Not so Marvelous Marin

The summer semester has begun at Dominican University of California in San Rafael, so once again I am taking the Golden Gate Transit bus to school in the evenings for class.  At the urging of my office manager and with some financial support from my workplace I have been taking college classes since Fall 2005 in the Pathways Program.  With any luck, I will be able to graduate before I retire.

I like to get out of the City and enjoy the countrified feel of Marin.  Usually the commute doesn't bother me.  But today, the traffic on 101 North seemed worse; unsurprisingly just this very week it was named the ninth most delayed freeway location in the Bay Area in a study conducted by MTC and CalTrans.  As traffic inched northwards, it occurred to me that the reason for the delay is Marin's topography--a series of east-west trending ridges and valleys that are traversed by the freeway.  In some areas 101 is the only north-south route, so local traffic must take the freeway because there are no nearby parallel streets.  The traffic could be greatly reduced if parkways were constructed running parallel to 101 to the west through the hills that would take some of the traffic from Novato to Terra Linda and from Terra Linda to Fairfax.  Other places where 101 is the only route are the stretches between Mill Valley and Corte Madera and from Larkspur to San Rafael, where the traffic predictibly slows down at rush hour.  But I doubt if new roads will ever be built because the open space that they would run through is all protected--this is Marin--and the land values are so high that condemnation is too expensive to consider.  Although the Marin Independent Journal heralds the carpool lanes being built as the Second Coming that will deliver drivers from the horrors of congestion, I don't see Marinites carpooling up, however liberal they may be.  These are the people after all who lecture you about global warming from behind the wheel of their Escalades.

Could public transit be the answer?  Hah.  For the carriage trade who take the ferry to their jobs in view offices in downtown San Francisco, Golden Gate Transit bends over backwards, but for the hoi polloi who schlep to and from school at night, their attitude is that we should be thankful to have a once-hourly bus.  And so what if it doesn't come?  That's what happened last night.  The 9:18 bus from the San Rafael Transit Center didn't show up. I asked the relief driver who was also waiting what happened, and he brushed me off with a "why do you care?"  I told him that it would be nice to know if the bus was 15 or 50 minutes late, and he said "it'll get here when it gets here".  Finally it rolled into the transit center around 10:00 PM.  The drivers changed shifts and I asked the driver if the driver he relieved told him what had caused the delay.  He brushed me off again by saying "I have more important things to do".  Yeah, right. 

I take the Capitol Corridor to Sacramento fairly frequently. The train is sometimes late. It happens.  But at least the Capitol Corridor has electronic signs and messages that tell you why a train was delayed (heavy traffic near Hercules) and what its revised ETA will be.  This gives you the opportunity to call others, and keeps you from feeling stranded.  GGT should install signs in its poor excuses for "transit centers" and give its bus drivers a lesson in customer service.

Glittering off in the distance, like the Holy Grail is the promise of rail transit in Marin.  The Sonoma Marin Area Rail Transit was formed to turn the former Northwestern Pacific line into a transportation hub, that also includes a bicycle freeway.  Being something of a pragmatist, I'm not holding my breath.  But being something of an idealist, I can dream, can't I?
 

Die, Monster Die!

Superior Court Judge James Warren struck down Proposition H, the Chris Daly-backed ballot issue on the November ballot that would have outlawed possession of handguns by anyone other than law enforcement, security guards, private detectives and others who require guns for their work. 

According to the SFGate article: 

Warren said California law, which authorizes police agencies to issue handgun permits, implicitly prohibits a city or county from banning handgun possession by law-abiding adults.

That law "demonstrates the Legislature's intent to occupy, on a statewide basis, the field of residential and commercial handgun possession to the exclusion of local government entities,'' Warren wrote in a 30-page decision.

If the city were allowed to ban handguns within its borders, he said, nearby counties could be flooded by handguns no longer allowed in San Francisco. Such a possibility illustrates the need for gun ownership to be regulated on a state level, Warren said.

