequent conflicts of interest and resulting endangering of cyclists for 5 years that had led to?

-marc

I know Streetsblog wasn't around back then, but why excatly did the mayor remove her from that position? It didn't make much sense.

If you give them political cover to take action, and then they take that cover to do the predictably wrong thing, then you all will own responsibility for that.

If you trust the MTA to act correctly when so empowered, then proceed eyes wide open.

-marc

Stop consolidation will be difficult enough if done in a sane and rational manner. Done by this MTA Board under Gavin Newsom, it will end up as brutal as this budget is.

-marc

I also hope that David Chiu can rally six more to defeat it.

Let's hope this budget is odoriferous enough that we can count to seven over at the Board of Supervisors.

-marc