With a limited capacity at the Transbay Temporary Terminal, AC Transit has been using a vacant lot near the terminal and on-street parking along Fremont for staging its buses in preparation for the weekday evening commute.
With several Transbay area construction projects slated to concurrently commence this Spring, AC Transit will need to vacate both the lot and the Fremont Street parking areas it has used since moving to the Temporary Terminal.
From the Transbay Joint Powers Authority with respect to the required move:
In a joint effort to replace this needed staging space, AC Transit, the Transbay Joint Powers Authority, and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency have identified new curbside space on sections of streets bounded by Folsom and Bryant and Fremont and Main that will meet AC Transit’s weekday staging needs between 3pm and 6pm.
The joint proposal is to designate these areas as “no parking” areas between 3pm and 6pm on weekdays. This restriction would not apply before 3pm, after 6pm, or on weekends.
From Jamie Whitaker over at Rincon Hill Neighborhood News with respect to the plan:
Apparently, AC Transit is getting bumped from their staging area along Fremont Street and wants to idle their cancer-causing air polluting buses along our residential streets Main, Beale, Bryant, and Harrison – AND take our Residential Parking Permit areas while they’re doing so. Wow. This is war, right? They want to kill us, pretty much…
These guys know they should be doing outreach to the Neighborhood Association before doing such bullshit. Even worse, they’re holding this community meeting on the evening of our regularly scheduled SBRMBNA meeting. I guess they cannot be trusted anymore than several other government entities that pull such crap on residents all the time.
The aforementioned meeting will be held Monday, March 11 at 6pm in the offices of the Transbay Joint Powers Authority located at 201 Mission Street, Suite 2100. The map of the affected areas and parking spots as proposed:
∙ March 11, 2013 Community Meeting: AC Transit Bus Staging [transbaycenter.org]
∙ Temporary Transbay Terminal “Sneak Peek” Next Week [SocketSite]
what a whiner!
if you are so concerned about cancer causing air polluting buses, than maybe you shouldn’t be driving (and parking) a car. It is really hypocritical! typical useless neighborhood association nimby.
Jamie is one of SF’s bolder NIMBYs, as he doesnt mind putting his name out there.
Regardless, he’s a NIMBY in the same genre as SFs best: Sue Hestor, Bruce Brugman, Larry Stokus
Clearly the solution is to stop all new construction in the neighborhood so that the buses can go back to staging on empty lots. If there are going to be any temporary negative impacts to neighbors then they shouldn’t be improving the neighborhood with new construction.
Jamie — if you ever get that cross-SOMA Muni line you’re always talking about, guess what? Buses layover at terminals. I’m sorry, “cancer-causing air polluting” buses.
Basically unless you want the city to spend most of its time sh****ng on your life, you have to spend most of your time at “community outreach” meetings, waiting while your toes curl to get a chance to explain to the dolts that run transit in this town why most of their ideas are deeply flawed. Not that they pay attention.
If Jamie Whitaker gets cancer from buses on the street outside his HEPA-filtered condo, he should just call the waaaaaahmbulance.
If you decided to live (1) downtown, (2) right next a massive bus terminal and (3) in an area where everyone know there is major development slated in the years ahead, you really cannot complain about things like this. Its hard to find the words to describe someone who moves into a high-rise condo in Rincon Hill and then expect the surrounding environment to turn into something like Pleasanton.
I used to live in the Infinity near a samtrans bustop. The issue (for me) was the idling. Some drivers would idle for 20 minutes at 5AM.
Yeah, yeah, it’s a dense downtown area with construction. But buses are not allowed to idle for that long.
I’m trying to understand why there is any RPD parking in such a downtown area. That was a bad move on the City’s part to begin with…makes no sense whatsoever.
It’s a city. If I wanted cleaner air, I’d move to Ocean Beach. It’s a given that pollution comes with dense city life.
When I lived on Telegraph Hill, a bus going full throttle up Union would deposit a layer of soot everywhere on the front of our place. We would mostly open the back windows because that air was much cleaner.
Could this issue be improved? Absolutely.
The bulk of our transportation capacity should be underground. But there’d still a need for diesel buses where they can’t be replaced.
