Six months ago, after years of delays, San Francisco supervisors finally approved the plan to put dedicated bus lanes down on Geary Boulevard. So why did I visit City Hall on Tuesday to hear the board of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency going over the details yet again and inviting public comment?
Turns out that until recently, bus rapid transit has been the purview of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority. The SFMTA, which oversees the city’s buses, streets, taxis, and more, has to itself approve the planned project. The supervisors’ vote in January was basically the handoff.
In San Francisco government, what do you do to make a straightforward assessment and approve a project? You schedule a meeting, of course, which at City Hall has its rhythms and rituals. Near the 1 p.m. start, smartly dressed staffers, planners, and consultants work the room and greet each other. More informally attired gadflys hold the day’s printed agenda and fill out their comment-request cards. Journalists and advocates have laptops and phones out.
Human interest first
There are various items are on the docket before Geary BRT. The board directors get to their places on the dais and kick things off with crowd-pleasers: congratulating a retiring manager, entertaining a demonstration from the champion cable car bell-ringer. Everyone applauds.
Then we move on to more polarizing stuff, such as the news that the new light-rail vehicles will need testing in the Market Street tunnel, shutting down service on weeknights and weekends next week until late August. The gadflys I mentioned before have queued up to await their turn at the podium before the board, where again you can discern a telltale pattern. Two of them ask why the public was not given more notice of the meeting’s agenda earlier. By now the room’s gallery seating is at capacity with members of the public, so there’s that. One particular speaker, David Pilpel, who I understand is active on transit (he’s listed here as “Muni expert”) and open-government issues, makes a point to comment on every single item on the agenda with one or two exceptions, based just on what I saw in one afternoon. The classic example is when directors sought to approve the minutes from the last month’s meeting, and there was Pilpel piping up about a discrepancy, duly noted by the chairwoman before moving on.
Eventually we get to an item about the infamous tech shuttles. Though the city and the operators worked out a pilot program to manage the routes, pickups, and drop-offs, there’s plenty of tweaking to be done; avoidable problems keep cropping up, like big buses getting stuck on hills or idling for extended periods while parked. An MTA staffer says the agency has so far levied $500,000 in fines and issued tickets for shuttles that aren’t adhering to the rules. The situation in Noe Valley regarding the shuttles, we hear, is “challenging.” The board asks staff to come back with an update next month, and opens the floor for public comment before moving on.
Two riders of the shuttle buses speak in their favor, but the bulk of comments is the familiar opposition. Several maintain that in turning over bus stops, white zones, and streets, the city is getting rolled. One speaker outlines the rich irony in how the modern giants of innovation and technology rely on stinky diesel buses to operate. Why can’t workers take transit to and from pickup points, or to Caltrain?
Part of the answer to that perfectly reasonable (while perhaps not practical) question is that Muni, our transit system, moves way too slowly. It’s a perfect segue to the main event of the day, approving the county Transportation Authority’s project report and hybrid design for BRT on Geary Boulevard.
SFMTA project manager Liz Brisson presents slides to the board broadly reviewing the project, synthesizing what is rote to anyone who’s been looking at BRT since the early 2000s — buses are crowded, their uneven intervals create inconsistent travel times. By separating the bus from traffic, by optimizing the signals, by doing street work like bulbouts and medians you can make a dramatic improvement for people along Geary.
Pedestrians on the Geary corridor are eight times more likely to be hit by traffic on average than on other city streets.
I actually learned one new thing Tuesday: Pedestrians on the Geary corridor are eight times more likely to be hit by traffic on average than on other city streets. That alone should have spurred the city to make changes many years ago. (Might that have meant more meetings?) Otherwise, I feel like Bill Murray’s famous weatherman character who relives the same day over and over in the 1993 film “Groundhog Day.” All the old boxes are being checked. Everyone, from the directors and the commenters to the hangers-on like myself, is going through the motions of again debating a project so glaringly in need for a dangerous boulevard that sees 54,000 bus riders a day and 43,000 cars during high volume times. (For those of you geeking out on the particulars, there is is one late adjustment to the project: The center-lane configuration will run west one more block, from 27th Avenue to 28th Avenue. Moving on.)
You could say the process, San Francisco government’s adherence to ongoing meetings and public input, is designed to grind things down, to grind everyone down who is interested in progress, because that’s exactly what is happening. The entire exercise, little more than a formality, becomes a Kafka-esque dance made more agonizing by the requirement of regurgitated beefs from the public.
Let’s play BRT comment bingo! Ready?
- Flagrantly misleading information, check: One speaker says the red lanes in the project are bad for merchants because they scare away customers. Actually, they don’t and also make the street safer.
- Lack of understanding infused with paranoia, double-check: Someone says the project’s environmental report is flawed because it doesn’t take into account the aging population. Another speaker, picking up on the thread, alleges “this is a project for the young and fit” and asks the board: “Are you doing what Mayor [Ed] Lee wants you to do?” Just minutes ago we were told Geary is a pedestrian accident trap that’s unsafe for seniors, children and everyone else on foot.
- David Pilpel, check: Pilpel says he’s not for or against the BRT, but has some “concerns.” He’s not sure what lessons have been learned from other SFMTA capital projects, and overall he’s “not convinced one way or the other” that the costs are worth the benefits. David Pilpel, thanks for sharing.
- See you in court, check: A representative of San Franciscans for Sensible Transit, the latest incarnation of the no-BRT-in-my-backyard group of merchants and residents, reminds the board that it’s suing. He says “we’re ready to be your red team” on alternatives to the project design. He says the group is amenable to resolving the CEQA-based lawsuit. Then he walks out.
It’s an odd, albeit necessary display of democracy at work. Rachel Hyden of the San Francisco Transit Riders calls out the amount of justification it takes to get an incremental improvement rolled out, and I’ve found a kindred soul. (Here’s her op-ed in the SF Chronicle, posted on the same day as this meeting.)
Finally it’s the directors’ turn for comments. There’s some magnanimous stroking about how hard the staff has worked, how former Richmond district Sup. Eric Mar championed the project over his two terms in office. (His predecessor, Jake McGoldrick, pushed it for his two terms too. Like I said, lots of patterns.) Director Gwyneth Borden, who notes that she helped secure funding for BRT back in 2003, says the fact that it’s a hybrid center-lane and outside red-lane project, that the full “center-lane configuration did not work out here … is somewhat disappointing,” but is eager to move on. “This is what people want and have wanted for a long time.” With that, the six board members present vote unanimously to approve the Geary project.
Next up: More time
Half the room clears out into the hallway. The business-attired staffers and planners huddle and congratulate Liz Brisson. One of them hands me a phone and asks me to take a picture.
Because “Groundhog Day” was a movie we knew had to end, and that the endings in Hollywood are typically happy, we knew Bill Murray was going to snap out of the loop. Then there’s Geary BRT. If you have any hair left on your head, please save some to pull out at the meeting later this year where MTA directors sign off on the final environmental-impact statement, as well as the transit project’s “record of decision.” In addition, the first phase of the project, from Market to Stanyan, still needs to complete the federal environmental process, do the outreach on design details, and be drafted into SFMTA board legislation. That’s at least two years of plodding, in the best-case scenario.
We can be certain that the officials, the staffers, the haters, the advocates, David Pilpel, and tragically myself will be there at our places in City Hall, devices and comment cards at the ready.
Follow Anthony Lazarus on Twitter: @Sr_Lazarus