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Well, this is a post we haven't had to write in awhile -- an angry Supervisor Chris Daly lashed out at a meeting last night! Obscenities may have been used! Oh, yay!!! We've missed blogging about Chris Daly!
Daly apparently dropped an f-bomb on Michael Scanlan, the head of Caltrain, after Scanlan expressed concern about accepting $400 million in stimulus money to extend Caltrain into SF when people still weren't sure if the SF design proposal would work. After the meeting, Daly started shouting at Scanlan for veering off message without giving Daly a heads-up first.
Scanlan's all like, I'm sure Chris just feels passionately about things. Daly had no comment when Matier and Ross asked him about it. Oooh, we hope this doesn't count as pushing the meme of Daly the bully.
In other dog bites man news, Gavin Newsom was busted being a hypocrite, this time about drinking bottled water (he blamed it on his security detail).
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How soon can Daly be recalled?
Never, because his constituents would easily defeat a recall.
Democracy sucks!
someday we'll just call him curmudgeonly and be done with it.
The bigger news is that someone who is actually in the business of running trains has taken a good look at the plans. I never could figure out how some of the passenger numbers were supposed to work, given one platform for Caltrain and two for the HSR. (Remember that at some times there are trains arriving/departing every five minutes, and the only works because King St. has a dozen platforms or so.) Then, there's congestion: the tunnel out of Transbay into the Mission Creek area is going to have to be roughly two miles long; the last time I saw the plans, it still called for the cross-SOMA connection to follow Second Street (for two extra 90-degree turns). How fast do you think trains will go those first/last two miles? Say 25 mph, tops? Finally, there are the right-of-way issues, starting with: how do you squeeze two more tracks into the rail corridor through Potrero/Dogpatch and BVHP without completely hacking off the neighbors? There's really not room to go side-by-side; to go under, you have to deal with two creeks and a lot of really messy rock, without compromising the footings for 280. Good luck with all of those.
DALY is a typical ass, at least Scanlan has the intelligence to ask if the 400 million was actually neccassary. More people need to ask these question rather than just spending like our morons in city hall do so well
Did you see Gavin's embarrassing appearance on Bill Maher this weekend? Gavin is no intellectual heavy weight and it showed as he was so over matched by the other guests and Maher.
It's almost depressing how S.F. keeps electing these embarassments.
I miss Dog Bites Man...hilarious show
I miss Dog Bites Man...hilarious show
There are many legitimate questions that should be asked before a whole lotta money is committed to a giant project in the middle of the City that will have ramifications for decades to come. It is not being "bad" to ask questions about said project, esp. when we are spending Federal dollars that are a one-time deal.
There are a lot of Big Things to work out so that we don't build a giant monument to bad rushed decisions. It's unfortunate that some people who are elected felt the need to scream down anyone who dared make such a suggestion and chose not to engage in dialogue and work out something that works for everyone involved.
We have too many Rushed Decisions that we're living with today (Prime Example: that "temporary" bus that replaced the B-Geary until BART was supposed to run to Ocean Beach. 50 years later and...)
BTW this is the same MTC that is spending $70 million on an extension to the Oakland Airport that many transit advocates suggest could be done better. Eric at Transbay Blog has the scoop:
http://tinyurl.com/transbayblog
The sentiment is appreciable, Greg, but I really think there aren't enough rushed decisions in terms of city planning here in San Francisco. Your own example of Geary Blvd. is suffering mightily while too many parties dither over the implementation of BRT. With every study the final decision becomes costlier and more tepid, and I think there's a place for bold, rash strokes. New York is having some luck with that tack at this very moment, as Broadway speeds along towards pedestrianization.
And it's good to remember that San Francisco itself, after all, was a rushed decision, its streets platted in a way no sensible party could condone. But who, today, would want to change that?
All that said, I don't know enough about HSR and "train-boxes" to pipe up on this particular project, and it would be terrible, terrible, terrible if the actual engineering was half-baked. So here I cede the floor.
Exactly. How can we move forward on this when we haven't even dealt with the abomination known elsewhere as "the angle of Market St."? First things first!
I love it. A Chris Daly troll post is morphing to substantive policy debate! Truly man bites dog.
I think you raise a good point re: BRT, or any improvements to Geary St. and I agree sitting around picking noses while Geary St. slows to a snail's pace is silly. So we agree on that. I've often joked that if we built stuff in the 1920s the way we do now, we'd still be dickering around with EIR reports and endless public hearings 80 years later.
That said, when you are talking about a monumental public works project like the transbay terminal, which is going to have a huge impact on transit locally/statwide AND on the future growth in San Francisco, rushing to spend spend spend isn't smart. What,we can't wait another WEEK and make sure what we're doing is as best we can tell the best plan? That's all that folks are asking, and it's reasonable. Yelling obscenities and threatening public servants doesn't help anyone's case.
I think there's a very fine line between both positions and it's tough to reach it. On one hand we need to spend more time assessing things to be certain we're doing something that will work effectively. We're frequently in the habit of approving money for things when they don't hold up with many bond issues having this problem in particular (if you say "Money for libraries!" people often don't even bother to look more deeply into it and see if it's going to be handled effectively). At the same time we also have a hideous problem with not getting things done on time and wasting tons and tons of money and time trying to work it out. Perhaps the Bay Bridge retrofit is one of the top issues here: it desperately needed to be fixed due to the possibility of a catastrophic failure and we're still not done with it twenty years later... at ludicrously increased cost.
Caltrans, I'm told, won't even be able to benefit from most of the stimulus funding because they're only funding projects ready to go in, IIRC, six months and Caltrans requires funding be secured in advance of beginning the year-long process needed to begin work.
Translink could certainly be yet another poster child for the many issues we have in getting projects up and running that other cities seem to implement without anything close to the same hassles.
We need to plan things out and consider the relevant input, but there's a limit. Listen to the engineers and try to find a solution that is technically and economically feasible and then move on it. Frankly the legitimate engineering viewpoints tend to be the easiest to come by, it's the political dickering (or some asshole who hates cyclists) that is usually what keeps us back.
Though I disagree with Daly in this case we perhaps need to be telling more people to go fuck themselves when they start obstructing well-informed plans.
I almost always want to change the street design. It shows greatly that it was rushed and that we should have waited and redesigned after the earthquake and fire rather than just throw everything back up with no regard to making a city plan that works rather than a mess of incompatible grids and bizarre intersections.
I'm not a huge fan of Scanlon and clan but he's right on this one, IMHO.
Then we should cancel the billion dollar bus terminal. The project was proposed to SF as a way to get high speed rail downtown. No HSR, no terminal.
Time for a history lesson, kids. When SF was first platted, Market was the dividing line between ordinary business and commercial (the 50 Vara blocks) and more industrial uses in the 100 Vara blocks. This was a crude form of zoning, where the area north of Market was platted with "standard" lots while "jumbo" lots would be found to the south.
Given that I haven't returned M&R's calls for 2 years and that Rita never calls me, we seem to have ourselves a genuine standoff!
Check for decent coverage of the downtown extension issue including my input in Fog City Journal.