“I’m trying to understand why there is any RPD parking in such a downtown area. That was a bad move on the City’s part to begin with…makes no sense whatsoever.”
Because the oh-so-enlightened transit-first policy of the Politbüro forces an artificial constraint on off-street parking. So residents have to park on the street. Or perhaps you’d prefer that residents are subject to time-limited parking so they have to move their cars several times a day? Yeah, that’ll improve congestion and pollution.
In the real world, people have cars. In socialist make-believe world, they all take crappy Muni.
I would prefer that residents of dense downtown neighborhoods are subject to time-limited parking so that they would either of the following things:
1. pay for off-street parking
2. give up their car and walk,bike,take muni, or use car share instead.
In an area so close to downtown, where parking is in such short supply, there is no reason to reserve on street parking for residents at a fraction of the cost of off-street parking.
I expect this RPD was established prior to the towers going in, and when the area still felt relatively sleepy. Probably, actually, it was a response to opening PacBell Park. In any case, it’s pretty dumb on the City’s part to allow it, but it’s very hard to take away “rights”…the residents get used to their special status. But, ultimately, it’s the city’s right of way, not the residents.
The cancer-inducing idling looks like a red herring to me. The busses were already doing that within the neighborhood so the net change to that is zero. The real issue must be the parking, but since many won’t sympathize with that, health concerns are introduced.
Besides, I’ve walked past the staged busses along Fremont in the afternoon several times and never seen any that were idling until they were about to pull up to the transit center.
While I don’t have any objection to their proposal, I wonder if they are willing to go as far as Bryant Street, why not go one block further to Pier 30-32?
Also, how much longer (months/years) will they have to use city streets to idle buses?
I think Jamie Whitaker is a hero! He has finally discovered the real cause of cancer: buses. Now we just need to eliminate all buses and cancer will be a thing of the past.
Thanks Jamie!
Steve @9:04 AM, lol @11:24 AM and lyqwyd @2:07 PM : you write as if there were no such thing as non-diesel buses. There are at least a few communities and transit districts in the Bay Area, and certainly more in California in general, that use cleaner-burning CNG-based buses, for exactly this reason. Diesel fumes are nasty.
I expect that we’ll have access to completely non internal combustion engine transit modes in the not-so-distant future.
Cracks me up how everyone else is a nimby, and no one is supposed to question developers or the City about anything. “You live in a big mean city and if you don’t like blah blah in your neighborhood, you should move to rural Ohio!”
Pure bollocks. Anyone who doesn’t pick their battles and make a reasonable fight for what they believe in deserves everything they get. Have a nice weekend.
I also wonder what is up with so many comments that claim that if you live in a city means never questioning developers plans. Send the busses to Noe Valley and stand back and watch what REAL complaining will look like. Oh that’s funny, they have been complaining for years about the Google, Facebook and Apple busses!
What I find most amusing is the build anything crowd tends to live in single family homes with garages and back yards, and YET they expect everyone else to live in concrete canyons (“quit complaining about shadows!”) without parking or trees.
Shouldn’t there be some type of middle ground for this dialogue without telling people to move to Oregon?
“There are at least a few communities and transit districts in the Bay Area, and certainly more in California in general, that use cleaner-burning CNG-based buses, for exactly this reason.”
Yet AC Transit, Golden Gate Transit, and SamTrans all persist in maitaining highly polluting, particulate generating, nasty, stinking diesel powered bus fleets! This is really inexcusable when CNG is not only incredibly cleaner but is today less expensive. Inertia and lack of investment has their suburban fare-paying passengers paying a premium while the cancer risk for everyone in the path of the commute is increased.
Jamie, I hope you have thick skin. I’m beginning sense several of the commentators on this site are thin between the ears. Diesel particulate contamination has been designated a carcinogen in CA. State law requires public and private operators of large Diesel propelled vehicles to turn off their engines after 3 minutes of idling. The exception is construction equipment.
You are right to complain about the proposal to move bus queuing next to a residential building. I guess the jerks criticizing you for standing up to this proposal would be fine if the buses parked next to their children’s schools or bedrooms and sat idling spewing carcinogen’s into their lungs.
