Some people show more love for their cars than they do for their families. Photo: Guide to Detailing

“Then there are those—and I love these people—” says Mark Curtis, CEO of the Splash Car Wash chain, who visit weekly, core customers “who truly care for their cars” and “see them and their upkeep as a reflection of themselves, and have it as part of their regular routine.” This ardent minority keeps alive the cliché that we Americans love our cars, an oversimplification that fails to capture our divergent, ambivalent, evolving feelings about them. Still, on the whole, we may treat our vehicles better than we treat ourselves.

Take a gander at how much cash and credit we lavish on them. On the household level, transportation accounts for one out of every six dollars Americans spend, the crushing majority of which goes to owning and operating cars. (By contrast, families who use public transportation and own one less car can save up to $8,400 a year, according to APTA). Only housing accounts for a bigger chunk of our budgets; we fork out less for food.

It’s especially illuminating to look at spending “per capita”—that is, how much we spend per person and per vehicle in our household. Though we spend more than twice as much to fuel each body in our home with food than we do to fuel each vehicle in our garage with gasoline, there are several measures by which we treat our cars nearly as well or better than we treat ourselves—and our families.

The average American spends nearly as many dollars annually on the health and well-being of each vehicle—$2,536 for repairs, maintenance, and insurance—as we spend on each humanoid member of the family, whose allocation for healthcare and insurance is $2,747. That’s just $18 more a month preventing and treating disease than repairing dings and replacing tires. The amount we dedicate to buying and financing each car is triple what we spend educating each family member. In other words, we pour three times as much into our depreciating assets than we invest in our own, and our children’s, futures.

Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey 2009

And while it is reassuring that we devote more of our household budget to shelter than we do to our vehicles, even a hunk of our housing costs are used to protect and pamper our cars rather than ourselves. Real estate experts have estimated that 13 percent of a home’s value is accounted for by its garage. For the average family, that means that each year about $1,150 of mortgage payments, never mind some property taxes, are going to keeping a roof, not over our children, but over our vehicles. Without that hidden expense, we’d be able to put two-thirds more toward charity or clothing our growing kids.

Then there’s the quality time we devote to them—and even if time isn’t money, it’s still, well, time. According to Arbitron, the average American adult spends 18.5 hours per week on the road, much of this driving solo, compared to the 6.7 hours per week spent preparing meals and caring for children and only 2.2 hours per week exercising to stay healthy and happy.

Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics: American Time Use Survey 2010; Arbitron 2009 In-Car Study

While driving equals leisure for a few avid enthusiasts, most experience commuting as more stressful than pleasurable. In our sprawling communities, we find that we must drive—or are in the mindless habit of driving—to pursue our social lives or interests. The hope that moving to the suburbs or exurbs will mean more family time has been, for many, a pipe dream.

Americans have been driving fewer miles recently–billions fewer–saving on gas money and other direct costs of car ownership. That’s good news. This reduction doesn’t just save those families money; it saves all of us from incurring the innumerable indirect costs of driving. Further reductions in the time and money we all devote to the national automobile fleet are possible if we recognize that we are treating our cars better than we treat ourselves—and, better yet, if we ask why.

Top Senate Democrat Harry Reid vows to keep an clean-car subsidy in the budget, come hell or high water. Photo: J. Scott Applewhite / AP

After midnight last night, the House finally managed to narrowly pass a budget extension bill, but Senate leaders have already rejected it out of hand, since it includes about half the disaster relief they’d like and cuts $1.5 billion from a clean-fuel technology manufacturing program for the auto industry.

The disagreement is strong enough that it threatens to keep Congress in session longer than intended — likely through the weekend, and possibly even into next week’s scheduled recess.

That gives them a week, if necessary, to avert a government shutdown — the potential consequence of inaction on a bill to extend federal government spending past September 30.

Clean vehicles are great, but if Democrats really want to meet important environmental goals, just imagine how much good they could do by spending that $1.5 billion to implement better bus systems or provide emergency assistance to transit agencies struggling to keep up with higher ridership.

In addition to highlighting how Senate Democrats highly prize car subsidies, this situation also puts in perspective the brewing fight over the FY2012 budget. If Congress can’t even pass a simple extension to keep government operations for a few months, with just a few billion dollars’ difference, how will they ever agree to bridge the enormous gap between their visions for FY2012?

Meanwhile, Congress is learning, or perhaps not learning, that they can’t expect to pass clean extensions at the last minute when they can’t agree or aren’t ready to take a pass new legislation in time for the old legislation to expire. Extensions are rarely “clean” anymore, and the new items in them are often cause for rancorous debate.

Lawmakers are still optimistic that they’ll make a deal, and experts caution against too much hysteria over a possible government shutdown, since every budget vote in recent memory has gone down to the wire, and somehow lawmakers always figure something out, usually without missing any of their recess time. In comparison with some of those epic fights, this skirmish over a few billion dollars seems easily solved.

However, it does remind us of a similar situation earlier this year, when the country found itself on the brink of a shutdown. Streetsblog asked transportation agencies and industry officials what a shutdown would mean for them. AASHTO said states wouldn’t be able to get reimbursed for transportation spending, totaling about $100 million a day. An official from Dallas Area Rapid Transit said a shutdown would only present a serious problem if it dragged on for months, but the agency could handle a few weeks without federal reimbursements. Construction industry leaders, already fed up with inaction on Capitol Hill from the two-year delay in passing a new transportation bill, seemed resigned to coping with the problems Washington presents them.

Image: James Yamasaki / The Stranger

Under the headline, “Okay, Fine, It’s War,” Seattle’s The Stranger blog this week published a manifesto “of and by the nondrivers themselves.” They’re sick of being called “militants” for caring about pedestrian safety, and they’re tired of the specter of a “war on cars.”

We heartily recommend that you read the whole thing, but here are some of our favorite parts. Like this, from the first plank of the manifesto: “The car-driving class must pay its own way!”

For cars we have paved our forests, spanned our lakes, and burrowed under our cities. Yet drivers throw tantrums at the painting of a mere bicycle lane on the street. They balk at the mere suggestion of hiking a car-tab fee, raising the gas tax, or tolling to help pay for their insatiable demands, even as downtrodden transit riders have seen fares rise 80 percent over four years.

No more! We demand that car drivers pay their own way, bearing the full cost of the automobile-petroleum-industrial complex that has depleted our environment, strangled our cities, and drawn our nation into foreign wars. Reinstate the progressive motor vehicle excise tax, hike the gas tax, and toll every freeway, bridge, and neighborhood street until the true cost of driving lies as heavy and noxious as our smog-laden air. Our present system of hidden subsidies is the opiate of the car-driving masses; only when it is totally withdrawn will our road-building addiction finally be broken.

They go on to demand better, more expansive transit, safer streets and sidewalks, and traffic calming. And this:

This antagonism [between car driver and nondriver] traces directly to the creation of the modern car driver, a privileged individual who, as noted, is the beneficiary of a long course of subsidies, tax incentives, and wars for cheap oil. But the same subsidies that created this creature (who now rages about the roads while simultaneously screaming of being a victim in some war) can—and must, beginning now—be used to build bike lanes, sidewalks, light rail, and other benefits to the nondriving classes.

That’s the kind of manifesto we can get on board with.

After the manifesto, The Stranger goes on to report on the rising numbers of crashes between cars and cyclists, the violent anti-bike rhetoric being spewed by car drivers that are the “victims” of some imagined war on cars, the massive disparity between funding for car infrastructure and everything else, and the heroes of the non-driver, beloved both for their advocacy and their tight asses. Read it, read it all.

Market and Kearny and 3rd Streets, 1909. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

“Whose Streets? OUR Streets!” yell rowdy demonstrators when they surge off the sidewalk and into thoroughfares. True enough, the streets are our public commons, what’s left of it (along with libraries and our diminishing public schools), but most of the time these public avenues are dedicated to the movement of vehicles, mostly privately owned autos. Other uses are frowned upon, discouraged by laws and regulations and what has become our “customary expectations.” Ask any driver who is impeded by anything other than a “normal” traffic jam and they’ll be quick to denounce the inappropriate use or blockage of the street.

Bicyclists have been working to make space on the streets of San Francisco for bicycling, and to do that they’ve been trying to reshape public expectations about how streets are used. Predictably there’s been a pushback from motorists and their allies, who imagine that the norms of mid-20th century American life can be extended indefinitely into the future. But cyclists and their natural allies, pedestrians, can take heart from a lost history that has been illuminated by Peter D. Norton in his recent book Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. He skillfully excavates the shift that was engineered in public opinion during the 1920s by the organized forces of what called itself “Motordom.” Their efforts turned pedestrians into scofflaws known as “jaywalkers,” shifted the burden of public safety from speeding motorists to their victims, and reorganized American urban design around providing more roads and more space for private cars.

Typical street scene in 1909, long before private cars had become a major problem. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

For decades, over 40,000 people have died each year in car crashes on the streets of the United States. This daily carnage is utterly normalized to the point that few of us think about it at all, and if we do, it’s like the weather, just a regular part of our environment. But it wasn’t always this way. Back when the private automobile was first beginning to appear on public streets a large majority of the population, including politicians, police, and business leaders, agreed that cars were interlopers and ought to be regulated and subordinated to pedestrians and streetcars.

It’s almost impossible to imagine the speed with which conditions on urban streets changed at the dawn of the motorized era. Here’s a quote from the California Automobile Association’s Motorland magazine in August 1927 describing the rapid growth in car ownership:

In 1895 there were four cars registered, in 1905 there were 77,400 in use, in 1915 the total had risen to 2,309,000, and in 1925 there were 17,512,000 passenger automobiles on the highways, and the total is now in excess of 20,000,000.

Motorland magazine cover, July 1927

With over two million cars clogging city streets in 1915, and death and injury tolls rising, cities took various measures to address the problem (quoting from “Fighting Traffic”):

From 1915 (and especially after 1920), cities tried marking crosswalks with painted lines, but most pedestrians ignored them. A Kansas City safety expert reported that when police tried to keep them out of the roadway, “pedestrians, many of them women” would “demand that police stand aside.” In one case, he reported, “women used their parasols on the policemen.” Police relaxed enforcement.

