"San Francisco values"
I've just become aware of this phrase, used by fascists and right-wingers to describe everything I love about the political climate of the Bay Area. Aside from breathtaking natural beauty (which of course a lot of other places around the world also possess), the left-leaning-ness of Northern California is the primary reason I choose to live here.
I'm mostly okay with the results of the elections. My two favorite city council candidates won (the third seat was taken by the person I most did NOT want to see in there, but two out of three ain't bad), even though – as a person who lives about five inches outside city limits – I was not allowed to vote for them. I did study up on the other various local and state issues and candidates and voted as consciously as possible, although I'm not sure I always understand the full implications of some of the items I'm voting on, especially the financial ones. As for candidates, unless I know them personally I vote based on their positions on issues I care about – the environment, the war in Iraq, the death penalty, gay marriage, reproductive rights, immigration, stem cell research, etc. etc. etc. – as well as more local issues like agriculture, affordable housing and transportation.
As usual I'm going to leave the ranting to others more well-informed and enthusiastic than I am, and put my energy instead into something local where I can actually have an effect. A friend of mine from the garden has been working with the city to figure out how to spend $300,000 on improvements to bike lanes and paths (only inside the city limits, though), so I've been talking with him about how to get involved with that. To me, it would be more important to improve the COUNTY roads between my house and downtown – but this seems like a good place to start getting familar with how this kind of thing is done.
Unfortunately, I've been told that getting anything done in the county is a nightmare, because not only do you have to deal with politicians who are 30 miles away and have no idea what you're talking about half the time, but most of the roads also come under the provenance of CalTrans, which is a state agency that is even harder to reach. These projects are notorious for taking for-freaking-ever and ending up out of date before they're halfway complete. Also, budgets and timelines and political opportunism often create truly bizarre results.
Right now I'm aware of two examples of this within a mile of my house. One is a fancy new crosswalk with heavy-duty guard rails and flashing lights and buttons to push and a rubberized nubbly skid-proof ramp and landing pad on each corner for wheelchairs, which would be great in a pedestrian area but not so useful when there's not a sidewalk within three quarters of a mile in any direction, and nobody – I mean NOBODY – ever walks on that road. So here sits this new million-dollar crosswalk with no sidewalk leading up to it, and nowhere to go if you do decide to walk across, since it dead-ends up against the edge of an open field.
Why did that money get spent? Because the road was being resurfaced, and there's a rule that all projects of this kind must include crosswalks at major intersections. Personally, I would have preferred to have the money spent on a bike lane. About this I've been told, "ain't gonna happen." If you want to ride a bike across the valley safely, use the existing cross-valley bike lane. Yes, "lane." There's only one in the entire valley, and it takes me more than three miles out of my way.
The other one is the creek stabilizaton project at the end of my road. I guess some folks got nervous when the water went over the bridge last winter, and so they've taken bulldozers and "reshaped" the creekbed so that it now looks more like a big flat rock-strewn road than a creek. I suppose the idea is that this shape will cause the water to spread out rather than building up force as it runs down narrow channels, but everyone I've talked to who knows about this kind of thing has said it's a totally imbecilic design. Having seen boulders the size of a La-Z-Boy recliner tumbling down the creekbed last winter like Cheerios into a bowl, I have to say I agree. Once the water gets going, it does what it wants. There's also the matter of a large log jam just up the creek from us, made up of mature trees that got torn out of the ground in the last flood, which our neighbor has been forbidden (by the project engineers) to touch. We're far enough from the creek that any flooding probably won't touch us, but if the bridge goes out we're all going to be screwed.
Oh wait. I said I wasn't going to rant.
I'm mostly okay with the results of the elections. My two favorite city council candidates won (the third seat was taken by the person I most did NOT want to see in there, but two out of three ain't bad), even though – as a person who lives about five inches outside city limits – I was not allowed to vote for them. I did study up on the other various local and state issues and candidates and voted as consciously as possible, although I'm not sure I always understand the full implications of some of the items I'm voting on, especially the financial ones. As for candidates, unless I know them personally I vote based on their positions on issues I care about – the environment, the war in Iraq, the death penalty, gay marriage, reproductive rights, immigration, stem cell research, etc. etc. etc. – as well as more local issues like agriculture, affordable housing and transportation.
As usual I'm going to leave the ranting to others more well-informed and enthusiastic than I am, and put my energy instead into something local where I can actually have an effect. A friend of mine from the garden has been working with the city to figure out how to spend $300,000 on improvements to bike lanes and paths (only inside the city limits, though), so I've been talking with him about how to get involved with that. To me, it would be more important to improve the COUNTY roads between my house and downtown – but this seems like a good place to start getting familar with how this kind of thing is done.
Unfortunately, I've been told that getting anything done in the county is a nightmare, because not only do you have to deal with politicians who are 30 miles away and have no idea what you're talking about half the time, but most of the roads also come under the provenance of CalTrans, which is a state agency that is even harder to reach. These projects are notorious for taking for-freaking-ever and ending up out of date before they're halfway complete. Also, budgets and timelines and political opportunism often create truly bizarre results.
Right now I'm aware of two examples of this within a mile of my house. One is a fancy new crosswalk with heavy-duty guard rails and flashing lights and buttons to push and a rubberized nubbly skid-proof ramp and landing pad on each corner for wheelchairs, which would be great in a pedestrian area but not so useful when there's not a sidewalk within three quarters of a mile in any direction, and nobody – I mean NOBODY – ever walks on that road. So here sits this new million-dollar crosswalk with no sidewalk leading up to it, and nowhere to go if you do decide to walk across, since it dead-ends up against the edge of an open field.
Why did that money get spent? Because the road was being resurfaced, and there's a rule that all projects of this kind must include crosswalks at major intersections. Personally, I would have preferred to have the money spent on a bike lane. About this I've been told, "ain't gonna happen." If you want to ride a bike across the valley safely, use the existing cross-valley bike lane. Yes, "lane." There's only one in the entire valley, and it takes me more than three miles out of my way.
The other one is the creek stabilizaton project at the end of my road. I guess some folks got nervous when the water went over the bridge last winter, and so they've taken bulldozers and "reshaped" the creekbed so that it now looks more like a big flat rock-strewn road than a creek. I suppose the idea is that this shape will cause the water to spread out rather than building up force as it runs down narrow channels, but everyone I've talked to who knows about this kind of thing has said it's a totally imbecilic design. Having seen boulders the size of a La-Z-Boy recliner tumbling down the creekbed last winter like Cheerios into a bowl, I have to say I agree. Once the water gets going, it does what it wants. There's also the matter of a large log jam just up the creek from us, made up of mature trees that got torn out of the ground in the last flood, which our neighbor has been forbidden (by the project engineers) to touch. We're far enough from the creek that any flooding probably won't touch us, but if the bridge goes out we're all going to be screwed.
Oh wait. I said I wasn't going to rant.
1 Comments:
Last night I was watching a documentary about the California gold rush and was surprised to learn that one of the first highly successful miners (actually, he started the gold rush and sold mining supplies to the masses) was a Mormon who opted to keep searching for the promised land further West while the rest of the saints settled in Utah. What if the rest of them had followed him instead of stopping with Brigham? Can you imagine "San Francisco values" if history had been written differently?
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