Streetsblog San Francisco

If only phone calls could burn the infidels on the radio itself!

-marc

Turned out that the KQED broadcast was the Leah Shahum Show, as I was cut off after a few early comments. The moderator, a cyclist of course, then let Shahum do her speed rap without contradition the rest of the hour. Progressives do equal time!

Leah & Judson did a great job on this today. It is incredible how skewed the debate can be though--there was an email from a woman calling attention to the fact that cars slow MUNI more than anything besides CM once a month for a few minutes here and there at certain parts in the city. The moderator immediately flipped this into yet another question about CM and even brought up a violent confrontation from Willie Brown's days. This compounded with all the 'Scofflaw!' foamers is really remarkable.

Why don't we just be upfront and push back a little bit with all the carnage caused by out of control motorvehicles in the last week say? We don't need to go back a decade for that.

marcos - we get your point, you hate the San Francisco Bike Corporation. Let me ask you this - if not for the SFBC, if it was just 100,000 individual cyclists, fractured in voice and with myriad of daily problems to deal with, would anything have gotten done?

This member - and I am sure many of the 10,000 other ones - thinks this. "I have a fulltime job and a young son and a business to run, I don't have time to work hard on bike lanes, go to every meeting, deal with MTA, so I am going to put my weight behind a small group of people who are probably more qualified than most, give them my proxy and therefore the power to accomplish something, and trust that they don't screw up too badly".

This scenario plays out everywhere, every day, on every issue. If we get these 45 projects, the city will be a much better place than it was yesterday, and much better for cyclists than almost anywhere. Copenhagen it won't be, but I'm drooling over the prospect of the lanes on Townsend, for bike racks on 18th, improvements on Portola, Division, etc...

Also, this is PUBLIC POLICY not PRIVATE POLICY and should be an open process irrespective of the number of members paying dues to any private corporation.

-marc

if there's a parade, marcos will come rain on it. this absurd vitriolic obsession with the sfbc is rivalled only by the vigor of mr. anderson himself.
this also just more proof that opposite ends of the political spectrum come around full circle in their paranoia to hold hands, in this case to claim that the sfbc is just a big conspiracy to rob "real" citizens of the city of their rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

@fcp, no bike lanes or new bike facilities was four years of rainy parade.

Apparently those who make rain get a free pass, those who say the rainmakers are making rain are ridiculed.

I wonder why I have a stack of solicitations from the SFBC that I've saved over the past five years asking me to renew my membership but have not seen SFBC turn that membership and those resources into anything more ambitious than heaving across the finish line a bicycle network that represents planning from 12 years ago.

That pace of accomplishment is not sufficient by my measure, especially when compared to other jurisdictions with access to many fewer resources than we.

Again, it was not me who set up the scenario where the SFBC got held helpless for four years by the likes of Rob Anderson, but it is me who is demanding accountability so that this lesson is learned and we might avoid getting caught in the well known trap of "group think" again.

-marc

@thegreasybear, the SFBC, MTA, MEA and City Attorney left an opening large enough for Anderson to drive 99 percent of a CAR through.

Your take-away lesson: blamestorm the litigant instead of acknowledging that our side really messed this one up.

-marc

@SfResident, Anderson's suit exposed the fact that the certain segments of the Bicycle Plan network would delay several Muni lines.

Do you think it was a good idea that the City ignored the state law which requires that all projects be cleared so that they don't delay public transit?

-marc

"Anderson's still kind of an asshole"

#/usr/bin/perl

s/kind of//;

Totally agree with Anderson. And, specifically, the 2nd street bike lane will create chaos.

"Criminal" Mass needs to be stopped, too, before a cyclist mob kills a pedestrian or impedes an ambulance, and thus, a huge lawsuit is filed against the city (taxpayers).

Criminal Mass does more to prompt concerns against a bicycle advocacy efforts than anything. If this anarchist-led event was stopped once and for all, I suspect bicylists groups in the city would have a less dangerous, blantantly entitled (you pay for my biking to work) reputation.

@marcos re:PERL you are still living in the cycle/memory limited universe

@marcos - instead of attacking @John Murphy's approach, why not fix the bug?

$echo "Anderson's still kind of an asshole" | perl -i -ple 's/kind of //'

$echo "Anderson's still kind of an asshole" | sed 's/kind of //'

Marc's gonna hate me again for this, but he's right. Being a cleric on bicycles serves no one and so on. Yeah Rob Anderson tells lies - he told lies about my neighborhood on his blog the other day. And using a court and lawyers and enriching the legal class to make policy is offensive on all levels.

But the fact the bike people get EVERY SINGLE THING THEY WANT, and transit riders get kicked in the teeth at the state and local level, and the pass that all gets from the bike pros is kinda stupid. Choose-up-siderism serves no one. We can all get along if we all pay attention and we all realize we live in a very dense, very small city.

So long as people like me, for whom riding a bike for every single thing is no longer an option due to several injuries, are excluded for those of you who can ride your bike till the cows come home, and block my bus or Metro train, well, guess what? that's crap.