Pedestrians on Market Street, 1937. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

The common usage of the streets by all was considered sacrosanct and attempts by motordom and/or police to regulate people’s use of the streets was widely resisted. Plenty of police didn’t agree that pedestrian behavior should be criminalized on behalf of motoring:

New York police magistrate Bruce Cobb in 1919 defended the “legal right to the highway” of the “foot passenger,” arguing that “if pedestrians were at their peril confined to street corners or certain designated crossings, it might tend to give selfish drivers too great a sense of proprietorship in the highway.” He assigned the responsibility for the safety of the pedestrian—even one who “darts obliquely across a crowded thorofare”—to drivers… By 1916 “jaywalker” was a feature of “police parlance.” Police use modified the word’s meaning and sparked controversy. “Jaywalker” carried the sting of ridicule, and many objected to branding independent-minded pedestrians with the term… The New York Times objected, calling the word “highly opprobrious” and “a truly shocking name.”

Typical of auto industry-sponsored advertising shifting the burden for road safety from motorists to the children who had customarily been able to play in the streets safely. (Motorland magazine)

Anti-jaywalking campaigns came to San Francisco too.

In a 1920 safety campaign, San Francisco pedestrians who thought they were minding their own business found themselves pulled into mocked-up outdoor courtrooms. In front of crowds of onlookers they were lectured on the perils of jaywalking.

In 1941 jaywalking became a topic of interest in local papers, with several images captured of women jaywalking. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

Clearly 20 years of anti-jaywalking campaigns in San Francisco and the country as a whole had not convinced people to abandon their customary ways of crossing public streets. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

In 1942 this shot at 5th and Market shows the women walking against the signal. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

As the 1920s continued, more and more cars were being sold, and the streets were both crowded and contested. Streetcar operators blamed cars for clogging thoroughfares and slowing down their lines, causing late runs and generally inconveniencing passengers. Motorists parked everywhere, jamming curbsides two-deep, when they weren’t weaving through chaotic urban streets. Attempts to regulate and standardize traffic patterns began during this era, with lanes, crosswalks, traffic signals, and parking regulations slowly emerging as “solutions” to the problems created by tens of thousands of private cars filling the streets.

February 3, 1927, Van Ness and Fell Streets, with helpful labels to show what motorists are doing wrong. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

More 1927 instructional photography. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

When sales slumped in late 1923 and into 1924, analysts speculated that the market for cars was saturated (at about 7 Americans per car at the time). The car industry consisted of dozens of companies, who began to fail or merge during this first contraction in sales. The industry reorganized its public relations and launched concerted efforts to redefine “saturation”:

There was no “buying-power saturation,” [motordom] said. The real bridle on the demand for automobiles was not the consumer’s wallet, but street capacity. Traffic congestion deterred the would-be urban car buyer, and congestion was saturation of streets.

By the late 1920s, a young graduate student named Miller McClintock had become the nation’s pre-eminent traffic researcher thanks to his 1925 thesis “Street Traffic Control.” His career is a window into the process of private corruption of public interests that riddles American history up to the present.

In his 1925 graduate thesis Street Traffic Control, the old McClintock had maintained that widening streets would merely attract more vehicles to them, leaving traffic as congested as before. The automobile, he wrote, was a waster of space compared to the streetcar, noting that “the greater economy of the latter is marked.” “It seems desirable,” McClintock wrote, “to give trolley cars the right of way under general conditions, and to place restrictions on motor vehicles in their relations with street cars.” He described the automobile as a “menace to human life” and “the greatest public destroyer of human life.”

Two years later all had changed. McClintock wrote of “the inevitable necessity to provide more room” in the streets. He called for “new streets” and “wider streets.”… In 1925 McClintock virtually ruled out elevated streets as expensive and impractical; two years later he urged that they be considered.

What had happened in the two years between the diametrically opposed advice given by McClintock? He had been hired by Studebaker’s Vice President to head up the new “Albert Russel Erskine Bureau for Street Traffic Research,” which was first placed in Los Angeles where McClintock was teaching at UC, but a year later moved by Studebaker to Harvard University, where the car company continued to fund the ostensibly “independent” institute. As the years went by McClintock became one of the foremost authorities on traffic planning, though his organization dropped the “Albert Russel Erskine” from its name when the chairman of Studebaker Motors committed suicide in 1933!

McClintock came to San Francisco early in his career. In the August 1927 Motorland magazine, he penned an article summarizing his research “Curing the Ills of San Francisco Traffic”: “… it is recognized that an ultimate requirement for the solution of street and highway congestion is to be found in the creation of more ample street area.” And sure enough, it was in this exact period that San Francisco embarked on a series of street widenings throughout the city, including for example, Capp Street and Army Street in the Mission District. Interestingly, McClintock’s traffic study shows the predominant car-free life of San Franciscans at the time:

On a typical business day studied by the traffic survey committee, 1,073,963 persons entered and left [the central business] district during a fourteen-hour period from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. Vehicles of all types, including streetcars, carried 744,667 people in and out of the district, In addition, 329,296 pedestrians entered and left the district during the same period… In no other city is there such a large pedestrian movement into the central district, nor such a large outrush of people during the noon hour. Both of these conditions may be attributed to the large capacity of apartment houses immediately adjacent to the district…

Incredibly, streetcars were used by 70 percent of the people depending on some kind of transportation to get downtown, while only a quarter used passenger cars, but the latter made up 61 percent of vehicular traffic as compared to 11 percent for the streetcars! What has been poorly understood in the triumphant narrative of the private automobile is how cars benefited from enormous public expenditures, even when they were being used by a relatively small minority of the population. New infrastructure to accommodate motorists far outstripped any public investment in public streetcar service, let alone any subsidies for the privately owned lines. Meanwhile, electric streetcar companies were slowly going bankrupt, with their fares publicly restricted and the public streets on which they operated slowly being taken over by private vehicles.

Traditional use of the streets by pedestrians was being criminalized by new traffic codes. McClintock put forth a new Uniform Traffic Ordinance, adopted by San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, which was intended to “legislate jaywalkers off the streets,” crowed a Motorland magazine editorial. In 1915, Ford already had a factory at 21st and Harrison in the Mission making Model-T’s, and by the mid-1920s, the new car business was fully ensconced along Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco:

Chevrolet dealer at Van Ness and Sacramento, 1933. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

Rambler dealer, Van Ness Avenue, August 1964. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

Interior of Don Lee Cadillac showroom (now AMC Theaters). (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

Don Lee Cadillac dealership, Van Ness and O'Farrell, 1928. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

Miller McClintock continued his work on behalf of the auto industry from his bought-and-paid-for perch at Harvard University.

Miller McClintock [became] the impresario of a new kind of highway road show. In the spring of 1937, the Shell Oil Company combined McClintock’s traffic expertise with the talents of the stage designer Normal Bel Geddes to build a scale model of “the automobile city of tomorrow.”… Others interested in the rebuilding of cities for the motor age adopted Shell’s technique. At the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition, United States Steel displayed its vision of San Francisco in 1999, with wider streets, cloverleaf intersections, and an elevated highway.

Overshadowed by the far more successful World’s Fair in New York City, and in particular by the tone-setting “World of Tomorrow” exhibit there built by General Motors, the 1939 US Steel vision of San Francisco in 1999 is worth peeking at:

"San Francisco in 1999" Golden Gate International Exposition, 1939. US Steel financed this diorama, meant to reinvent San Francisco as a Corbusian radial city with a new rationalized and centralized port combining all piers in a single monumental jetty extending from 16th Street. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

This close-up from the US Steel 1939 vision of San Francisco in 1999 shows the intersection of 7th and Howard streets with elevated roadways passing under each tower. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

Here’s a description of the exhibit by Richard Reinhart in his book on the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition “Treasure Island: San Francisco’s Exposition Years”

Artist Donald McLoughlin had prepared a dioramic view of San Francisco in 1999 for the US Steel exhibit in the Hall of Mines, Metals and Machinery. This prognostic nightmare showed the city stripped of every vestige of 1939 except Coit Tower, the bridges and Chinatown. All maritime activity had disappeared from the Embarcadero. Shipping was concentrated at a super-pier at the foot of 16th Street.

North of Market Street every block contained a single, identical high-rise apartment house. South of Market, sixty-story office towers of steel and glass alternated with block-square plazas in a vast checkerboard pattern. Elevated freeways ran through the geometric landscape.

McLoughlin correctly anticipated the removal of maritime activity from San Francisco’s waterfront, though his massive modern pier is spread along the Oakland bay shore rather than on a prominent pier jutting out from 16th Street. Visions like this, and the better known version in New York, informed the post-WWII population as it fled cities for the suburbs. Those who remained though, had a different idea of what our cities would become, and thanks to their stopping the highway builders in their tracks in the late 1950s and early 1960s, San Francisco was not crushed in this way.

Interesting to recall that while 30,000 citizens were mobilized to stop freeway building in San Francisco (the very same elevated, pedestrian-free streets McClintock had come to endorse as an industry flack) thousands more, mostly African American and white youth, staged a vigorous civil rights campaign along auto row, demanding that blacks be given equal treatment in hiring by auto dealers, especially Don Lee’s Cadillac dealership.

Crowd cheering civil rights employment settlement with auto dealers, 1964. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

Contrary to the fervent wishes of today’s motorists, streets have not always been the domain of cars. Clever marketing prior to the Depression led to radical redesign of both the physical streets and our assumptions about how public streets should be used. As we ride to and from work on our bicycles these days, or get together in Critical Mass or Bike Party social rides, we are participating in a new push to redefine how streets are used, and most importantly, how we think about public space. While we haven’t yet found a new consensus, the rising tide of bicycling, parklets, Sunday Streets, car-free zones, etc., all amply demonstrate that the private car’s days are in decline. Add a dollop of global warming and a couple of scoops of cheap fossil fuel scarcity, and the question of Whose Streets is once again a key issue of social contestation. Perhaps at least we can stop blindly accepting death and mayhem as an inevitable and natural consequence of our social transportation choices!

Cartoon by Jean-Francois Batellier, a French artist who sells his art and books on the streets of Paris.

Drivers ignore the signs and routinely block the crosswalk and speed at the intersection of Harrison and Main streets. Photos by Bryan Goebel.

On December 10, 2004, Katy Liddell had just stepped off the N-Judah with a sack of cleaning supplies and was walking to her Portside apartment at Harrison and Main in Rincon Hill, when she noticed a cadre of emergency vehicles surrounding the intersection. As Liddell drew closer, she saw something that horrified her.

