Quick, everyone, freak out! Sarah Lacy's PandoDaily article ("And you thought SF cabs were bad? BART strike is crippling fledgling mid-market tech corridor") is the online version of a drunk Missionite who stumbles into Aunt Charlie's Lounge and shrieks, "Oh my god, this place is pathetic! How is it still even open?!" This isn't to say that Lacy doesn't have thought-provoking or even semi-accurate tidbits to spit out; it's more that the article's tone could win a Tony Award in a revival of Children of a Lesser God. Let's begin.
Lacy begins by (unfairly) trashing the Tenderloin. "In case you have never had to joys of wandering through the Tenderloin, it’s pretty much the mouth of hell," she says. "It makes the 16th and Mission BART station--which was once so clogged with human feces the escalator broke down--look like Shangri La. "
Charmed. (We should point out that the feces-laced escalator wasn't in the Mission. It was at Civic Center, right by PandoDaily's office.)
Among other issues, Lacy is livid that the BART strike has affected her (and scores of other tech sheeps') arrival time at their MidMarket offices. She then goes on to point out how the BART strike has crippled the MidMarket tech industry--the most important thing in San Francisco, ever. "Mayor Lee has to be even more annoyed than I or any of the other thousands of tech workers struggling to get to the office this week," Lacy writes. "Just when it was starting to look like something near impossible was working, San Francisco’s new tech corridor has been brought to its knees in the last 48 hours as the city has been locked in a full-on transit and traffic nightmare."
Now would be a good time to point out that BART isn't the only form of public transportation in San Francisco. We also have Muni. The 38 Geary alone carries 50K a day! Further, there's the new Twitter bus from Muni, the 83x launched by the SFMTA especially for tech folks who work down there.
Then there's something about libertarians and progressives:
This is why it’s not easy being Mayor of a town like this. You preside between a warring brew of libertarians who have no regard for laws and progressives who want to dictate whether your Happy Meal comes with a toy; mashed up with a vocal contingent who wants to “Keep San Francisco weird” alongside newly minted hacker millionaires who want to change their reality in every conceivable way. All of these intense parties are in constant collision in a small geographically bound patch of land.
And finally, our favorite part: "As much as progressives might like the idea, the entire city won’t bike to work everyday. There need to be real options if you want people to ditch cars ... Put simply: You can't expect people to live like New Yorkers in a city that refuses to allow itself to evolve into a West Coast New York."
Popcorn, anyone?