Governor | Streetsblog San Francisco

Posts from the "Governor" Category

Wednesday, April 22, 2009 8 Comments

Gav For Guv Short On Transportation Essentials

Newsom extolling the glories of EVs, from mayorgavinnewsom via Flickr

So Gav made it official yesterday that he's running for Guv by tweeting it to his more than 283,000 followers, announcing it on Facebook, and even running a strange pseudo-article with a lot of donate hyperlinks in the Huffington Post, all of which made a splash among bloggers and traditional media icons. All the hullabaloo aside, I need convincing on Gav's record on the issues important to this blog.

For his transportation platform, he leads with the right foot, making a strong link between transit improvements and climate change, job growth, and energy independence.

We must leave the era of the car behind and refocus our investment and energy on building smart, environmentally sustainable transit options

Creating robust mass transportation systems will connect our local and regional economies, create jobs, give Californians better affordable transit options and ease traffic congestion.

Amen, brother. I couldn't have said it better and I hope all environmental and transportation advocates will hammer on those points this election cycle, namely that any candidate who claims green cred must embrace transit and that public transportation equals jobs. No governor serious about addressing climate change can stand by idly (or sit by in a hydrogen Hummer) as all state funding for transit is zeroed out and environmental review for highway projects is thwarted. Any candidate for governor that wants my vote will immediately reverse the trend away from funding transit operations and widening highways.

So I'm sure the very first platform point will be a solution for restoring desperately needed transit operating money? Hmm, not so much. He leads with "innovative technology," claiming that he's modernized Muni with NextMuni and Translink. While it's important to give riders information and make their transfers more fluid, we learned in the kerfuffle over 311 work orders to MTA that more than 60 percent of total call volume to service were questions about bus and train schedules, which NextMuni provides for much less money.

Monday, April 13, 2009 7 Comments

California Cities Need A Predictable Fund For Transit Operations

by Matthew Roth

Photo by George Donnelly, via Flickr

When the State Transit Assistance (STA) fund was zeroed out to pass the budget a couple of months ago, the already dire situation for transit operators in California became much worse. In the Bay Area, AC Transit raised fares, the MTA has been considering budget cuts and fare hikes, and BART will likely do the same if its board can get to the discussion at the next meeting.

While these temporary solutions will balance the spreadsheets for this year, the state's commitment to transit operations for the next five years will be a pittance and operators will continue to suffer. Unless advocates can get on the same page and build a comprehensive coalition to call for more funding, elected officials like Governor Schwarzenegger will get away with pitching themselves as green politicians and then sabotaging one of the best ways to make our mobility more sustainable.

Unfortunately, advocates are not unified in their call for a commitment to transit. Several hundred people have turned out at meetings about funding cuts, but those same numbers have not made it to Sacramento to lobby legislators for an affirmative change. Some of the groups will be spending their resources lobbying Washington for changes to the transportation act rather than dealing with the troubled situation at the state level.

"For me, part of it will be where the biggest opportunities are for organizing. There is some possibility for major transitions at the federal level," said CALPIRG's Emily Rusch, cautioning that transit constituency wasn't strong enough at the state level. "It will take some time before we can find more money from legislators or at the ballot."

Wednesday, April 1, 2009 9 Comments

Mayor Newsom, Caltrans Announce Plans to Remove Portions of I-280

by Matthew Roth

A controlled explosion from the filming of the TV series "Trauma," on a closed portion of I-280

Mayor Gavin Newsom yesterday announced one of his most ambitious plans for re-shaping San Francisco, telling reporters at a press conference with Caltrans Director Will Kemption and Caltrain Director Michael Scanlan that the city would move forward with plans to tear down sections of I-280 through San Francisco.

"As we saw this weekend with the filming of the new TV series 'Trauma,' we can close a section of 280 and it doesn't back up all the way to San Bruno," said Mayor Newsom. "I'm committed to actively looking for projects where we can transform our streets into public open space, especially in neighborhoods that have so little of it. Show me another project that gives back more space to our great city than this."