“I saw a tarp covering a body in the middle of the street,” Liddell recalled. “I found out that one of my neighbors had been hit and killed.”

The violent force of a big rig truck had thrown 63-year-old Beverly Kees out of the crosswalk, killing her. Kees, a popular SF State journalism professor who had recently retired, lived across the street from Liddell in the BayCrest Towers. The dog she had been walking was also hit and injured.

“Beverly saved his life. She saw the truck coming and she picked him up,” said Debi Gould, Kees’ friend and neighbor and owner of the dog who was with her when she died, a rat terrier mix named Harp. As Gould tells it, Kees, who lived two doors down, had been told by her doctor that she needed to walk more. She asked Gould if she could walk Harp one day, and the two formed a close bond.

“She started walking him to the point where he loved being with her, and instead of a couple of times a week, it ended up being every day that I went to work,” said Gould, a retired flight attendant who also walks a lot and feels like pedestrians in San Francisco “are considered an inconvenience.”

Beverly Kees and Harp. Photo courtesy of Debi Gould.

Not long after coming across the aftermath of the crash that killed Beverly Kees, Katy Liddell found out about Walk San Francisco and began advocating for changes at the intersection, along with other residents, including Gould. They formed a committee, organized a petition drive and turned in more than 200 signatures to the Department of Parking and Traffic (DPT). The response was not what they wanted to hear.

“We appreciate the petition that was submitted to DPT’s Livable Streets Program and continue to evaluate and prioritize applications for traffic calming. Unfortunately, your location is not a viable candidate for traffic calming measures,” wrote the agency’s former deputy director of planning, William Lieberman [pdf]. “The current pedestrian issues at the intersection are of a nature that requires active traffic enforcement.”

Although the news was disappointing, the committee kept pressing. Two years later, after urging from the office of former Mayor Gavin Newsom, the SFMTA’s former lead traffic engineer Jack Fleck sent a letter out announcing a series of engineering changes, including repainting crosswalks and adding pedestrian signals, at several SoMa and Rincon Hill intersections, but nothing was planned for Main and Harrison.

On a recent Friday afternoon, Giants fans were forced to maneuver around cars blocking the crosswalk.

A man's motorcycle is tripped by a nasty pothole.

A Mean Intersection

The intersection of Harrison and Main is the kind of place that’s so dangerous by design, it’s easy to see how drivers can lose their sense of humanity. In one of the city’s densest neighborhoods, Harrison serves as a four-lane westbound arterial (there is a fifth eastbound lane) that carries 12,600 drivers daily, most headed to the Bay Bridge. In peak-hour afternoon traffic, drivers routinely speed and block the crosswalk. Since 2003, three people have died there, including Kees, and many more have been injured.

“It’s horrible,” said Sam Kabash, who owns the corner market. “Drivers come by, they go, and they don’t care that people are passing by. There’s been too many accidents, too many crashes and too many people getting run over.”

On a recent Friday afternoon, many drivers appeared anxious and at their worst, frustrated by the blocks-long queue of traffic inching toward the First Street on-ramp. A man who was knocked to the ground after his motorcycle tripped over a nasty pothole quickly rebounded as drivers flew past him. Giants fans walking to the ballpark were forced to squeeze between cars hogging the crosswalk.

“We’re under siege by cars Monday through Friday,” said Jamie Whitaker, a pedestrian advocate and resident of the BayCrest Towers, one of several high-rise residential buildings surrounding Harrison and Main.  Traffic lightens up at night and on the weekends, but that’s not much comfort to Whitaker and other residents who’ve been lobbying for a “radical re-engineering” of the intersection for seven years now.

“Walking through this intersection every day might make you a little crazy,” said Whitaker, standing just outside Habash’s market. Not long after moving into the neighborhood from Detroit five years ago, Whitaker started a blog, and more recently has been documenting the ugly conditions on video.

Other intersections along Harrison are just as problematic, including pedestrian crossings at Fremont and at 1st Street, where drivers are led onto the Bay Bridge in front of One Rincon Hill.

A westward look at the traffic queue on Harrison from Main Street.

Looking eastward toward the Bay Bridge from Fremont.

Rincon Hill Plan

Rincon Hill was once a forgotten “jumble of freeway and Transbay Terminal ramps,” notes this SPUR report, but it’s now a 12-block high-rise neighborhood that could see more than 10,000 new residents by 2025. Its streets, however, are not yet ready to accommodate those new residents, whom the city would like to encourage to walk as much as possible.

In practice, developers eyeing future high-rise residential buildings continue to request a high ratio of parking, which means yet more cars in an already congested neighborhood. There are no parking requirements in Rincon Hill and the maximum is one space per two units, required to be built underground, but exceptions have been granted to some developers to build, in some cases, one space for every unit.

“It would be a shame to build a high-rise neighborhood with close proximity to downtown for people who drive to Silicon Valley,” said Tom Radulovich, the executive director of Livable City. “We don’t need more drivable neighborhoods in proximity to downtown.”

The Rincon Hill Plan, passed in 2005, makes the 55-acre neighborhood “a high-priority housing site” because it’s so close to the Financial District and has a number of vacant or underutilized parcels. It acknowledges the neighborhood’s streets are unsafe and unpleasant for pedestrians. The sidewalks are narrow, the intersection crossings are dangerous, and the noise levels exceed state and city standards. In addition, many walls facing the sidewalk are blank and featureless and there is a general lack of open space.

The streetscape component, currently being revised by the San Francisco Planning Department, envisioned fundamental changes, but it’s been sitting on the shelf for a number of years, due to stagnant development that isn’t bringing in the impact fees required to pay for the improvements. It calls for “extensive sidewalk widenings, tree plantings, street furniture, and the creation of new public spaces along streets throughout the district.”

Some aspects, such as widened sidewalks and landscaping, have already been implemented on portions of some streets, such as Beale and Spear, with the ultimate goal of turning them into living streets. On Harrison, the streetscape plan would widen the sidewalks from 8 to 12 feet, add bulbouts on each block, and narrow the traffic lanes. All the public improvements would cost $26 million. The street components alone would cost $12 million.

Joshua Switzky, a citywide policy planner for the Planning Department, told Streetsblog he is organizing a meeting with residents to unveil the revised streetscape plan and set priorities, given the limited funding. A community meeting has been tentatively scheduled for July 19.

A One Rincon Hill resident walks across the intersection of Harrison and 1st streets, one of the city's ugliest intersections.

A woman and her child cross Harrison and First Street, which was backed up all the way to Market, and along Battery.

The vacant parcel at Harrison and Fremont.

Pedestrian Safety as a Priority in District 6

The advocates working to bring change to Harrison and Main streets have been empowered of late by Supevisor Jane Kim’s efforts to improve pedestrian safety in District 6, which has the highest rate of pedestrian deaths and injuries of any district. Most recently, Whitaker has been leading the charge to improve Rincon Hill’s streets.

“Jamie has been amazing and it’s to his full credit that things are actually happening,” said Matthias Mormino, an aide to Kim. In an interview in her City Hall office last week, Kim told Streetsblog that she is working to push the various city agencies handling pedestrian safety issues to move quicker.

“Without a little bit of attention and visibility given to the issue here at City Hall, work just gets shuffled around,” said Kim. She pointed out that many city staffers who have advocated for pedestrian safety have been grateful for the attention she’s given to the issue.

“It’s not like I had to create new ideas and figure out what our priorities are,” Kim said. “It’s just about implementation. On a certain level, that’s easier and more challenging to do.” Kim said if voters approve a streets bond measure on the November ballot, she will work to get some of that money directed to pedestrian safety improvements in District 6.

SFMTA Measures

While Rincon Hill’s residents wait for streetscape improvements, the SFMTA is finally planning some engineering measures they hope will help at Harrison and Main, thanks to Whitaker’s relentless advocacy. According to the SFMTA, the changes include:

• A head start for pedestrians crossing Harrison Street.  “The head start will allow pedestrians to cross 4 seconds before any conflicting vehicles receive the green.  Thus, pedestrians are given a head start to establish their right-of-way in the intersection, with the intent of making drivers more aware of the pedestrians in the intersection.”
• “The flashing red hand will now count down from 15 seconds (currently 9 seconds) for pedestrians crossing Harrison St before going to a solid red hand.  After the flashing red hand goes to a solid red hand, there are still about 4.5 seconds before the cross-auto-traffic on Harrison Street will be shown their green light.  This intentional delay is extra time that pedestrians can use to complete their crossing.”
• Painting white continental crosswalks at the intersection. They feature a ladder design with “white longitudinal lines at a 90 degree angle to the line of the crosswalk,” according to the Federal Highway Administration’s pedestrian crossings page.
• Pursuing legislation for No U-turns for eastbound Harrison St at Main St.  “During our field investigation, we noticed a number of vehicles traveling eastbound on Harrison and making a U-turn at Main St to cut in the queue of vehicles, increasing the number of vehicles in the intersection, trying to get onto the Bay Bridge on-ramp.”

In addition, the agency is planning to assign a parking control officer to the intersection. While it’s not the “radical re-engineering” advocates had hoped for, “it’s a start,” said Gould. “I realize there’s a lot of red tape involved with City Hall but where pedestrian safety is concerned it’s been a serious frustration.”

“I’m elated. I’m anxious to see these improvements,” said Whitaker. “This is just one intersection in South of Market. There are many more that need help because there’s 30,000 more people that have moved to SoMa since 1990, and there’s more coming.”

"Americans Love Their Cars" -- and that's why we pollute our air, destroy our cities, and make ourselves fat? Image: Smashing Magazine

Americans love their cars. A Google search for this statement returns 2.8 times as many hits as “Americans love their pets” and 6.3 times as many as “Americans love their guns”. Yes, there will always be automotive enthusiasts and drivers fond of their cars. But our car culture is both shifting and conflicted: The last time they were surveyed by Pew, Americans saying they saw their cars as “something special”, more than just a means of transportation, had dropped from 43 to 23 percent. Americans may need their cars in our transit-starved and poorly planned landscape, but with mind-numbing traffic and volatile gas prices, the luster is off the chrome.