What's really crap is that it's an even/or. And that cranks who live in rent controlled apartments and so on can get lawyers to spend my tax dollars on litigation, instead of mediation.

Sucks all around!!!

How is Greg "Anonymous" if Rob Anderson is having conversations with him?

Anywho...

1) James Council fell asleep at the wheel while on duty as a Sheriff's deputy and killed two cyclists who were riding single file on the shoulder. He was given 4 months home arrest. The bike people wanted that douchnozzle thrown in jail for a long long time, we certainly didn't get that.

2) The bike people get a lot of stuff because

A) They show up. We were in a war with Caltrain and we beat them by going to the JPB meetings over and over and over and beating the JPB over the head. Not one person showed up to comment on two proposed fare increases during that timeframe and they sailed through. Caltrain threatened to kill Gilroy service (not a bike issue), all hell broke loose, Caltrain backed off.

B) They participate. City riddled with potholes? Riders go around, mark them, note them, bring the list to the MTA. Are the N-Judah riders taking detailed (non-anecdotal) statistics of service disruptions and bringing them to the BoS?

C) Painting bike lanes is cheap and the pavement is not represented by a union that refuses to concede anything, even work rules that offend everyone but the drivers themselves.

Rest assured Greg, if I were suddenly elevated to Mayor of San Francisco my number one priority would be MUNI, not bike lanes. Fortunately, there are plenty of civilians willing to do heavy lifting on the bike lane issue. Unfortunately there aren't a lot of politicians willing to take bold moves for MUNI.

But what I really want to know is Rob Anderson's position on the scripting debate?

Greg, that's the problem I have with advocacy in this city. While the SFBC has made itself very powerful (and I don't begrudge them effective advocacy and membership building), where in the world are the effective transit advocates? Having lived in NYC for 8 years and watched Gene Russianoff and the Straphangers Campaign, I'm at a loss to understand why this city doesn't have a 10,000 member (or 100,0000 member or bigger) advocacy group holding political leaders' feet in the flames to make MTA more functional.

@Matthew Roth, Rescue Muni almost was that, but they got captured by SPUR, Newsom and Willie Brown when Prop E was gutted and amended a decade ago. Now, when Rachel Gordon calls out for community representation on a story, RM is first on her list.

San Francisco activism is very non-profit, mediating and clientelist in character with little participatory democracy. I'd take issue with your assessment of the SFBC, for an organization their size, they are not very effective per member as they misuse their relatively vast resources focusing on minutae of interest, ignoring the big picture.

The best way to make advocacy work is for the folks with the most skin in the game to be at the table. But that threatens entrenched bureaucracy which has all but captured and neutralized advocates.

Organizing Muni would be interesting. I'd always thought it best to organize by line, creating line committees which would keep tabs on what's working and not on the line. Organizing these committees would easy if folks who rode each line were given the resources to organize while riding. I'd brought this up at the TEP, as a means to ensure that the MTA had boots on the ground, as it were, but we are apparently reduced to "talk to the MTA hand." (sorry Judson).

But organizing Muni riders requires "significant initial capitalization."

-marc

Barna: We had over 200 members show up to City Hall to speak up for the bike plan. Many volunteer SFBC members went door to door to get nearly 150 support letters from businesses along the cooridors. SFBC staff worked hard to smooth out issues of concerned business owners and MTA staff.

Fundraising is a natural part of a 10-person full-time organization, unless you wanted us to have our policies dictated by corporate fund's grant processes.

All members were and are invited to participate beyond donation-- and welcome ideas of better ways to organize/mobilize if you'd like to provide them.

If that's not enough, advocacy isn't a monopoly. As WOBO did with EBBC, if you want to see more or different actions, you can start your own group. And if you want it to be multi-modal, as Matthew recommended, get on it- I'll gladly join you to fight for transit and walking, too.

Barna: I hear you-- and many of those comments have been made before-- and, trust me, noone at SFBC wants to become a primarily-fundraising organization. Our Volunteer Nights are packed and our day-to-day volunteers (which have swelled due to the downturn in the economy recently) are the life-blood of our organization and we couldn't function effectively with a passive membership. We understand that some people (myself included before being hired) can't do more than give money, and that's OK, too, but we depend on these active and engaged folks to get things done.

As for grants vs member dues: I've worked in the grant-funded world, and it isn't fun (see: 'The Revolution will not be Funded'). Member dues gives us the latitude to respond to member interest and set our own path, not dictated by funding cycles and PO's.

The third point is, in all honesty the SFBC advocates for muni and pedestrians, but that's not our mission and if we spent too much time on it, many of our 10,000 members wouldn't be happy with their money going towards that. They pay dues to care about bikes, and while the connection is obvious to S'blong readers and commenters and staff, it's lees clear to many average cyclists out there, even though it is moving in that direction.

I'm not saying YOU should go start another org first and foremost-- we'd love you to help shape the SFBC-- but there are a few folks around town and commenters on s'blog who spend their time complaining and attacking only, rather than trying to build a better city. I'd love to see a strong member-based Transit Riders Union happen in SF- like LA's BRU, or NYC's Straphangers. I think it's the only way we'll get some appropriate funding for these necessary services.