Mayor Newsom painted a grand vision of a ribbon park in the footprint of the current freeway and said the city would rezone much of the area for residential development, much of which would be affordable housing, he claimed. "Think Rock Creek Park for the next century," said Mayor Newsom. "If New York City can convert an old rail line through Manhattan into the Highline Park, surely we can transform our outdated infrastructure into green space."

Caltrans' Kempton said that the agency had considered various freeways that underperformed their transportation function after the successful removal of segments of the Embarcadero Freeway and Central Freeway to Market Street, but said that they weren't seriously thinking about this section of I-280 until Mayor Newsom approached Governor Schwarzenegger late last year.

"We've understood that it was possible to make changes to further segments of the Embarcadero Freeway," said Kempton, "but we didn't see it as a priority until Mayor Newsom made it so. Now, we're only committing to study it, but we know the Obama administration is looking for innovative transportation projects, and I wouldn't be surprised if there are unspent federal stimulus funds from other states that we can apply for in six months, a year from now."

"Highway de-construction can be just as shovel-ready as highway re-construction," said Kempton.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009 No Comments

Sacramento to Debate How to Allocate Stimulus Funds this Week

by Matthew Roth

TransForm tells Streetsblog San Francisco that legislators in Sacramento have prepared draft legislation for how the state should spend federal stimulus money on transportation projects and that there is important advocacy that needs to be done to improve it. AB X3 20 will be introduced imminently and debated this week.

TransForm's action alert calls on legislators to adhere to principals agreed upon by the MTC and generally considered best practice in California:

Fix it first by maximizing funding for SHOPP: The independent Legislative Analyst’s Office has identified $1.5 billion in needs for projects to maintain the existing state highway system as part of the State Highway Operation and Protection Program. Federal DOT data shows that roadway maintenance and repair creates 9% more jobs than roadway and bridge expansion projects.
Provide complete streets for all users: Stimulus projects should create complete streets, in order to improve the efficiency and safety of travel by motorists, bicyclists, pedestrians, the disabled and transit users.
Fund bicying and pedestrian infrastructure with TE dollars: The ARRA directs only 3% of funds to the Transportation Enhancement program. The state should instead use the traditional federal sub-allocation formula for transportation enhancements and direct 10% of all surface transportation recovery funding to TE. Bicycling and pedestrian infrastructure are key to giving people low-cost transportation options and result in local economic activity.

Monday, January 26, 2009 34 Comments

Paradise LOSt (Part I): How Long Will the City Keep Us Stuck in Our Cars?

by Matthew Roth

Editor's note: Today we begin Part I of our occasional series on LOS reform.

Traffic engineers are reluctant to give exclusive lanes to buses (or bikes) for fear of the impact on cars

The Pseudo-Science of LOS

There's a dirty little secret you should know about San Francisco: It's engineered first and foremost for automobility and will never be able to shed this bias if the traffic engineers are in the driver's seat wielding their traffic analysis tools like bibles. As long as the city continues prioritizing the use of transportation analysis known as Level of Service (LOS), you might as well burn our Transit First policy for warmth.

On the one hand, LOS is a very simple and blunt metric for understanding the speed that vehicles can move about the city. LOS measures the amount of vehicular delay at an intersection, with A through F grades assigned to increased delay. This measurement is taken during the peak 15 minutes of evening rush hour and if an intersection slips from LOS D to LOS E, traffic managers will try to mitigate the impact, which usually means widening the road, shrinking the sidewalks, removing crosswalks, softening turning angles, and adjusting signal timing to speed the movement of vehicles.