You are also right to complain about the city removing RPP parking in the neighborhood. I guess the jerks criticizing you would be fine if the city did the same in their neighborhoods. Makes you wounder which neighborhoods they live in. I can’t think of one neighborhood in San Francisco that would go along with a proposal to remove RPP parking from neighborhood without a big fight. Any of you jerks think of one?
The reason the RPP program exist in South Beach is because of AT&T park. Any of you jerks have a 42,000 seat entertainment venue in your neighborhood?
As for criticizing me for supporting Jamie…..have at it jerks.
Want a car? Pay for the cost of storing it. You don’t have a God given right to store your private property on public roadways. Car drivers get too many subsidizes as it is.
NoeValleyJim, you yourself in the past on this site mentioned you own a car, and when people fight projects that provide off street parking, why create a catch 22 for those that park on the street because no off street parking was available? I probably paid an extra 125K for my unit because it included a private garage, and have NO problem with the additional cost, but I do have a problem with car owners telling other car owners about how they are “subsidized” and how they should live their lives.
For those interested in the issues instead of moronic personal attacks … here is a worthwhile reason to ask for diesel buses to be parked on non-residential blocks which may contain children or seniors who have no filters for the outside air coming into their homes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/13/health/diesel-fumes-cause-lung-cancer-who-says.html?_r=0
THere’s also the map of air pollution problem areas – look at SoMa, especially near the Bay Bridge:
http://www.sustainablesf.org/indicators/view/40
Some choice quotes from the Department of Public Health:
Why Is This An Indicator Of Health and Sustainability?
Motor vehicle emissions, power plants, and refineries are the predominant sources of fine particulate air pollution (PM2.5). Several large-scale studies demonstrate that increased exposure to PM2.5 is associated with detrimental cardiovascular outcomes, including increased risk of death from ischemic heart disease, higher blood pressure, and coronary artery calcification.
Motor vehicles and other forms of fossil fuel combustion emit several toxic air contaminants that are either known or probable human carcinogens, including benzene, formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, and 1,3-butadiene. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that “mobile sources of air toxics account for as much as half of all cancers attributed to outdoor sources of air toxics.”
Additionally, in June 2012, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organization, updated their classification of diesel engine exhaust from a probable human carcinogen to carcinogenic to humans. The update was based on sufficient evidence that exposure to diesel exhaust can increase the risk of developing lung cancer and is positively associated with an increased risk of bladder cancer.
I guess if folks want to be complicit zombies, they call others NIMBY and such. Personally, I don’t want to invite a government entity to do something that medical research has proven will shorten my life.
Hyperbole aside, there is a valid point about the concentration of diesel smoke in urban canyons. Even if bus drivers shut down after parking in the layover area and start up just before the next run, there’s still going to be extra particulates and exhaust gas. When you start an engine cold it takes a while for it warm up to burn “to spec”. The catalytic converter needs to be hot. Until then the tailpipe will emit nonstandard stuff.
The most straightforward way to address the real problem is to swap in as many LPG buses as possible on these routes. Most large Indian cities have converted thousands of three wheeler taxis from nasty blue smokin two-stroke engines to cleaner LPG. Surely that took a lot more effort than what is needed here in SF.
@NoeValleyJim
Another progressive voice who thinks their smarter and better than the rest of us. You like telling others how to live their lives while you live by your own rules. Typical SFer…do as I say not as I do and Soooo compassionate.
Hey Jim, it just so happens residence, owners, and tenants who just happen live on a street with RPP parking and own a car pay a fee to the city for the “privilege” of parking on the street. Cost is something like $120+- a year. It’s not free.
Many of the new condos built in and around South Beach have parking deficits by design. Many have one parking space for each unit or less. A major problem for the residence in the area has been their neighborhood is designated a “downtown parking ” area by the city. Which means lots of loading zones and metered parking with higher rates and shorter time spans. This presents a problem for visitors, day care workers, home care providers, visiting nurses, etc. The “Y” RPP area allows residences to park their own vehicles on the street while their visitors use their parking space, if they happen to have a space.
Many of older building in the SoMa have no parking at all. Remember SoMa was not designed as a residential neighborhood. It was industrial and commercial. So resident parking by design was never planned for.
