The SFMTA Board of Directors in their seats at a hearing on Enterprise Revenue and Fare Policy Options. Image via SFGovTV. On Tuesday, SFMTA staff revealed revenue proposals that include raising the Clipper fare again — it just went up earlier this year — from $2.85 to $3.00. While other aspects looked somewhat better, the overall picture was that of an agency staff and board alarmingly out of…
It seems everyone in San Francisco is trying to figure out how last week’s recall of Supervisor Joel Engardio will change the city’s political landscape. Safe streets advocates have reason to be especially concerned. The core issue that motivated recallers most was the conversion of the Great Highway into Sunset Dunes Park, approved by 55% of voters in last year’s Proposition K, and backed by…
Zohran Mamdani is surging in polls for New York City mayor, closing the gap between him and his chief competitor, the disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo. But one person not feeling the momentum is the transit consultant Jarrett Walker, who in a series of social media posts criticized Zohran’s proposal to make buses fare-free (along with streets and signal changes to speed them up). Walker’s…
I recently read the late Mike Davis’s essays on environmental devastation, war, and urban ecology in Dead Cities (2002, now back in print from Haymarket Books ). I don’t know if “enjoyable” is the right word for writing on often bleak and enraging topics, but it was a compelling read. The 2024 Haymarket edition is well done, too, except that in five places, there’s missing text at a page break,…
Recently, I’ve been doing something extremely unfashionable. I’ve been paying for everyday purchases in cash. That goes against the grain in 2024. Maybe it’s going to get some of you to write me off as a nostalgic, impractical, idealistic Luddite. So it goes. But maybe, using cash is an interesting thing to do precisely because of where the world is right now. Big tech companies increasingly run…
When I was at City Hall last Friday, a Chron reporter tried to interest me in a person-on-the-street interview about whether Biden should drop out and what I thought about Kamala Harris. I declined to answer, and not only because I was there in connection with an unrelated campaign . I’ve been trying to avoid thinking about the subject. It doesn’t matter if I have a smart answer. I’m not…
I want to start responding more to things I read and listen to, so here’s a quick sort of critical summary of the It’s Going Down podcast’s interview with Andrew Lee , author of Defying Displacement . Andrew thinks shifts in the economy have made it more valuable to organize collectively to defend homes and neighborhoods (organizing at the “point of reproduction”) compared to what used to be the…
This morning I got up before dawn to drop lit for the primary election in San Francisco. As drizzle fell on my head, the sun rose, then hid again behind mist. The last time I did this — an early morning lit drop on Election Day — was in 2016. There’s been a dramatic increase in networked, front-door surveillance cameras (the Ring brand and others). It’s a trend that worries me: the abuse potential…
At first, U.S. society treated the Covid-19 pandemic as an emergency requiring collective solutions. Now we pretend it’s over and treat staying healthy as an individual matter. I live in San Francisco and hang out in progressive spaces that were some of the last holdouts in urging and giving out masks. Now, even though the new Covid surge is making more of my friends sick than ever, masks are a…
This past week, I recorded an album-a-day called Matter for the Bicycle Research , which you can now stream or download at that link. Recommended if you like Guided by Voices, Magnetic Fields, or guitar-and-boombox-era Mountain Goats. An album-a-day is when you write 20+ minutes of new music, record it, and produce it, all in a single 24-hour period, with no ideas from before the day and no…