MUNI FAIL Photo: Emily Drennen
"We'll get sued."
"We only get one shot at the ballot box."
"We can't remove any parking."
"We need to balance street use between modes."
"We can't afford it."
"The environmental review process takes hundreds of thousands of dollars and years to complete."
"The unions won't go for it."
San Francisco government excels at coming up with reasons why we can't dramatically improve our streets and transit. Bureaucracy by its very nature slows processes down and eats up political will.
City staff often self-censor by only proposing projects that can be easily defended based on engineering standards or precedents. These "safe" projects have the best chance of being funded, and the least likelihood of being rejected by elected decision-makers or the public. Elaborate project approval and environmental review processes ensure that relatively simple projects like striping a bike lane (which can be physically built in less than one workday) often take months or years to complete.
Interagency squabbling, such as the turf battle between the SF County Transportation Authority (which has the funds) and the SF Municipal Transportation Agency (which manages MUNI and our streets), squanders our City's meager planning and capital resources. Add the Planning Department, Department of Public Works, Public Utility Commission, Port Authority, and other agencies into the project approval mix, and it is easy to see why projects become gridlocked.
We'll never have enough money, nor will 100% of our citizens ever be happy with any given project. Some group of vocal citizens will always complain about a project, no matter how limited or broad in its scope. It is actually a strength of our local democracy that (some of) our citizens feel empowered to voice their objections to projects that impact them. But the citizenry are generally scared of new ideas, even when their best interests would actually be better served than by the status quo.
It is high time for our city bureaucracy to get out of its own way. Our elected officials need to direct city agencies to get bike, ped, and transit projects out of planning and into construction as quickly as possible. Our budget problems are just too dire to continue spinning our wheels in bureaucratic inefficiency.
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Continue to Part 2 of the series: tinyurl.com/drennen070809
Continue to Part 3 of the series: tinyurl.com/drennen070809-2
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