Teens can’t wait to grab the car keys. The press persists in romanticizing a teen’s first trip to the DMV as the ultimate coming of age ritual. But it’s their middle-aged parents who are more likely to be champing at the bit, fed up with schlepping their kids and steeped in nostalgia about the freedom they felt when they first drove. But this generation is different. Already connected by smartphones and computers, and graduating into a terrible job market, young people are less car-happy than their parents were at the same age. Today’s teens are delaying getting their licenses and purchasing vehicles, and college students are more interested in living in urban centers where they can be less car-dependent.

The economy depends on the auto industry. The popular, business, and political media alike echo the fallacy that a healthy US economy depends on a healthy auto industry. This chorus helped justify the 2009 bailouts of GM and Chrysler. But the auto industry knows that the dependency is reversed: it needs economic growth, tax breaks and subsidies, and vibrant credit markets to sell cars. A nation more reliant on transit and active transportation would be one in which households had lower debt and more discretionary income to spend on housing, leisure, and other products, enriching a wide swath of industries. It would also be a nation, in the next downturn, less hostage to how a single industry’s fate might affect entire communities and supply chains.

The America car industry can return to its former glory. This theme, sounded in Eminem’s paean to the resurrection of Detroit in recent Chrysler ads, is a media favorite. It resounds in stories about car companies that succeed because they “build the cars that consumers want”. The reality is that profitability in an industry so mature, when most families already own multiple vehicles, requires money be made mostly on auto loans and extended warranties. Toyota, which rose to #1 in an era when the press blamed Detroit’s troubles on its having the wrong products, has been making more on car loans than on selling cars. The auto industry’s next heyday, if there is one, will be as a finance business, not a manufacturing or transportation business as it was at its, and the American economy’s, mid-20^th century glory days.

We can’t fix the car system because poor people will suffer. Raise the gas tax? Institute congestion pricing? Eliminate oil subsidies? Limit risky offshore drilling? The news media regularly regurgitates the idea that these policies would make driving more costly and that this would necessarily hurt the working poor most of all. Of course, no group suffers under our current car system more than the poor, who devote a heftier chunk of their budgets to transportation than the rest of us and who are disproportionately victims of auto sales fraud, predatory lending, discriminatory insurance pricing, and racial profiling in traffic violations. Simple solutions like redirecting oil and auto subsidies to transit improvements and exempting the poor from new gas taxes would increase equality of mobility.

These myths about our car-dependent transportation system, and the industries that benefit from it, too often go unquestioned by journalists and opinion leaders. Advocates for transportation equity and for a modern transportation system must challenge these assumptions. Rather than let ourselves be paralyzed by these truisms or lulled into thinking these myths harmless, we must tackle these obstacles standing between us and a better transportation future.

Catherine Lutz, a Brown University anthropologist, and Anne Lutz Fernandez, a former marketer and banker, are the authors of Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and its Effect on our Lives (Palgrave Macmillan).

A new Canadian television ad for the Kia Sportage, filmed in San Francisco’s Financial District, markets an attitude of acceptance about the responsibility of sharing the road with bicycles. It’s quite a contrast from the conventional image of cars as an embodiment of power and dominance.

While the ad encourages drivers to share the road, it still reassures them that the car is “perfectly capable of ‘owning’” it, and its slogan suggesting that driving is a part of any real change does sound a lot like greenwashing.

It is refreshing, however, to see a car manufacturer’s marketing strategy that acknowledges the impacts of automobiles on the safety of cycling and prominently features San Francisco’s sharrow markings.

Photo: Myleen Hollero/Orange Photography

The California Department of Insurance has approved a pay-as-you-drive insurance program encouraged by environmental advocates and transportation planners because it provides an incentive to drive less by reducing premiums for low-mileage drivers. Widespread adoption of similar insurance policies could reduce driving in the U.S. by as much as eight percent, according to a Brookings Institution study.

“The voluntary pay-as-you-drive initiative is an innovative program that will allow insurers to offer plans based on more accurate mileage, so that people who choose to drive less will pay less for auto insurance,” California Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner said recently when he announced the program with the participation of State Farm Insurance and the Automobile Club of Southern California.

Though other insurance companies, notably Progressive Insurance, have experimented with pay-as-you-drive policies, because of the large number of drivers in California and the scale of the program, it could have national significance.

State Farm — the state’s largest automobile insurance company with 3.3 million policy holders and premiums of $2.5 billion — had previously required mileage to be self-reported by customers, who then got a small discount if they drove less than 7,500 miles in a year. Starting in late February, State Farm will offer an initial 5 percent discount for the first policy term to drivers who opt-in to the Drive Safe and Save program and agree to self-report their odometer readings at the beginning and end of each policy period. Policy holders with an active On Star system, which comes with many vehicles made by General Motors, can agree to allow State Farm to access their mileage data automatically.

Customers who opt-in under the program will have their policies adjusted based on 500-mile segments up to 19,000 miles per year. For those who rarely drive, State Farm expects their premiums will be reduced by up to 45 percent. Assuming State Farm achieves its target of convincing one quarter of its policy holders to switch to pay-as-you-drive, the resulting savings would be $31 million a year.

“From our perspective it’s an opportunity to help our customer have more options when pricing their policy,” said Sevag Sarkissian, a spokesperson for State Farm. “An exciting positive that goes along with this is the potential impact this has on the environment.”

State Farm and OnStar partnered in 2009 for a small pilot in Ohio, though both companies believe Californians will embrace the program in large numbers, given the state’s reputation for environmental advocacy.

“Both OnStar and State Farm are trying to be leaders. We’re trying to work with California consumers to get lower rates,” said Mark DuBois, manager of strategic alliances at OnStar. DuBois said the program is primarily about saving drivers money, but he noted the incentive to drive less would help the environment. “We’re all trying to look at how to make green initiatives and look at ways to reduce that carbon footprint. We look at it as a potential to change consumer behavior.”

The environmental impact would be substantial, as the Brookings Institution study noted. If every driver in the state switched to pay-as-you-drive, the eight percent reduction in driving would translate to 24 billion fewer miles driven, 1.2 billion fewer gallons of gasoline and a seven to nine percent reduction in carbon dioxide.

According to a Victoria Transport Policy Institute study, widespread adoption of pay-as-you-drive would also reduce traffic crashes, lowering medical bills and saving lives. “Mileage reductions reduce traffic density (vehicles per lane-mile), which reduces crash rates,” the study noted.

Another potential benefit of the program is the gradual public acceptance of reporting vehicle miles traveled (VMT). For Robert Atkinson, President of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and former chair of the National Commission on Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing at the U.S. Department of Transportation, this could make it easier to transition to a distance-based VMT tax to pay for roads.

This is particularly important as cars get increasingly better mileage and the gas tax now pays for barely half the cost of highways. Given that raising the gas-tax has been a political third rail, a shift to another funding mechanism will be crucial to pay for infrastructure, according to Atkinson.

“People will get marginally used to the notion of paying by the mile. Then it’s less of a big emotional or intellectual shift,” said Atkinson about moving to a distance-based tax.

“If it works in California, then they talk about it elsewhere. Eventually these innovations will permeate to other states,” he said.

Dodge Charger: “Man’s Last Stand”

Chrysler stokes the gender wars with this ad suggesting that the American male may seem to have been tamed by the boss and neutered by the wife, but all that the rebel within needs to bust out is a $38K fully loaded Dodge Charger. The road is his last refuge, the one place where he can still be a manly man. He’ll “eat fruit” at home, but he won’t be a fruit in control of the kind of growling, ferocious muscle car that had its heyday back when men last really had it good. (For a rejoinder, click here.)

Toyota Sienna: “Mommy Like”

How does a mom, stressed from commuting to work and shuttling the kids to soccer practice day in and day out, get away from it all? Why, of course, by spending more time in her vehicle! In this commercial for the Sienna minivan, Mommy steals some quality time alone—in the backseat where the kids usually get to have all the fun. The message? Auto dependence’s problems are solved not by driving less but by buying more, including a new car chock-a-block with luxury options to distract us from the aggravation and tedium of the average 18 ½ hours Americans sit in a car each week.

Lexus: “The Next Big Thing”

Billions of dollars of ads touting safety have helped convince Americans that the phrase “safe car” is no oxymoron, notwithstanding the roughly 380,000 crash deaths over the past decade. Here’s a Lexus ad that takes to a dizzying new level the myth that car technology will solve—any minute now—the problems that the car itself has created. Its suggestion that “a real driver in a real car reacting to a real situation without real consequences” is a real possibility fosters a false sense of safety among drivers that encourages dangerous risk-taking. It also deflects the push for meaningful regulation in areas such as roof crush and crash incompatibility.

Hyundai Sonata: “Turboface”

It’s nothing new for a car company to produce a commercial that encourages speeding as an expression of freedom. But this Hyundai Sonata Turbo ad, set not on expansive wilderness roads but on compact city streets, makes the laughably miniscule disclaimer — “Professional driver on a closed course. Do not attempt”—more ironic than ever.

Hyundai Sonata: “Horizontal Bungee Jumping”

Another ad from Hyundai that finds risk-taking amusing, while also playing into the notion that we can protect ourselves from all those other bad drivers out there (in this case, the crazy young ’uns on the road)–if we just buy the right car.

Subaru: “Baby Driver”

A good parent buys the right car to protect their good children from all those bad drivers out there (in this case, the crazy young ‘uns on the road whose parents failed to give them the best car or the best advice). This is just one of the latest and most pathos-laden of ads following a remarkable trend of exploiting kids to sell cars to adults and to peddle car culture to kids. Reality bites back, though: there remains nothing more deadly to teenagers than crashes, and those with their own cars are more likely to die in them than those who share their parents’ vehicles.

Toyota Highlander: “Kid Cave”

Here’s another kid-driven beaut. “Just because you’re a parent doesn’t mean you have to be lame,” needles Nathan in this SUV commercial from a campaign founded on the power of pester marketing. Toyota is no doubt relying on surveys showing that the majority of parents say their children had meaningful input into the decision to buy the last family vehicle, especially their kids around Nathan’s age: 6-8 years old.

Chevrolet: “Chevy Runs Deep”

This one just looks like a car ad. It’s really part of a political campaign to justify the bailouts and delegitimize further industry safety and other regulation. And if you are old enough to remember Reagan’s similar “Morning in America” ads, you’ll recognize stroking people’s sense of national self-worth as a tried-and-true sales technique. Combining wistful nostalgia for the country’s economic glories of the past and bright-eyed optimism for its eco-friendly techno-future, this Chevrolet ad reminds us that our past, present, and future all depend on a healthy US auto industry, even if the cost in dollars and lives seems high.

