[Carfreeliving] Matt Smith column from 5/4/05 SF Weekly

[A P Thornley]

in case you didn't catch this in the edition 
that's about to go off the stands (does anyone 
know Matt Smith? is he on this list?)

=+=+=+=+=

SF Weekly May 04, 2005

    http://www.sfweekly.com/issues/2005-05-04/news/smith.html

Gridlock
Bill Lieberman, new planning director for the 
Municipal Transportation Agency, wades into the 
swamp of San Francisco transit politics
BY MATT SMITH

On a drizzly Thursday afternoon in April a pair 
of construction workers in orange Mitchell 
Engineering vests mucked around with shovels on 
the east shore of Mission Creek, an industrial 
slough cut into the century-old bay fill that 
undergirds San Francisco's postindustrial south 
side. Another worker guided a framework of steel 
and composite beams onto pontoons on the creek's 
surface. Yet another barked into a walkie-talkie. 
A fifth hosed off some concrete forms. In all, 
about a dozen workers putzed about on and near 
the ancient Fourth Street drawbridge, which, once 
retrofitted, will carry light-rail cars along a 
$1.4 billion route connecting the outlying 
Hunters Point neighborhood with, eventually, 
Chinatown. Busy though they appeared, the 
workers' main task that day was to bide time 
while attorneys for their employer and the 
city-of-San Francisco lawyers argued over cost 
overruns resulting from a new discovery: 
Retaining walls under and beside the bridge were 
in far worse condition than anyone had 
anticipated. Any settlement to the problem was 
sure to add significant expense to the project. 
Without a settlement, projectwide delays could 
cost more money yet.

As dollars were being sucked by the million into 
the retrofitted rail bridge, money for transit 
was being slashed elsewhere.

The previous afternoon Michael Burns, chief of 
the city's Municipal Transportation Agency, 
discussed a new round of cuts to train and bus 
service citywide, due in part to a year spent 
relying on overtime pay to keep a full staff. 
"Overtime hurt us for the rest of the fiscal 
year. And we're hoping to fix that with service 
cuts," Burns said at a presentation last week. 
"They're not deep cuts. But any cuts beyond this, 
and we're really going to hurt service."

How could our transit system spend a billion and 
a half dollars -- and perhaps much more on 
possible cost overruns such as are shaping up at 
Mission Creek -- to extend itself to a commuter's 
version of nowhere, while failing to pay for 
maintaining basic service everywhere?

The answer is as simple it is confounding. San 
Francisco's transit system is an expensive and 
inefficient lattice of boondoggles, sinecures, 
political deals, and delays because, for the most 
part, the area's residents, politicos, and power 
brokers prefer it that way. Though it's a 
nightmare for most commuters, our transport 
system works quite well for those in a position 
to gain from paying close attention to it.

There exists a minuscule glimmer of hope that 
things might change for the better. Last month 
San Francisco hired a new, idealistic yet 
hard-nosed czar of transit planning who could 
theoretically help transform the system to 
everybody's benefit. I propose we give him an 
extended honeymoon of political support as he 
takes on the forces that currently make riding 
Muni a chump's errand.

Bill Lieberman, the newly recruited director of 
planning for San Francisco's Municipal 
Transportation Agency, has a gilded résumé and 
broad new authority over employees who manage and 
maintain streets, traffic, parking, buses, and 
trains. If a talk he gave last week before a 
group of urban policy wonks is any indication, he 
has exactly the sort of expertise, ideas, and 
enthusiasm necessary for such a task. But unless 
he's blessed by a miracle -- such as support from 
the hundreds of thousands of San Franciscans who 
have a hard time getting around the city, yet so 
far have paid little attention to why this is so 
-- he'll fail.

Without such miraculous intervention, the system 
of inertia that keeps transit so sluggish in San 
Francisco -- the union officials, Democratic 
Party hacks, neighborhood activists, bureaucrats, 
developers, and elected officials who benefit 
from our system remaining expensive and slow -- 
will eat Lieberman alive.

I can vouch for Muni's dysfunction. Last month I 
fell ill and used Muni, rather than my bicycle, 
to travel to work and other appointments. Thanks 
to long waits and slow travel once the bus came, 
the switch to Muni meant adding an extra 40 
minutes each way to work, an hour each way to an 
appointment in Noe Valley. At this rate, I 
calculated, riding Muni would rob me of two full 
days per month, or in the course of a normal life 
span, five entire years, from my time on Earth. 
There are convicted kidnappers and rapists who've 
suffered less severe punishment.

Why are San Franciscans so condemned, and why are 
commuters about to be sentenced to even more hard 
time in the coming round of Muni cuts? Because a 
relatively small group of people benefits greatly 
from the system that produces slow Muni service, 
and those people agitate mightily to keep it that 
way.

Excessive overtime payments -- to be covered by 
riders who wait longer for the pauperized bus 
system during the rest of this year -- are 
typically triggered by union contracts that make 
it easy for Muni employees to miss work 
unpunished and hard for Muni management to put a 
full staff in the field without paying overtime. 
The union that negotiates those worker-friendly 
agreements provides electioneering troops during 
races for public office. Few bus riders who are 
late for work because their bus didn't and didn't 
and didn't come connect their plight to 
officeholders who are backed by the bus workers' 
union. So there's little incentive for those 
officeholders to change the politically 
beneficial dysfunction at Muni.

The 38 Geary -- our main bus route transporting 
people from the Richmond District suburbs to 
downtown -- spends much of its time lurching from 
stop to stop on every block through the 
Tenderloin District. The ride is so slow and 
uncomfortable that many people drive instead, 
clogging the streets and making the buses slower 
still.