"California has an overarching concern in controlling gun use by defining the circumstances under which firearms can be possessed uniformly across the state, without having this statewide scheme contradicted or subverted by local policy,'' the judge said.

If only it could end there.  But no. San Francisco is going to appeal:

San Francisco will ask a state appeals court to restore a ban on handgun possession by city residents, City Attorney Dennis Herrera said Tuesday.

Herrera said the city would appeal Warren's ruling to the same Court of Appeal that overturned another San Francisco gun ordinance in 1982, a measure that prohibited both residents and nonresidents from having handguns in the city.

I'm having a deja vu experience here.  In early 1999 Supervisor Tom Ammiano tried and failed to pass legislation to prohibit financial institutions from charging for ATM use, so write-in mayoral candidate Ammiano sponsored Proposition F on the November ballot to accomplish what he failed to do at City Hall--despite the fact that the courts had consistently ruled that local governments were preempted by federal law from regulating bank fees.  Proposition F passed resoundingly and died an ignominous death when financial institutions successfully sued to have the measure overturned. 

Ammiano's Proposition F and Daly's Proposition H are examples of the sort of symbolic politics characteristic of the left.  Just as it didn't matter to Ammiano that there was settled law on ATM fees, it doesn't matter to Chris Daly that the California legislature has precluded local governments from enacting gun bans, or that the City went down the same path with a handgun ban to defeat in 1982.  It's more important for progressive politicians to be seen doing the right thing--as dictated by the party line--rather than doing what actually will help the City. 

In announcing plans for an appeal Tuesday, Herrera said he believes that San Francisco voters "acted within their authority to restrict handgun possession and firearm sales within the limits of their own city.''

"Gun violence is a grave problem in this city, and our citizens have a right to do what they can legislatively to reduce it,'' Herrera said.

"The enormous human toll of gun violence requires different treatment in San Francisco County than in Mono County.''

Perhaps Dennis Herrera should study the example of Washington, DC which has had a ban on guns since 1976, yet has the most horrific violent crime statistics of any major city in the United States:

Just consider a few statistics: Five years before the D.C. Council banned nearly all firearms in 1976, the District's murder rate fell from 37 to 27 per 100,000 people. In the five years after 1976, the murder rate rose to 35 per 100,000 people. Between 1976 and 1991, the D.C. homicide rate rose 200 percent. The national homicide rate during the same 15-year period rose just 12 percent.

According to the FBI, the District has the highest violent crime rate in the nation of any city over 500,000 people. Its homicide rate is eight times higher than the rest of the country and four times higher than similarly sized Ft. Worth, Texas. The comparison is apt. Texas has some of the most constitutional gun laws in the country

Maybe one day the Washington, DC gun ban will be repealed.  Let's hope the San Francisco gun ban never becomes law.

Reaching Out

Yesterday, I had the pleasant experience of meeting Jamison, my fellow gay, native Bay Arean, San Francisco urban planning (among other things) afficianado who blogs at Adventures in Urban Living.  Our interests are so much alike, that at first I feared he might be my evil twin, or I his.  We met at Tully's in the Castro (I highly recommend the Mocha Bellacino).  I'm pleased to report that he's much better looking in real life than in the picture on his blog with all the bicycle gear.  But it was his cyclopedic knowledge of policy and planning issues in the Bay Area that I found truly dazzling. We wonked out for over two hours discussing the Market Octavia Plan, the Central Subway his plan for a Folsom Muni Metro line and many other things.  I urge you to go pay Jamison a visit (if you haven't already) and support him with a donation to the AIDS ride.

The Architecture and Design of Sacred Spaces

I have long been a fan of Scott Berkun.  Particularly his essays, which are remarkably lucid meditations on what it takes to be a successful manager, among other things.  So it comes as no surprise that his blog is most readable as well.  I particularly enjoyed this post in which he describes an exercise in studying the architecture and design of sacred spaces that was part of the 2006 GEL Conference:

As part of the GEL 2006 Conference I ran an architectural tour through NYC, focusing on sacred places. What’s a sacred place? Well, I left that up to the people on the tour. Half of the stops had some religious affiliation, but the other half were secular (A park, a train station and a square). Since the goal of the tour was to explore these powerful places as designers, I wanted a wide definition for what a sacred place is.