Our independent spirit makes most Americans reluctant to believe that we are susceptible to the persuasion of advertising. And while we may not be immediately swayed by any one maker’s single pitch to run out and buy a particular model, the marketing formula works, over the long run, to feed a culture based on owning and driving cars. A dollop of family love, a dash of freedom, a heap of faith in progress and America: it’s the well-tested recipe that keeps the American car buyer coming back for more.

What factors do you think led to these numbers? Was it car-share, more biking, more walking, more telecommuting, higher unemployment? Remember to take into account that these numbers are from the 2008 and 2009 census data, respectively.

Tell me what you think in the comments. How do you think this will change next year?

H/T Jason Henderson, SF State Geography Professor

Adding a few more lanes should do the trick. Photo of the 405: Atwater Village Newbie

After yesterday’s electoral drubbing, the Obama administration will have to deal with a starkly different Congress when they make their expected push for a multi-year transportation bill early next year. We know that some influential House Republicans, like John Mica, don’t necessarily believe that bigger highways will solve America’s transportation problems. And we know that some pro-transit voices in Washington originate from the right. But no one expects the GOP ascendancy to make transportation reform any easier.

For a taste of the right-wing line against transportation reform, check out the election week issue of the Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard. Inside, editor Fred Barnes (under fire recently for accepting speaking fees from the GOP) mounts an attack on just about every federal transportation policy other than highway spending. There’s nothing really conservative about Barnes’s screed — it could have come straight from the pen of an asphalt industry lobbyist. Wondering what a transportation bill would look like if it were reshaped according to what highway boosters believe should be the “core program”? Read Barnes and find out.

He starts by ridiculing Ray LaHood’s speech at the 2010 National Bike Summit, where the transportation secretary said that Americans “want out of their cars, they want out of congestion, they want to live in livable neighborhoods and livable communities.” Barnes disagrees:

LaHood was half right. People hate traffic congestion. But they want to get out of their cars about as much as they want to get stuck behind a bicyclist who rides at a donkey’s pace before running through red lights and stop signs. What people mainly want is to stay in their cars and have LaHood do something to reduce congestion.

Like finance the construction and maintenance of highways and bridges to facilitate the flow of autos and trucks. That, rather than promoting “livability” or “the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of nonmotorized,” is the job of the Department of Transportation. Always has been.

This is, basically, his entire argument: People just want to “stay in their cars.” We have zero interest in getting around any other way. According to Fred Barnes, we are perfectly content to drive and drive and drive, as long as we don’t have to put up with all the other people driving. If you believe that, then his cheerleading for highway construction makes a lot of sense.

If being inside our cars is what we’re really all about, by all means lets throw more money down the sinkhole of highway expansion. That will guarantee more quality time inside our cars. Then, a few years later, when we’re in our cars but not enjoying it so much because the new lanes are jammed with traffic again, we’ll repeat the whole expensive process.

But if we’d rather spend more time with our families and loved ones — or, you know, doing actual work instead of commuting — maybe we should try a different way of building our transportation system. According to public opinion research by Transportation for America, 57 percent of Americans would like to spend less time in their cars. Even with our highway-centric system, we’re already voting with our feet: These days, Americans are driving less and opting to walk, bike, and ride transit more than we were at the beginning of the decade.

A cursory internet search reveals that, when Barnes says the job of U.S. DOT has always been to build highways and only highways, he’s just making stuff up. The U.S. DOT mission statement does not mention any particular mode. The department’s job is, in fact, to “serve the United States by ensuring a fast, safe, efficient, accessible and convenient transportation system that meets our vital national interests and enhances the quality of life of the American people, today and into the future.”

So there’s some flexibility here. Now, consider that the Pentagon is under the impression that climate change poses a risk to national security. Or that public health experts peg the annual medical costs imposed by traffic and pollution at more than $200 billion. Or the mounting evidence that car dependence begets obesity and higher medical costs. Or that, according to research by CEOs for Cities, travel times are longest in sprawling metro areas, while areas that pursued smart growth and livability strategies have actually reduced commute times. All of which points to the conclusion that at this moment, the U.S. DOT’s job — providing an efficient transportation system that meets our vital national interests and so forth — is indeed to advance livability and stop promoting motorized transport.

Back to the Barnes highway-building argument. Maybe you’re worried that fighting congestion by building more roads that generate more congestion is a bad way to spend money. But Fred Barnes isn’t. He is, however, highly concerned about spending on rail:

The stimulus included $8 billion for high-speed projects, again not “paid for.” Now the administration is taking “the next step toward realizing its vision for high-speed rail,” the Department of Transportation said in June, handing out “$2.1 billion in grants to continue the development of high-speed intercity passenger rail corridors.”

On top of that, there’s talk in Washington of spending $50 billion more on high-speed trains. Where the funding would come from is anybody’s guess, but LaHood is fully on board. High-speed rail between cities is needed “so people can get out of their cars,” he said in an interview last month with Grist magazine. “They can take a train ride to see Grandma rather than doing it in a car.”

You know what else we haven’t figured out how to pay for? Highways. According to Subsidyscope, gas taxes and other fees have never covered the costs of the highway system. In 2007, fees collected from highway users barely covered half the costs of building and maintaining highways. That year, about $70 billion in highway funding came from other sources. (Even in New York, which, more than any other state, uses fees on driving to support public transit, drivers cover only 65 cents of each dollar spent on highways [PDF].) Meanwhile, the bicycle and pedestrian projects that Barnes moans about received all of $1.2 billion in federal funding in 2009, a record-setting year.

You could say that these massive subsidies for the highway system affect our behavior and induce driving. But Fred Barnes has different ideas about what affects our transportation decisions:

Last year, George Will zinged LaHood as the “Secretary of Behavior Modification” for his fervent opposition to cars. LaHood all but pleaded guilty. Steering funds from highways to bike and walking paths and streetcars, he said, “is a way to coerce people out of their cars.” His word, coerce.

But it’s hardly an answer to traffic congestion. Most people, most of the time, aren’t going to ride a bike to work or walk. They’re going to drive, even in the face of disincentives erected by LaHood.

LaHood will wear “coerce people out of their cars” around his neck forever. Which is ironic, because if anything, the Obama DOT has assiduously avoided erecting any “disincentives” to driving. The gas tax rate has been untouchable under LaHood. A mileage tax has been a non-starter. The last time U.S. DOT encouraged cities to pursue policies like congestion pricing or performance parking, which do affect driving behavior, George W. Bush was president.

The Obama administration, with its priority on ejecting people from their cars and its embrace of an environmental ethic that regards highways as evil, is unlikely to champion a higher gas tax. Any other tax increase you can imagine, yes. This one, no. That means Republicans will have to step up. They can insist the revenues be used solely for highways and bridges. Local governments would then be free to spend on bikeways.

A lobbyist for highway builders could hardly have said it better. The gas tax is theirs — it belongs to highways. This is the mentality that advocates for transportation reform will face off against in the months ahead, when the administration moves forward with its infrastructure push. Every dollar for transit, bicycling and safer streets will be contested. Be prepared.

As lethal as this gun is, it probably hasn't killed as many people off the battlefield as a Dodge Viper. Image: Barrett.

I mocked Max Muller of Max Motors last summer for offering free AK-47s with the purchase of a new vehicle from his Butler, Missouri, showroom. We noted the “Kalashnikovs for Clunkers” deal was the second annual offering of guns with new cars, after he offered Glocks or Gas in 2008. At the time I wrote the article, Cash for Clunkers was all the rage so my angle was how kooky an incentive a firearm was for re-upping your ride.

Well, this year Max has gone right for the jugular, trying to sell his most compensatory vehicular stock by offering one of the baddest weapons on the market, whether for the battlefield or the Viagra crowd: the Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle. If you aren’t already familiar with the Barrett, it’s made by Ronnie Barrett in Murfreesboro (pronounced “Muf-freeze-burrow”), Tennessee, and it has become the poster-child for gun-control advocates trying to keep military-grade weaponry off the civilian market.

I’ll admit right now to my Streetsblog readers, I grew up a gun aficionado on a ranch in Nevada and, at age 13, I wanted little more than to become a sniper for the Marines. Well, I also really wanted a red pick-up truck with chrome roll-bars, a gun rack in the cab and vanity plates that read “Matt.” So in a deep-down, reptilian-brain way, I understand the appeal of a big V-10 and a bigger firearm, though every fiber in my adult sensibility strains against these impulses.

Short detour into my adolescent psyche aside, if you haven’t already gone to Max’s Snipers for Vipers radio ad, I highly recommend a listen. The deep voice of the narrator beckons you to make like Randal O’toole (funny, for a Portland-area bike rider, he sure loves hot rods) and head over to the nearest dealership to get a real manly killing machine with your manly killing machine.

What did your dealer throw in with your new vehicle? Did he top off your blinker fluid? Give me a break! Max motors is taking it to the next level. They’re calling it “Snipers for Vipers.” Yeah, you heard me, Max Motors is always taking aim at lower prices. You can take aim too, when you buy a new Dodge Viper from Max Motors, you’ll get a free Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle. It’s a gun with the power to match the car. A cool Dodge Viper and a .50 caliber sniper rifle. Max Motor has 10 Vipers to choose from, so go ahead, pull the trigger. Ask about “Snipers for Vipers” now at Max Motors in Butler Missouri, home of the free, the brave, and the guaranteed lowest prices in the USA.

Of course, both the Barrett and the Sniper are way over-engineered for use in the real world. The Viper SRT-10 has 600 horsepower, a top speed of 202 miles per hour, and goes 0-60 in 3.5 seconds, one of the fastest production vehicles on the market. The Barrett can puncture tank armor from a mile away and is illegal in numerous states, including California.

Bravado aside, this year’s ad made me realize Max Muller is doing a much better job associating cars with death than any lily-livered livable city advocate like me could possibly do. Perhaps all new vehicles should be paired with a firearm? This guilt by association could be very beneficial.

Photo: Myleen Hollero/Orange Photography

The Obama administration got a lot of attention earlier this year when it raised fuel efficiency rules to an average 35 miles per gallon across the nation’s fleet of automobiles that will be produced between 2012 and 2016. Now the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), a division of the U.S. Department of Transportation (US DOT), have laid out an ambitious road map [pdf] to push tougher greenhouse gas emission and fuel economy standards for passenger cars and trucks built from 2017 through 2025, standards that hypothetically could push the national fleet average up as high as 62 mpg.