Those of you living in residential neighborhoods, like you Jim, with high densities may have a reason to bitch about on street paring issues. How about keeping it confined to your neighborhoods. Your totally clueless about South of Market neighborhood issues. Especially you NoeValleyJim.
Cost is something like $120+- a year. It’s not free.
LOL, that’s as close to free as it gets. Make that monthly and we might be talking about something approaching the true market price.
Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but I am in general in favor of any policy that decreases automobile usage. I think that automobile drivers are massively subsidized, to the detriment of pretty much everyone (including themselves). So yes, I want parking restrictions in new development and yes I want on street parking to be charged at market rates and yes I want traffic to be calmed and yes I want more streets converted to pedestrian and cyclist only use.
And the fact that I am arguing against my own economic self-interest in favor of the commonweal makes my argument stronger, not weaker.
I believe in the “freedom” to drive a car, but I think that the true cost, including all the misery and suffering inflicted on others, should be born by the car drivers, not passed off to less powerful members of society and citizens of the world.
I also believe in the freedom to hold any damn opinion you please. My right to state my opinion on a blog is at least as strong as your desire to not be discomforted by someone disagreeing with you. If you can’t stand ideas that differ from your own you should unplug from the Internet!
Sorry Keepitup, you live in a city with other people and we are all entitled to our opinions about how the city should be run. I work in SOMA and bicycle through there every day, so I have more vested interest than most, but even if I didn’t I would still have a right to an opinion. And a vote to make it happen and friends in city hall to help push my agenda and a membership in the Bicycle Coalition to keep making San Francisco more livable.
You are welcome to keep pushing your own selfish agenda, good luck with that. $120/yr is nothing near the market rate or cost to the city of providing that parking, I am going to continue to try and get that nominal fee increased. There are probably some specific use cases, like a home health nurse visiting a patient for example, that might deserve special treatment, but probably not. High meter fees help encourage turnover, which means that someone like a visiting nurse would be more likely to be able to find parking, not less. Sure, her visit will cost more but it should cost more because street space in a crowded area is more valuable. Why should thousands of bus riders be inconvenienced with slower trips so that a few car drivers can park in front of their house?
As the land use changes, some people will be inconvenienced, that happens with all changes. Perhaps they should be compensated in some fashion, but they should not have the ability to block the change that improves live for so many.
@NoeValleyJim
There you go again Jim “..we are all entitled..”. Thank you for making my point!
Hey Jim, when do you start paying your fair share for the right to park your bike on city streets and sidewalks? When do you bike riders start paying fees to the rest of us to use our public infrastructure? They do it in Montreal. The do it in Berkeley. Those fees could be used to teach bike safety to riders like the one that killed that poor senior guy crossing the street in the Castro. Hello, pedestrians have rights too!
And as we all know, that is except for maybe you Jim, all public transportation in the Bay area is subsidized with local, Federal and State tax dollars. So if your going to bitch about low fees for the RPP program at least be intellectually honest. We are all paying to subsidize one thing or another. That is except bike riders…..lol. So don’t make me laugh with your fake arguments. Time to put parking meters in place for bikes. Oh by the way, how much do you pay to store your bike in that shinny new storage room that the building department now requires new building owners provide and include in their design? Most likely your being subsidized aren’t you? My guess is and your the one that said it best “we are all entitled”.
There you go again Jim…do as I say not as I do.
@anon
“LOL, that’s as close to free as it gets. Make that monthly and we might be talking about something approaching the true market price.”
Tell that to the guy living in a SRO in the SoMa who just happens to live in a building with no parking, has a car to get to work, makes minimum wage, pays $4 bucks a gallon for gas. Your soooo compassionate.
That’s the thing I love about all you progressives…..Your soooo compassionate. Yea, let’s make it right and make the guy earning $1200 a month pay $400 a month for parking on the street. I get it.
Sorry, I’m not going to feel sorry for a person who lives in an SRO and owns a car. They need to get their priorities straight. “Compassion” isn’t bending over backwards to make sure that no one ever has to change behavior, regardless of how insanely stupid it is.
And car drivers are the most entitled of all. I see you crying crocodile tears over the one pedestrian killed by a cyclist but no mention of the 15 a year killed by cars. Why is that?
