Street Fight: The Politics of Mobility in San Francisco

Conclusion: San Francisco as National Bellwether

192 CONCLUSION San Francisco as National Bellwether Pessimistic political realities notwithstanding, if sustainable urban transportation is to work for people, many disparate pieces must come together in a synchronized way. Reducing automobility requires not only good transit, but higher-density, walkable residential patterns, more public spaces rather than private space, and more mixed uses within the urban fabric instead of single-use districts. Bicycling has enormous potential for short-range urban trips but needs good transit as a regional complement. Safe, practical walking and bicycling require that cars not only be slowed and tamed but also that they be less obtrusive, bulky, and menacing. Concomitantly, if urban transit is to flow smoothly, less urban space should be allocated for the moving and parking of cars. San Francisco is an important national bellwether because many of the attributes of the city have the potential to be synchronized in these ways. The city’s population density and evolving policies vis-à-vis the car are arguably more in line with what truly needs to be done to address urgent problems of GHG emissions, energy policy, and social concerns about mobility. San Francisco is an exceptionally livable city by many indicators and has a very high, one might say, insatiable demand for new housing because of this. It is a city where one can choose to live without a car and remain functional and comfortable, something atypical of most American 193 San Francisco as National Bellwether cities. However, despite having 30 percent car-free households and the highest transit ridership west of the Mississippi River, today San Francisco has one of the highest densities of automobile registrations in the United States, at over nine thousand motor vehicles per square mile. As stressed in the introduction, this apposition of many car-free households and high transit ridership juxtaposed against high vehicle density is a critical issue for the livability movement to consider. People might be able to choose to live without a car, but they continue to be affronted and burdened by their neighbors’ choices to continue to own and use cars. Transit is slowed in traffic, bicycling remains hazardous for the less nimble, and walking in the city can be a dangerous obstacle course. San Francisco embodies both what the livability movement is trying to achieve and what can go wrong. In the political process, loud opposition to removing car space and parking permeates the discourse on mobility in San Francisco. The preservation of automobility is often justified on claims that transit systems are slow and impractical and that bicycling is unsafe and things are too far apart to walk. All of this is true to a certain extent in parts of San Francisco , especially in the Bay Area region, but it is a self-reinforcing feedback cycle. To break the cycle requires a rethinking of urban space and perhaps a moment of inconvenience for the motorist. This is exactly the situation San Francisco finds itself in in the opening decades of the twenty-first century: it is poised to break the cycle. In San Francisco breaking the cycle includes a bold discussion around a future 30–30–40 mode split between cars, transit, and bicycle/walking, respectively , and a mandate to reduce GHGs to 80 percent of levels in 1990. The city has practical ideas about implementing transit first, expanding Muni to double its current capacity, and, through persistent progressive activism, could Connect the City (as proposed by the SFBC) by building a network of cycle tracks, removing more segments of freeways, and reducing the amount of available parking as well as reforming traffic engineering in ways that limit automobility. These are all vital to the broad livability agenda, and in an era of paltry national leadership on global warming and energy security progressive San Franciscans continue to see it as their global civic duty to be out front and to inspire others to break the cycle. Ideology Matters Yet breaking the cycle cannot be accomplished by transcending ideology or hoping it goes away. There is no apolitical, dispassionate, objective, and unbiased professionalism in transportation, despite the insistence 194 Conclusion by many scholars, planners, engineers, policymakers, and advocates that transportation can be separated from ideology. There are deeply embedded assumptions involved in mobility debates, and these are ideological. Obviously, there are people who hold strong, internally consistent beliefs, beliefs backed by coherent ideologies like progressive, neoliberal, or conservative , and who do...