LOS delay from Highway Capacity Manual

LOS analysis seems like science, free from political or ideological considerations, the perfect traffic-engineering tool to rationalize our cities, but the methodology behind it is far from precise. As Jason Henderson, professor of geography at San Francisco State University, said at a recent presentation, LOS is a very poor tool methodologically. In the early years of its development, the "science" was merely traffic engineers assuming what made motorists uncomfortable. He cited the fact that LOS F used to represent a delay of more than 60 seconds, but that in the 2000 Highway Capacity Manual it was revised to 80 seconds. And motorist behavior studies since have shown that inconvenience with delay can depend on numerous factors and differ dramatically between drivers.

Yet the result of relying on this poor methodology to shape the growth of cities has a profound affect on the politics of human mobility, privileging the movement of vehicles before the movement of anything else. Quite simply, LOS analysis has given us Phoenix and Atlanta, congestion and ever-longer commutes, and a whole host of ills that accompany reliance on the inefficient use of street space for our cars.

"I've been doing transit analyses in California for 20 years," said Jeffrey Tumlin, principal of Nelson Nygaard, a transportation and land use consulting firm. "In my practice the single greatest promoter of sprawl and the single greatest obstacle to transit oriented development (TOD) and infill development is the transportation analysis conventions under CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act, LOS."

Wednesday, January 14, 2009 1 Comment

State Democrats Unveil Green Economic Stimulus Plan for California

by Bryan Goebel

In response to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's efforts to gut environmental regulations for highway projects in California, Democratic leaders in the Legislature have unveiled their own green economic stimulus plan.

The legislation by Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg and Assembly Speaker Karen Bass does not identify specific projects but "will accelerate over $2 billion in voter-approved infrastructure bond money aimed directly at investments in the emerging green economy." They said it would create about 40,000 new jobs.

"What we're presenting today is a way to do economic stimulus, a way to put Californians back to work, where we are not compromising environmental regulations," said Bass.

Here are some highlights from the handout:

Public Transit and Mobility: Help promote public transit and mobility by appropriating $800 million from Proposition 1B’s Public Transit Modernization, Improvement and Service Enhancement Account (PTMISEA) for ready-to-go capital projects. Now is an ideal time to accelerate the expenditure of bond funds for public transit: ridership is at an all-time high in California, agencies have identified hundreds of ready-to-go projects, transit improves mobility without sacrificing air quality. According to the California Transit Association (CTA), for every $1 billion invested in new transit capital projects, some 31,400 jobs are created and more than $3 billion in local economic activity is created.
Street and Pothole Repair: Create jobs fixing existing streets and repairing potholes. These funds would be used to fill potholes, resurface crumbling neighborhood streets, and improve bike and pedestrian facilities.
Green Urban Areas and Create Jobs: Implement urban tree planting projects that produce local community jobs and increase the livability of our communities.

Wednesday, January 7, 2009 1 Comment

Schwarzenegger Long on Fiscal Stimulus Rhetoric, Short on Transit Specifics

by Matthew Roth

Governor Schwarzenegger sent a letter Tuesday to President-elect Obama encouraging massive expenditure in the federal stimulus package on a host of projects in California. The letter comes a month after the governor and president-elect discussed the stimulus package in person:

When we met, I had identified $28 billion in infrastructure projects ready to break ground in California within the first 120 days of your administration. I am writing to report that we now have nearly $44 billion in projects that are ready to start construction or place orders.

Schwarzenegger proposes spending $11 billion of the $44 billion "in investment in road, transit and rail construction." But when pressed for a detailed project list, the governor's press office refused to elaborate and punted to regional officials.

The Municipal Transporation Commission (MTC), the Bay Area's transportation planning and federal fiscal conduit, was only slightly more forthcoming with specifics. While the MTC confirmed it has a long list of projects, it would not elaborate on the specifics for fear the public would view the project wish list as a slate of promises.

MTC spokesman Randy Rentschler was clear most of the projects that could be built within 90-120 days of Obama's inauguration would be road maintenance repairs that would not significantly alter the long-term strategic vision for the region.

"We could dig holes in the desert and they might contribute to the economic recovery," he said. "But then you've got holes in the desert."