It is indeed a tragedy that someone was run over as a regular cyclist I would welcome some kind of requirement of driver’s ed for new cyclists. My main fear these days is that I am going to get run over by another cyclist on Market Street. But the main threat to all other users of the public roads continues to be private automobiles. What is your plan for reducing that danger?
I personally already pay a huge amount of taxes that fund the building of infrastructure. You don’t really believe that gasoline taxes and use fees pay the full cost of the roadways, do you?
I believe that mass transit users, pedestrians and bicyclists should be preferentially subsidized over automobile drivers. Auto usage causes more negative externalities and should be discouraged. The inverse is true today, which is why our country is in such a mess.
The guy that lives in an SRO in SOMA and needs a car to drive to work should probably be nudged economically to either find a place of employment closer to where he lives or perhaps move closer to where the jobs are. This is exactly the kind of bad land use policy that we subsidize far too much of. Though it is much more common that it is the middle-class commuter living in the suburbs that is getting the subsidy and encouraged to continue his bad behavior.
I did say that there should be some kind of compensation and a grandfathering period to allow people to adjust to land use changes. But they should not be enshrined into law or public consciousness as some kind of permanent right. The SOMA residential perking permit holders want to try and push for that. Luckily, they in the minority and will be rolled back.
@anon
Again, thank you for making my point….
“Sorry, I’m not going to feel sorry for a person who lives in an SRO and owns a car. They need to get their priorities straight. “Compassion” isn’t bending over backwards to make sure that no one ever has to change behavior, regardless of how insanely stupid it is.”
I thank my lucky stars I only spend limited time in this city of nut jobs…..and compassionate hearts. How stupid of me to think the guy living in a SRO has got his priorities wrong. Bad me….Oh lordly lordly will I ever get it right?
Pretty funny that you are not even a resident Keepitup but you feel entitled to lecture us all on how we should live. Where do you spend most of your time, may I ask? What municipalities do you think get it right?
@NoeValleyJim
Thank you for your wise and exalted direction on how the rest of us should live our lives.
Thank God for progressives. Where would we be without their wisdom and guidance. Hey it worked in the USSR all those years, so why can’t it work here?
I love it when you want to make us live your lifestyle for the common good. Hey, by the way, my kid sister and her six kids are coming to town next week. Would you mind sharing your house for the common good. My SRO room only has one bed…now come’on it’s for the commons.
Hey, we are all progressives here in SF and it’s your duty to share what you have with the rest of us. Right?
Sorry, I have to go tend to the community garden now so I will be signing off for a while.
@NoeValleyJim
…”Pretty funny that you are not even a resident Keepitup….”
Dear Jim….that’s a misquote. I never said I wasn’t a resident. I said I spend limited time here.
Off the the garden now…..
I wouldn’t call myself a progressive. As it is I’m asking for the market price to be paid for parking, you’re the one looking for the government handout.
@Keepitup You still haven’t answered the question, I notice. Where do you spend your time when you are not in San Francisco? Who has a better model of civic engagement and service that you would have us San Franciscans aspire to? I am not asking to be argumentative, I am genuinely curious.
I do not advocate a top-down Soviet style planning system, that is just your straw man way to avoid debating the actual topic. I do however want better planning.
After taking a while to think about it, I think that if the SOMA residents can come up with a better plan to meet the needs of the various transit agencies, then that would be worth considering. Just trying to keep all these agencies from being able to operate to save a few parking spaces is a non-starter. The pollution argument seems mostly like a red herring to me, but of course the laws on idling buses should be enforced. I am a big fan of the various private buses that operate on Noe streets, to answer a topic brought up earlier. If you notice, a few cranky residents tried to block their operation but were unsuccessful. I do believe that a majority of Noe residents feel the same way that I do.
MoD’s desire to have everyone run NatGas buses is eminently reasonable, but we have to run our transit system with the buses we have not the buses we wish we had.
“Yes, I do own a car now, after 20 years of no car ownership. I needed one to drive my daughter to school after SFUSD did not give me an assignment in my neighborhood. We use it once or twice a week. I know from experience that you can live just fine in San Francisco without a car and I encourage San Francisco to make it as difficult and as expensive as possible to own and operate one here, including my own.”