Questions we asked:

• What feelings did the architects want people to have when inside? When entering? When leaving?
• How does the design achieve those effects?
• What is the visual focal point of the space? How is it supported?
• How are rhythm and symmetry used?
• What senses are activated by how the space is designed?
• What are the sacred places in your home? How do you use and honor them?

In my studies of architecture, especially sacred architecture, I realized that churches, shrines, and temples are all designed by people. There are no blueprints, and few descriptions, for them in most bibles or holy texts - so what you see in them is an expression of design imagination and talent, as much as anything else. I’m confident that most people can appreciate these buildings and designs in a non-religious way, if they choose too.

Scott comes to architecture from software design and I think you can see in the quoted text the calm lucidity he brings to the many and varied subjects he writes about.  Urbanities was also most intrigued by the GEL Conference which is described on the site as:

Short for "Good Experience Live", Gel is a conference, and community, exploring good experience in all its forms -- in business, art, society, technology, and life.

The goal of the conference is to create an environment that allows our multi-disciplinary community to explore the idea of "good experience" in a variety of contexts.

Here's to good experience!

News from Around the Bay

The big news is the 1,000+ foot skyscraper and two 800+ companion towers that planners proposed last week for the South of Market near First and Mission.  The proposed tower, if built would be the tallest west of the Mississippi and help further remake an area characterized by light industrial development and low slung back offices into a slender glass forest.  What's more, the revenue harvested by raising height limits in the area would be plowed into developing the Transbay Terminal  into a 21st Century transit hub, with a Caltrain station and high-speed rail connections to Los Angeles.  The proposal has met with encomiums from John Boland's San Francisco Cityscape and the Examiner's Ken Garcia.  Urbanities joins with the crowd of well-wishers, though like Cityscape commenter Bill Hough, we fear it is so good that it will never be built.

Today's John King column features the Hercules-WalMart slugfest currently being played out in the bucolic, New Urbanist suburb across the bay.  The world's largest retailer wanted to build an outlet on property it owned in Hercules, but the city denied its application.  When WalMart submitted a prettied-up application, it was denied again.  Now the city is threatening to go after the property by eminent domain.

While Urbanities is generally sympathetic to Hercules' desire to be something other than a carbon copy of so many other suburbs, we do not approve of its tactic of going after the jugular with eminent domain, even though in this case unlike Kelo, the city seems more sympathetic than the property owner.  It's easy to pick the virtuous, little municipal David over the retailing Goliath as John King does, but property rights are property rights and must be respected even when they belong to a company with a poor image like WalMart.  We hope that cooler heads prevail and that WalMart can find a graceful way to exit a place where it is not wanted.   

While we're on the subject of property rights, let's head on over to the ever-entertaining city of Berkeley where the city prohibits anyone from building or expanding or remodeling an existing building within 30 feet of a creek, even if the creek is flowing through an underground culvert.  Although the ordinance was passed in 1989, it didn't become an issue until 2004 when a creek flowing through an underground culvert caused part of a building to collapse.  Now the city is planning a rewrite of the ordinance that it hopes will please both creek-lovers and property owners, but it looks like there's going to be a fight. 

The urban creeks movement promises to liberate urban creeks from the shackles of their underground culverts and let them flow freely above ground.  Visions of steelhead spawning in the middle of downtown Berkeley led to the passage of the ordinance in 1989.  But it's neither reasonable nor rational to hold property owners hostage to a nice idea. 

Unless the city of Berkeley compensates property owners for essentially creating a public easement through their property they should be allowed to build as they see fit.  Urbanities thinks the city is making a step in the right direction by granting more leeway to creekside property owners but we think the rewrite doesn't go far enough.