“We must, and we will, keep the momentum going to make sure that all motor vehicles sold in America are realizing the best fuel economy and greenhouse gas reductions possible,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. “Continuing the national program would help create a more secure energy future by reducing the nation’s dependence on oil, which has been a national objective since the first oil price shocks in the 1970s.”

GHG and MPG levels analyzed for various scenarios. Source: US DOT

Today’s report provides an initial assessment for a potential national program for the 2025 model year horizon and outlines next steps for additional work the agencies will undertake to meet the yet-to-be established GHG reduction goals. Depending on the scenario eventually chosen, the industry will have to reduce CO2 production across the national car and truck fleet from a minimum 3 percent (or the equivalent of 47 mpg) up to 6 percent (or the equivalent of 62 mpg).

The report outlines the costs and benefits of several approaches for reaching the targets (technology pathways A, B, C, or D), from focusing on reducing vehicle size and advanced gasoline, to relying on gas-electric hybrids and full electric vehicles (EVs). Rule makers assert that even the 6 percent target is achievable with existing technology, though the higher benchmark would require more hybrids and EVs within a manufacturer’s fleet.

Even though there will be an increase in the initial cost of vehicles employing more advanced technologies to meet the expected rules, the payoff will be fewer trips to the pump and significant long-term cost savings. From the report:

The preliminary estimated per-vehicle cost increases for a [manufacturer year] 2025 vehicle ranged from $770 to $3,500 across the range of stringency targets and technology pathways. Due to the fuel savings consumers experience by purchasing vehicles with improved fuel economy, the net lifetime owner savings would be $5,000 to $7,400, or a payback period of 1.4 to 4.2 years,

Projections for MY 2025 preliminary per-vehicle cost estimates, vehicle owner payback, and net owner lifetime savings.... Source: US DOT

Assuming a 6 percent GHG reduction target, if the industry followed Pathway A, for example, manufacturers would rely on hybrid electric technology (including plug-ins) and would see the highest preliminary per-vehicle cost increase of $3,500, but would save the vehicle’s owner $6,200 in fuel over the vehicle’s lifetime, with a payback period of 4.1 years. Under the same target but following Pathway C, manufacturers would rely on advanced fuels and smaller vehicles and would see the smallest initial per-vehicle cost increase of $2,800 and would save its owner $7,400 over the vehicle’s lifetime, with a payback period of 3.1 years.

Estimated total CO2e and fuel reductions for the lifetime of MY 2025 vehicles. The CO2e numbers vary depending on the scenario chosen and the penetration of hybrids and full EVs. Source: US DOT.

The overall impact of the reductions would be quite significant just for the vehicles produced in model year 2025, with varying levels of CO2e reductions depending on the technology pathway and the penetration of hybrids and electric vehicles in the market. If rule makers settled on the 6 percent target, for instance, the lifetime reduction of CO2e from all the cars and trucks manufactured in 2025 would be 530-590 million metric tons and the equivalent of 1.3 billion fewer barrels of oil than the baseline.

“Continuing the successful clean cars program will accelerate the environmental benefits, health protections and clean technology advances over the long-term,” EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson said in a statement.  “We will continue to work with automakers, environmentalists and other stakeholders to encourage standards that reduce our addiction to foreign oil, save money for American drivers, and clean up the air we breathe.”

At President Obama’s request, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) has participated in the development of the initial analysis and will come up with a technical assessment to inform the subsequent rulemaking process.

CARB spokesperson Stanley Young said Obama had asked CARB to work with the national rulemakers because they have “a great deal of expertise in developing vehicle standards. The President believes we would be able to contribute to the efforts and it would make it easier for California to harmonize its standards with national standards.”

The reaction from the Alliance of Automobile Manufactures, which represents BMW Group, Chrysler LLC, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Jaguar Land Rover, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Mitsubishi Motors, Porsche, Toyota, Volkswagen and Volvo, affirmed a commitment to improving fuel economy and reducing GHGs, but said the data in the report was still incomplete.

In a statement, Alliance president Dave McCurdy said, “In the coming weeks, we will carefully review the technical assessment’s assumptions regarding factors that will impact vehicle fuel economy increases over this time period…. EPA and DOT should now engage a broad range of independent experts to undertake a thorough analysis and balance the technological opportunities to improve vehicle and fleet fuel economy with the economic challenges they present – for automakers and American consumers.”

Three years later, lease up, the dealer convinced her to buy a somewhat nicer car, one with “just $299” in monthly payments. When the car was repossessed a year later because she couldn’t make the payments, she figured she had handed her dealer and loan company over $15,000. Sitting down to do the math, she estimated that insurance, gas, parking, tickets, tolls, taxes, and fees had vacuumed an additional $12,000 out of her accounts.

So four years and $27,000 later, Rowena had no vehicle, no savings, and a credit rating in ruins.

The full burden of car ownership far exceeds the purchase price. Photo: slambo_42/Flickr

Like most Americans, Rowena had no idea of the true total and ongoing financial cost of car ownership, and, like most Americans, she found her dealer in no rush to warn her about them. While rent or mortgage remains the largest budget item for the average household, transportation now comes in a close second, and in some zip codes it even exceeds housing.

Transportation swallows one out of every five dollars earned by the average American family, double the bite it took in 1960. This increase alone could account for much of the plummet, over that fifty-year period, in the household savings rate, which by the aughts had skidded close to zero.

We know how things got this bad. Back in 1960, developers had not yet fully sprawled out our housing stock; government had not yet spent billions on road building, letting transit atrophy; automakers had not yet piled on horsepower, luxury, and cargo space; lenders had not yet become so likely to set unsustainable and predatory car credit terms; and drivers had yet to consider short trips unwalkable and bus trips social suicide.

By 2009, the average purchase price of a new vehicle was over $27,000. But the true cost to families can easily total $45,000 for a midsize SUV like the Toyota Highlander, over just five years of ownership. The Department of Energy reports that the typical American household drove its average two cars a total of 20,000 miles last year. Assuming each vehicle is a mid-size sedan, that’s $14,600 a year, using AAA’s 2010 driving cost estimate of 73 cents per mile. Some families with two older, smaller cars or who drive fewer miles, say, will pay less; some families, with late model cars or trucks or an extra car, will pay a lot more. In a lifetime of car ownership, an American family will likely “invest” almost $1 million in its vehicles.

And these numbers don’t even count yet more hidden costs like the mortgage on our garages or the property taxes levied on them. More significantly, they exclude the goodly portion of our other tax bills that go to road-building, oil and car company subsidies and bailouts, local police and rescue services for dealing with traffic and crashes, the costs of road congestion passed on in the price of goods and services, or the oil-protection services of the U.S. military in the Middle East and elsewhere.

If the costs of cars for middle-class families have become largely unsustainable, those costs are immediately and profoundly crushing for working and poor families. That a car-dependent society makes such families poorer is well established, but this reality rubs against the conventional wisdom that owning a car creates opportunity. This mistaken belief is not without logical basis: the poor and carless can face extreme difficulty in getting and keeping employment because it is challenging simply to get to available jobs. A variety of governmental agencies and NGOs across the country work to help get the poor into cars for just this reason and with this assistance, some have achieved needed mobility.

Sadly, this well-intentioned approach is both scattershot and short-sighted. Cars chomp a disproportionate bite out of the smaller budgets of struggling families, who can be one fender bender or unpaid parking ticket away from losing their wheels. But this isn’t the only way those who are poor or working class lose out when they enter the car system. The car system redistributes wealth upward, playing a significant role in the creation of inequality in America.

How exactly? Cars are an expensive and depreciating asset for which there remains pervasive discrimination in new and used vehicle pricing, financing, and insurance. In other words, someone with low income or living in a poor or minority neighborhood will likely pay more to own and operate the same car than someone holding a higher-paying job or living in the next town over.

A used car lot in a poor Providence, RI neighborhood, for instance, advertised a 6-year-old Hyundai for $9,000 while the actual Blue Book value, more likely to be paid by middle class car buyers, was $2,880. Car insurance also comes with a higher price tag: Car owners living in some low income areas of Los Angeles can be charged as much as $3,500 per year for insurance, and a survey of three large insurers in 2005 found that drivers with clean driving records in some African American communities paid nearly $1,000 more per year than did drivers with similar records living in predominantly white zip codes.

At the same time, some of the richest Americans continue to get richer off the nation’s automobile dependence. Oil and car companies have long made up the majority of the top 10 firms in the Fortune 500, and for years, windfall oil and banking profits have been reaped from the gasoline-buying and loan-taking public. Even as they have been laying off workers and taking federal handouts, car companies have rewarded top executives and major shareholders: GM’s just-resigned Ed Whitacre made $9 million last year while Ford’s Alan Mulally pulled in just under $18 million. The CEO of one dealer chain, Auto Nation, took home almost $7 million in 2009.

While a fortunate handful make a fine living off of the current system, Americans residing on the bottom half of the national income distribution graph can’t live with the car and they can’t live without it. We’ll return to what car dependence looks like day-to-day from the working and poor neighborhoods of America in a future post. The bottom line here, though, is that we all need to understand the true cost of car ownership if the public and our elected officials are to be convinced to support initiatives that provide equitable mobility and freedom from the ever-weightier shackles of car dependence.

Anne Lutz Fernandez, a former marketer and banker, and Catherine Lutz, an anthropologist at the Watson Institute at Brown University, are the authors of Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and its Effect on our Lives (Palgrave Macmillan).

Larry Page's Tango in Glen Park. Photos: Matthew Roth.

The manufacturers pitch the vehicle as a high-performance electric car that can zip through traffic given its slender frame. Assuming you can split lanes legally (California is the only state where it is explicitly legal), you can use it as you would a motorcycle on congested roads. The Tango is also short enough that it can be parked perpendicular to the curb, just as a motorcycle would. 

Rick Woodbury, the President and Founder of Commuter Cars Corporatation, which has made 12 Tangos to date, said it was "designed it to be the fastest, safest, most convenient car for 90 percent of urban trips." 

Woodbury said the problem with traffic and commuting is a case of inefficient use of space, though his solution is not transit or bicycles, but narrower cars. "There are 106 million single-occupancy vehicles clogging the streets. That's 106 million people using the wrong tool."

