I recommend reading the entire article.
40 Years of Ignoring Transit-First
Morgan Fitzgibbons
huffingtonpost.com
03/19/2013
If you live in San Francisco and pay attention to transportation issues, there's no doubt you are aware: San Francisco is officially a "Transit-First" city. You can review the full "Transit-First" language in Section 8A.115 of the City Charter, but the upshot can be found in the third point of the section:
Decisions regarding the use of limited public street and sidewalk space shall encourage the use of public rights of way by pedestrians, bicyclists, and public transit, and shall strive to reduce traffic and improve public health and safety.
While this rhetoric sounds great in principle, a quick glance at our city's mode-share numbers or a visit to any street in San Francisco will reveal that our city's transportation infrastructure is still built overwhelmingly to accommodate the use of the private automobile.
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A good many of our fellow San Francisco citizens actually want to move away from the private automobile to rely on public transit, biking or walking to navigate their daily lives, but are routinely met with poor service and, worse, downright dangerous conditions. That's because the MTA isn't a Transit-First department; rather, they are Foot-Dragging-First, Community-Process-Second, Placating-Car-Owners-Third, More-Foot-Dragging-Fourth, and, if, after years of meetings and patience, community members still have the energy to prod some more to make sure the MTA lives up to their own word, maybe the city can finally get that "Transit-First" project implemented on the ground. In a world where the shadow side of the private automobile becomes more prevalent every day -- exacerbation of environmental issues, serious bodily injury or death to pedestrians on a daily basis, the sacrifice of a sense of community in exchange for speedy throughways and plentiful car storage; the very challenges the Board of Supervisors was attempting to address in 1973 -- the MTA has failed time and again to do the job for which we San Francisco citizens amply pay them.
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Look around the rest of the country -- mayors in many other big cities are showing strong leadership in actually implementing solutions that prioritize people over cars. In Chicago, Rahm Emanuel has committed to creating 645 miles of bikeways around his city by 2020, including 100 miles of physically separated bikeways by 2015, as well as working to eliminate all pedestrian fatalities by 2022. In New York, Mayor Bloomberg not only appointed a progressive Transportation Commissioner in Janette Sadik-Khan, but he actually empowered her to make improvements happen. Seemingly overnight, New York City transformed itself from a place where riding a bicycle meant taking your life into your own hands to one with a functional grid of safe, protected bikeways.... By contrast, Mayor Lee loves to trumpet our "proud Transit-First tradition," our "commitment" to having 20 percent mode-share for bikes by 2020, and our status as the "greenest city" in America, but has done absolutely nothing to position our city to keep pace with the cities that take seriously the necessary transformation of our urban infrastructure.
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As the 21st century rolls on, cities will be judged primarily by their ability to adapt to the demands created by a surge in urban populations and the challenges presented by the planetary crises. It used to be that this city took pride in the glory of San Francisco -- we rebuilt our city in a flash after the 1906 earthquake and constructed the engineering marvels that are the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges, earning us the nickname "The City That Knows How" because we wanted to prove to everyone that we are the greatest city in the world. Nowadays, we think releasing a series of buzzword-infused press releases will do the trick. When we declared ourselves a "Transit-First" city in 1973, we still had a sense of our responsibility to pave the way for the rest of the country and basked in the accompanying prestige that came along with it. Forty years later, we've lost our edge -- we no longer lead the country in anything but distance between our stated values and our actions and a misguided commitment to paralyzing hyper-democracy.
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