San Francisco is a city of unique transit challenges, namely it sits on a peninsula and has no flat surfaces. A subway would thus seem to have been the way to go, but the famously inefficient municipal government couldn't get that together, so it settled on an inordinate number of bus routes, plus two light rail systems that use almost the exact same path through much of the city, but different rails. The buses have great range, with the MTA boasting that they go within a block of 90% of residences. But if you live in an unpopular neighborhood or are going north/south rather than east/west, they also arrive only once in your lifetime, and forget about weekends. Weekends, when people are traveling for pleasure, so screw them. But despite these gripes the system actually does a decent job of getting SF's working class and students where they want to go.
The rich and commuters, though, still drive. Especially since the Caltrain depot is one of the most inaccessible spots in the whole city. So in an effort to get them out of their cars, the MTA had the brilliant idea of creating 'Spare The Air' days, on which BART is free until noon and the buses are free all day. I sincerely mean this idea was brilliant, so much so that it created peace on earth and goodwill among men, who no longer had to find two quarters for exact change. Everyone was lulled into thinking that the city had gotten something right for a change, and so when the next 'Spare the Air' day came around they trotted out to their bus stops confidently carrying nothing, only to find that, wait for it, the MTA had declared the day but not made transit free. And they did this over and over in the next few months, when frustrated travellers just needed one little break to make their lives better. 'It's a Spare the Air day, so get out of your cars, but we won't help you out.' The theory may have been that the Pavlovian response would kick in and we'd take transit because we heard the words, but in practice it has caused me and no doubt countless others to want to start up our cars and fill the tanks and head out of the city's boundaries to someplace better run. Someplace like Canada....
I think we can't go to Canada anymore; it's too close to Alaska, which as we have learned, is a very scary place.
Posted by: torie | September 04, 2008 at 09:39 AM