Woodbury said the ability to scale up production is hampered by money. He can build the current model at its sticker price at cost, but to sell it in the $10-15,000 price range, he would need around $1.5 billion in capital outlay to mass-produce the vehicle, an unlikely scenario without getting the buy-in of a major traditional car manufacturer.

"Car companies just don't invest in disruptive technology," said Woodbury.

He also noted that the public reaction was tempered by how different the vehicle is, whereas a company like Tesla re-purposed the standard car design with a different fuel source.

The Tango is built with a NASCAR-standard roll cage and the speed of a race car. The vehicle outperforms Tesla's cars in a head-to-head race, going 0-60 in under four seconds, and is only a hair slower than the fastest street-legal production car on the road, the $1.5 million Bugatti Veyron.

When asked why an urban car should be pitched as a performance vehicle, especially when speed is the most significant contributing factor to severity of pedestrian injuries in car crashes, Woodbury said "Speed is point A to point B."

"You can avoid pedestrians better than other cars," he added.

Though Tango didn't win the Progressive Insurance X Prize, the Tango was a finalist and will be at the gala event at the Capitol in Washington DC in mid September.

I saw this Tango in the pictures near the Glen Park BART Station in late July. Woodbury identified it as belonging to Larry Page, co-founder of Google.

My first thought when I saw it was all the space you could convert to bike lanes if more city cars were this thin. What do you think?

The door zone is a lot smaller here.

It
will take more than tech fixes to put an end to catastrophic oil spills
and reverse the mounting death toll wrought by motorized traffic on the
world’s streets.

Their misplaced faith is hardly
exceptional. If there is one true religion in the United States, it
worships at the altar of Technology. Christian or Jew, Muslim or
atheist, we accept this doctrine: that technology provides the main path
to improving our lives and that if it occasionally fails, even
catastrophically, all it will take is another technology to make everything better.

How else to explain two case studies in modern hubris that now appear to be reaching their denouements: The Deepwater Horizon catastrophe and Toyota’s sudden acceleration debacle.

It is our belief in technology that has for years reassured us, along
with oil industry advertising and the promises of the U.S. Minerals
Management Service, that drilling offshore — way offshore — could be
done safely while we kept on refilling our tanks. It has reassured us,
along with car company marketing and green lights from the NHTSA, that
our cars — increasingly electronically complex — would keep our
families safe while we put ever more miles on the odometer.

The automobile, not the computer or smart phone, is still the
technological icon we venerate with the greatest fervor. The car is the
most important, most expensive piece of technology most of us own. It is
the technology of the past century, and neither BP nor Toyota would be as large or as powerful without our genuflections.

Simply walk into one of our houses of worship, an auto showroom, on any
Sunday. Or drop some coins in the basket and enter one of the cathedrals
that are the Detroit, New York, or Los Angeles auto shows. Congregants
are gathered around the gleaming new vehicles, snapping cell phone pics
of spectacular concept cars and passing on the good news.

Of course, the automakers and petroleum companies don’t see this as
their first mission, operating as they do on cost containment and profit
maximization, not cutting edge technology as an end in itself. But
their customer base has been convinced that each time they buy a new
car, they are buying the future, secure in the knowledge that the
world’s smartest geologists and engineers are helping fuel their
experience. Never mind that the new tech they’re spending on is largely
media and telecom gadgetry, not the electric or more environmentally
sustainable power technologies that headline auto shows or attract tens
of thousands of Facebook followers, like the not-yet-for-sale Nissan Leaf.
(In fact, less than one percent of all new vehicles bought worldwide
over the next five years are estimated to be electric or
electric-hybrid).

Our responses to BP and Toyota’s epic failures expose the danger in our
faith. Deep anxiety aroused by death and destruction in the Gulf and on
the interstates is calmed by the belief that technology will save us –
if not now, soon. After all, the promise of technology is in the better
life to come. A failsafe brake override resolves Toyota’s problem,
reassuring us that there can be such a thing as a safe car. An
engineered capping and better blowout preventers promise to restore
confidence in our ability to tap into fossil fuels wherever they may be.

We haven’t quite realized that the faith in technology to save us from
the problems that technology has created was sold to us by people with a
deep interest in this outcome. Fortunes hinge on our capacity to treat
each of these disasters as an isolated “accident,” soon and easily
solved. Don’t worry. Go back to driving — maybe some other vehicle make
for a few years, stopping at a gas station under another sign for a
while — but get back to driving into the bright, new and improved car
future. Even as we clearly head for the cliff of environmental ruin.

BP and Toyota also share a public perception as “foreign,” to the good
fortune of American multinationals like ExxonMobil and Ford. BP may have
recently made poorer choices than other oil companies, but serious
threats to our way of life are endemic to the practice of drilling
(especially in the peak-oil period, as hydrocarbons become increasingly
hard to access, and iffy techno-fixes are developed to get us to the
dwindling supplies). Toyota may have produced too many cars too fast,
but 1.2 million people are killed globally each year in car crashes, a death toll that’s unlikely to be affected by whether vehicles are fueled by gas, electricity, or hydrogen.

Simply put, technological progress alone is not a strategy for a
sustainable future. The capping of the Deepwater Horizon and the
imminent passage of the Motor Vehicle Safety Act will leave intact the
technological faith that led to the initial devastation. America is in
dire need of behavioral and political change in areas ranging from
public leadership to corporate responsibility to the individual choice
to drive less. Only a hard turn can avert the head-on collision between
America’s love of technology and our quality of life.

Anne Lutz Fernandez, a former marketer and banker, and Catherine
Lutz, an anthropologist at the Watson Institute at Brown University,
are the authors of Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and its Effect on our Lives (Palgrave Macmillan).

Photos: Bryan Goebel

An impatient young SUV driver trying to go left onto Jones boils over with anger, throwing his hands up behind the wheel, as a pedestrian, a man who looked like a senior from my vantage point, slowly crosses the street in the crosswalk and points to the green light to illustrate to the driver that he has the right-of-way. The driver, as cranky as he was, did eventually let the man cross before he screeched down Jones Street.

These photos make me angry and sad. I look forward to the day when our traffic engineers and political leaders can begin to seriously rethink one-way arterials. Let's breath life back into our streets instead of noise, pollution and carnage.

Got a photo you think would make a good Eyes on the Street? Please send them to our flickr pool, or email tips@sf.streetsblog.org.

Many of the home finance industry's unethical practices were mirrored by the nation's auto dealers, but the regulatory response has left the car loan market untouched.

More egregiously, their business innovations -- not advertised as such, of course -- include such activities as “power-booking” (reporting to lenders that a car is equipped with non-existent options, thereby raising the amount of the loan) and “yo-yo financing” (a form of bait and switch, in which car buyers leave a down payment or trade in their car, drive off the lot, and then are falsely told that the financing "fell through" and that they have to pay a higher interest rate, often under threat of repossession or arrest).

The list goes on. Dealers regularly get kickbacks and markups from other lenders. Car loans have been packaged and dangerously securitized, just like home mortgages. Dealers encouraged many car buyers to use home equity loans to make their purchases, obliterating whatever cushion they had when home prices plummeted. It’s a jungle on the lot for consumers, especially the poor and those with poor credit.

In a recent New Yorker article, James Surowiecki seeks to explain how the auto dealer exemption could have happened when it is so opposed to the public interest, and when powerful actors like Citibank and J. P. Morgan did not escape regulation. He sees it as mostly a public relations coup, with the dealers presenting themselves as Main Street plain folks, virtually victims of the financial system themselves. They also played up the number of jobs dealerships provide in communities across the nation (how those jobs would dry up if dealers had to make an honest living was not made clear).

But what wasn’t noted is the power of the car dealers over the press itself.

The auto industry is the single largest advertiser in America’s newspapers, magazines, and television stations. It is the economic backbone of those media, and this helps explain the minimalist coverage, and the general lack of backbone in coverage, of this issue as the bill worked its way through Congress. Over the past several months, the loophole opened, then seemed to close, and then opened again. The media could have been educating the public on what the automotive loophole will cost them, day in and day out. Instead, they kept their focus on other sources and forms of lending abuses.

And when dealers are called “small businesspeople,” that may suggest they are in the same boat with the local embroidery shop owner or restaurateur, but dealers are often the largest business in a community, and many are part of large chains, like AutoNation. The auto dealer is a little guy like the beachfront mansions of Long Island are cottages, but PR-produced confusion has worked to the dealers’ advantage.

It isn’t just the financial reform bill that has left the real little guy, the car buyer, exposed to the avarice of auto dealers. Americans are at risk of ending up indentured to their car purchases because they can't escape from the car system itself. While the car is often presented as a vehicle of opportunity, getting people to work and new life chances, in reality it locks people into a costly lifestyle, creating more inequality in America than almost anything else besides access to quality education. While that’s a topic for another post, it is a key reason why transit and bikeable, walkable communities are so desperately needed -- to create a loophole car dealers can’t drive through.

Catherine Lutz, an anthropologist at the Watson Institute at Brown University, and Anne Lutz Fernandez, a former marketer and banker, are the authors of Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and its Effect on our Lives (Palgrave Macmillan).

Photo: Bryan Goebel.

What does San Francisco's retired top traffic engineer think about Market Street, Muni and global warming? We sat down with Jack Fleck recently for an extended interview. The 62-year-old retired last week after more than 25 years with the former Department of Parking and Traffic and the current San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA).

Fleck expounded on a number of topics and his answers offer some insight into his thinking over the years as the city's lead traffic engineer.

On cars and driving:

As a student I started connecting all these problems with the automobile and the first one was related to the urban riots, I mean the fact that at that time equal housing laws didn't exist. So, African Americans were pretty much confined to the inner city, at the same time the freeways were crisscrossing the cities and making them much less livable, destroying neighborhoods and creating noise and pollution and all of that, and they became like pressure cookers and they exploded, and so the inner city blight and the white flight were something I paid a lot of attention to in the '60s. But then also reading Jane Jacob's book, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," and how she contrasted Robert Moses, who was the big freeway builder. His vision of how the freeway was always good versus the reality, and not just freeways, but parking lots and widening streets and all the things that she talked about to create the fabric of a city and the way that the automobile was part of the problem. It wasn't like that was the only problem, but that was something she talked a lot about and I learned the word 'livability' I think from Don Appleyard when I took classes at Berkeley. I went to grad school in City Planning at Berkeley.