Not long ago, Muni planners tried to quicken this 
trip by removing a few stops, so buses would stop 
every other block, instead of once or twice a 
block. Riders with bus stops in front of their 
apartment buildings launched a protest movement, 
and the Board of Supervisors voted to disallow 
the removal of stops, thus burnishing the supes' 
profile as champions of social justice. There was 
no harm done, politically speaking, and the 38 
Geary remains an underused extended sentence in 
transit jail.

One reason it costs so much to move people 
swiftly in San Francisco is the expensive spread 
of transit resources to serve sparsely populated 
areas in the city's western and southern fringes. 
Last year, city planners put forth a proposal -- 
dubbed "the housing element" of the city's 
General Plan -- that would have allowed property 
owners to build more and higher apartment 
buildings along major bus and trolley routes. 
This plan was intended, in part, to allow Muni to 
move more people, more swiftly, for far less 
money than is now possible, by putting more 
people where transit lines already exist. But to 
gain the political support of suburban homeowner 
groups, which feared new apartment buildings 
would make it harder to find parking spaces, 
mayoral candidate Gavin Newsom promised in 1999 
to kill the plan. Once elected, he did. And there 
was no harm done, politically speaking, and 
public transit will continue to be inefficient 
and expensive far into the future.

If Congress continues to appropriate money for 
its construction, the Third Street Light Rail, 
the $1.4 billion trolley that will someday cross 
the Fourth Street bridge, will continue into its 
second phase, a so-called Central Subway 
connecting the bridge to Chinatown. This platinum 
extension is seen by people who pay attention to 
transit in the Bay Area as a colossal waste of 
money. Chinatown is not a particularly popular 
commuter destination. The route is already served 
by extensive bus service. The subway would 
require boring deep underground at a cost of 
hundreds of millions of dollars. Hunters Point, 
meanwhile, could have been served just as 
efficiently, at far less cost, by a system called 
bus rapid transit, in which buses ride in 
exclusive lanes cordoned off from other traffic 
and riders use raised and gated platforms, à la 
the city's light-rail stops. Bus rapid transit 
would provide more speed and greater capacity 
than light rail -- at a fraction of rail's cost.

Had the Third Street-Central Subway lines not 
been pursued and the money for them been spent 
elsewhere, the time San Franciscans suffer in 
Muni incarceration could have been cut by eons. 
The same funds dedicated to rapid bus lines along 
the Geary, Van Ness, and Mission corridors would 
move vastly more people per dollar spent. Trips 
that now take 45 minutes might take half as long, 
perhaps even approaching bicycle speed.

But a Chinatown subway line was offered as part 
of a decade-old political deal involving Willie 
Brown and neighborhood leaders whose backing was 
critical to the mayor's electoral success. Brown 
enjoyed substantial pull with federal officials 
in a position to fund such a project. So 
politically speaking, the Central Subway's a 
winner, too, and efficient, cost-effective bus 
service won't be funded, so a subway boondoggle 
can.

Well-planned transit -- which includes measures 
that emphasize pedestrian, bicycle, and bus 
(rather than automobile) access -- generally 
pencils out as more cost effective than the 
dramatic, politics-driven engineering projects 
that Bay Area mass transportation is known for. 
The cost gulf widens further once shovels start 
piercing the earth. Invasive projects such as 
subways and rail lines turn up unexpected 
challenges and expenses, especially in a fragile 
old city like ours. Take the example of the 
Fourth Street bridge, a seemingly simple feat in 
which an old drawbridge would be strengthened so 
it could accommodate a new commuter rail line.

Once into the project, however, workers 
discovered that the rotting concrete of the 
Mission Creek retaining walls near the bridge 
lacked the strength to build a satisfactory rail 
platform. Returning to the drawing board will 
entail significant additional cost, Michael Burns 
said last week. Thankfully, the city has just 
recruited a transit planning czar who seems 
committed to reasserting an emphasis on simple, 
relatively inexpensive planning as the best way 
to make our trains and buses run on time.

If the smallish audience at the offices of San 
Francisco Planning and Urban Research, an 
urban-affairs lobbying group, were kids in black 
T-shirts and new MTA planning director Bill 
Lieberman were a rock singer, the crowd would 
have been swaying with burning cigarette lighters 
aloft.

For nearly two decades Lieberman served as San 
Diego's transit planning director, and before 
that he helped launch Portland's acclaimed 
light-rail system. Last week, he talked about his 
post-college days working in Amsterdam.

"I saw what bicycles can accomplish in terms of 
moving people in an urban area, and what it 
requires to facilitate them," he said, as smiles, 
approving murmurs, and nods of agreement spread 
through the audience.

He acknowledged what a mess our system now is.

"In San Francisco it takes a long time to get 
around by transit. It's just plain slow. It takes 
forever to get anywhere," he said to more nods.

He uttered the urban planner's koan regarding walking.

"If you design around pedestrians, everything 
else kind of takes care of itself," he said.

And he hinted at ambitious plans for bus rapid transit.

"With bus rapid transit, we have to make it a 
spectacular thing. It shouldn't be just a better 
thing. It should be such a fantastic thing that 
it should attract people who don't use transit 
now," he said. "Frankly, I wouldn't mind charging 
more for it. We tend to look at 
one-size-fits-all. But I think we need to start 
looking at premium fares for premium service."

Lieberman said his job wouldn't be easy.

"I think my biggest challenge is with dealing 
with elevated expectations, with people saying, 
'We have a new transportation planning czar who's 
going to fix everything,'" he said.

Actually, Lieberman's challenge is exactly the 
opposite. This is a city where certain elements 
of the political culture pillory those who would 
try to make the city work more efficiently.

For the rest of us, he may be the best hope we'll 
have at a get-out-of-jail card, and we should 
root for him accordingly.


©2005 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.