So that sort of struck home as that's what I want to do, make cities livable and I don't know that it was really a word that was used a lot until more recently, but it does make sense. That's from all the days that I've been involved in this is trying to make this city a better place to live. But then there were other problems with cars obviously, the wars for oil and I think I learned the word ecology in about 1969, it was the first time I heard that word. I was like 'oh, that's a good one', because air pollution, oil spills which obviously are still a problem. So all of that sort of compounded to make me much more anti-automobile, but still, I was like 'yes, cars are still convenient and people love cars.' I was never a person that loved cars like they were my baby or something, like some people their whole identity is caught up in their cars and that's still true today, but they are very convenient to get around and so it's a love/hate thing.

On getting more people out of cars:

I think all the things that we do. We try to dedicate the space for bike lanes, for bus lanes. I'm not one to punish the drivers. I'm not really trying to do that, but I'm trying to make it attractive for these other modes, and if it comes down to a choice where you can't do both, then I would favor the other modes. I don't really consider myself anti-automobile in the sense that, just pragmatically speaking, you could get yourself in a lot of trouble politically if you try to take on all the drivers, why go there? You don't need to do that. That's why I was a little frustrated, or very frustrated, when the bike injunction happened, because we have been very careful to put in bike lanes that we felt didn't really cause any negative impact on the traffic. Almost all, we knew that there were some that were going to be more controversial and we were kind of putting off doing those, so the ones that had been put in, we thought were relatively non-controversial. So the fact that an injunction happened when we'd only done things that we thought were pretty safe was frustrating.

On Muni:

On bikes:

I grew up in Peoria and all the kids rode bikes. I mean everything we did. We rode bikes to school, we rode bikes to go visit each other. We rode bikes to Little League. I mean that was how we all got around and I was thinking about Ray LaHood, you know, he's two years younger than me but he's from Peoria, I'm sure he did that too, and he's a pretty big advocate for bikes right now, and that's pretty cool, you know? I was just thinking 'yes I can see how he would be advocate because we just all rode bikes.' Then at the University of Illinois I always rode a bike and when I lived in Berkeley I always rode a bike, but I don't really ride a bike in San Francisco that much. I mean we have city bikes here that I'll sign out if I want to go to a meeting and it's convenient, I am definitely very comfortable riding bikes, but I don't do it as much as I used to.

On Market and Octavia, the city's most dangerous intersection for bicyclists:

We've had a lot of problems at Market and Octavia. It's actually gotten a little better lately. We are keeping our fingers crossed. I'm wondering if it's because there are so many bicyclists now that the drivers are just finally becoming aware. I know Europe has made that argument that they can have bike lanes to the right and the drivers just learn to look, because there are so many bikes. Now it's an illegal right turn, I don't know whether those people making those right turns have now all of a sudden realized 'we really have to be careful', but we've done everything we can to try to make it very difficult to make those turns. So whatever, it seems like it's been a little bit better, cross my fingers, on that one

On Market Street:

Market Street would be wonderful to fix. My theory on Market Street is that it was designed in the '60s at a time when nobody rode bikes, and now we are trying to make it work for bikes. It's been really, really been fun to watch the increase in bikes on Market. So the problem is, I think, because of the position of the stairwells, there's not really room to widen the sidewalk. I mean if we could just widen it by a few feet we could put a bike lane in all the way down, but that's a very big if, because of the stairwells. Now some people had some good Market ideas I thought about, maybe moving the MUNI platforms so they aren't right next to a stairwell, in which case maybe you could widen the sidewalk. The problem is you have a platform and you have a stairwell and those are two pretty big objects, and there's only so much space in between them. So that's a big challenge. I thought a lot about it and haven't really been able to figure out how to solve it, but wish everybody luck on that one.

On making Folsom Street a two-way street:

I really don’t like to get hung up on the one-way street stuff but with Folsom I know people want to make it a traffic calmed Street and two-way and all that, but that’s where I get into this arterial argument.  I mean, we don’t want them on Mission.  We don’t want the traffic on Market. The parking garages downtown are really the key.  San Francisco did a brilliant thing by not allowing new parking garages, since like the late ‘80s or whatever.  If we had parking garages in all those high-rises the streets would be gridlocked.  I mean they just can’t handle any more traffic, but by not building the parking garages, most of the downtown streets really aren’t that congested and we could get even less traffic if we got rid of whatever parking there is.  So to make Folsom into a two-way street I think you’d have to figure out some way to get rid of the traffic that does exist, which like I say isn’t that much, but it’s enough to be needing some arterials and that’s kind of my thought about it.

On global warming:

I guess the main point I drive home is that the atmosphere can only absorb about 8 billion tons of CO2. In about 15 years there'll be about 8 billion people, so really our goal should be no more than one ton per person, whereas our current level is about 20 tones. So I think what I try to drive home is, how big the reduction has to be and we really just have to get off of fossil fuels, and there was a good quote from Ken Caldeira, do you know who he is? He was a speaker at SPUR, and I was curious about him. He's from Stanford, he said 'I think we need to more or less make it illegal to produce devices that emit CO2 into the atmosphere. Our target should be zero emissions.' Because realistically going from 20 to one is the same as getting rid of it completely, and of course the argument that just the oil spills and air quality and the wars for oil, I mean all those things alone would be good arguments for getting rid of fossil fuels, but the global warming is by far the strongest one. We just really need to get rid of the CO2.

San Francisco is more like Europe, maybe 10 tons per person, but still we are just way, way over what we could be sustainable. I think the world average is about five. So India is like pretty close but they have got a big coal-fired plant and they are growing fast. They really need to figure it out too. I think the main thing that we can do with all these things is to stop the growth in vehicle miles travelled. In-fill development, like they are assuming that all the future development will be in-fill, no further sprawl. So I think doing that is necessary but it's not sufficient to stop global warming. So that's when I get into just a further argument along these lines.

So San Francisco, what if we built all the cities in the country like Peoria and everybody else to be as dense as San Francisco? I mean we'd have to have people give up their yards and gardens and move to downtown Peoria? I don't think they are going to do it to be like San Francisco. But even here, 62 percent of our trips are by car, so you know, I mean there's a lot of cars out there, and so what if we were even more successful? What if we became like Copenhagen? Copenhagen still has four times as many kilometers by car as it does by bike, even though they have a 50 percent modal split, people use their cars for longer strips. So even Copenhagen would have to get rid of all those fossil fuels from all those cars and so the argument is then I really think that we need to go into electric cars, plug-in hybrids and that electricity has to be generated by renewal sources. And the good news is that there are all these manufacturers coming out with electric cars and plug-in hybrids. There's a lot of competition now to see who is going to get the one that really gets the popular response.

Of course the danger is that they will be so successful that we'll have more sprawl, more automobile-oriented development. It does solve the problems of wars for a while, it does solve the problems of air quality and hopefully can make a dent in global warming. It doesn't solve the problems of obesity and it doesn't solve the problem of urban life quality, all that kind of Jane Jacobs stuff. So it's not the ultimate total everything solution, but I think given the danger of global warming and being underwater kind of makes everything else moot. We can fight about all of the other things that we want to do, but if we are under water it's not going to matter.

Then here's a positive thing. The cost of solar power today is just barely above the cost of natural gas, generating electricity and if you look at the trend, it could be by 2020, at least this person from MIT seemed to think it could be cheaper than coal. That would be huge if we could get solar power down to that level then we could generate the electricity for these electric vehicles with basically no CO2. So there's hope. We don't need to, everyone in Peoria doesn't have to rebuild the city completely. It would be nice if we did all in-fill development and more density, and I think San Francisco, the relevance here is that we are a high density city that is a great place to live and that's what the rest of the country has to learn, is that density doesn't mean poor quality of life, we can make it a really good place and it's much more environmentally, ecologically sustainable to have high density than to have this sprawl.

Then there's another point of politically what we have to do. These federal subsidies are right now overwhelmingly for fossil fuels, exactly the opposite and we should not only be subsidizing, we should be taxing them and we should be subsidizing the renewables which there are some subsidies of, but not a lot and a lot of the subsidies are for corn ethanol which is probably the worst of the biofuels. There are some biofuels that are pretty good in terms of CO2 emissions, but not corn ethanol, that's like one of the worst ones. So it's got to politically completely turn around in terms of where the government puts its resources because it's all backward now.

On working with the advocates:

Actually, I was more of an advocate when I was in Berkeley. My first job there was to do citizen participation and we sort of construed that to mean community organizing.  So we were out there trying to get the neighborhoods to advocate for things.  So I really personally identify with the advocates and I also feel that it’s impossible to get things done without political support.

If it’s just city staff with a few opponents it’s very difficult to get anything done.  So the advocates are essential and having them there speaking in favor of the changes. With the whole Bike Plan obviously the Bike Coalition was very central to making that happen.

So by and large I’m totally comfortable with the advocates and the role they play.  I remember that Betsy Thagard was the founder of Walk San Francisco, I don’t know if you know her, but she moved to the East Bay.  I don’t know if she’s still around, I haven’t seen her for a long time, but I do remember she would complain about pedestrian safety and beat up on us and you know, and then afterwards, she said ‘well, what do you really need?’  And that was great because she was willing to support hiring staff, getting funding, making improvements and I think that kind of relationship with the advocates is really what I’ve always seen as a good thing.  

I don’t know, I’m not sure if there might be people who are just prejudiced against traffic engineers.  I mean engineers have a stereotype that we are kind of like stodgy or something, and people might just have that fixed in their mind and not be able to get past it, but I haven’t encountered too much of that.

Next: Who will be San Francisco's next top traffic engineer, and will he or she be the innovator we need? 

Yuck. Photo: izahorsky

Lilian Chan, a Transportation Demand Management Coordinator for the San Francisco Department of the Environment, said the goal is not only to get employers to sign up and engage in friendly competition to reduce greenhouse gas emission from employee commutes over two months this summer, but to engage with them in longer-term education campaigns and ultimately alter commute patterns. 

"We're hoping to get larger employers involved to get their support in encouraging alternative transportation for their employees," she said.

The employers will compete with similar-sized companies in each county and the winners will receive a special commendation by county authorities. Though this is the first year the event will be held, the various resource teams in each county hope the Great Race catches on and becomes an annual tradition.

Be sure to sign up before the July 15th deadline and encourage your employer to promote the event if they don't already.