Posted by: NoeValleyJim at September 12, 2012 12:25 AM
@NoeValleyJim, Why do YOU want to tell others how they can live? I have owned property (home and rentals) in San Francisco since 1988, yet feel no need to look down my nose at newer arrivals and how they commute. When did you decide YOU could select how others in the city get move about?
Why do YOU want to tell others how they can live?
Are you not doing the same?
Nope, just fascinated why some people who own cars and live in single family homes with garages, yards, trees, space, light and clean air want to then tell other people “Tough, you live in a city”, “Get over it” , “move to Ohio”, etc. NoeValleyJim has been writing about how he is against cars for years on this site and others, and yet owns an automobile himself! That is like being against private ownership of guns, but carrying and using one yourself.
I have no problem with people in Rincon Hill being involved in how their neighborhood is to change and it is not always Nimbyism to question developers plans. As mentioned before, nobody attacked people on here when they complained about the GOOGLE, Facebook and Apple busses in Noe Valley, so why is Jamie being attacked by some? Do you think if these busses were to sit on 24th street nobody would object?
You seem to be confusing a bunch of different discussions and boiling them down to “I don’t like NoeValleyJim” because he owns a car yet doesn’t want all laws in the city to be overwhelmingly weighted towards others that own cars and against anyone who doesn’t own a car. Seems like he has a right to arguing for policies against his own interest if he likes.
I am pretty open and honest about my life, which leaves me open to bizarre personal attacks. I don’t really mind though, I am a big boy and I can take it.
When are you going to answer my questions though?
How is it a “personal attack” to remind you that you mentioned you are against car usage in the city, but you yourself own and use a vehicle? (Which is your right) You entitled to to your opinions and it is not “personal”. The problem I have is no different than if someone complained about the shadows caused by a new tower, and then turned around and built a tower themselves, I just find it confusing. It is not an “attack” to point this out. NVJ, I actually agree with some of your thoughts but my goal would be to build better transit first before punishing car usage and parking. including yours.
Now, imho, the REAL “personal attacks” were made against Jamie who was called a “whiner”, or how about this comment “If Jamie Whitaker gets cancer from buses on the street outside his HEPA-filtered condo, he should just call the waaaaaahmbulance”
That is what I call an attack and not helpful dialogue!
NVJ, I have not called you a hypocritr, or any other attack words, I just pointed out that I remember you mentioned owning and using a car, using roads “heavily subsidized ” by tax money (as you yourself wrote).
If reminding you of comments they have made in the past is an “attack” I stand guilty as charged. Enjoy your Sunday.
I’m baffled at what you’re talking about. NVJ himself has said that he owns a car AND that he approves of efforts to make car ownership more expensive. Am I missing something? You seem to WANT to call him a hypocrite, but um, that ain’t hypocrisy.
If I recall correctly though NVJ owns a car, he makes a strong effort to use alternative transport when possible. Same goes for myself. My car hasn’t been on the streets in 2013 yet.
—————————
NVJ – I had thought that Muni or AC Transit already had LPG buses in their fleets. I agree that it doesn’t make sense to buy new equipment to fix the situation. Perhaps they could lease clean LPG or hydrogen powered vehicles from another transit agency? The problem that Jamie is concerned is just temporary anyways and should be resolved once the Transbay is complete.
I ride the Marina Express, bike, walk and barely use my car which has a private garage . Does this mean I can be against on street parking as well? Do as I say, not as I do! So now the new standard is if you only use cars part time you can be against other drivers ?
As mentioned earlier, the same goes for bus parking. The howls from the Noe Valley crowd about private busses make me wonder why it is ok for Soma and not for them?
The proposed removal of parking on north Polk Street for bike lanes as well as the planned installation of parking meters throughout residential streets in the Marina and Cow Hollow tell me this is the next big urban battle.
Does this mean I can be against on street parking as well? Do as I say, not as I do!
I don’t understand this. I use on-street parking now, but I ALSO think it is criminally under-priced and a despicable case of government subsidization of something that doesn’t need to be subsidized. Using something and agreeing that it needs to be changed to something else are not mutually exclusive.
I think that we should have much, MUCH higher gas taxes (on a state and federal level) than we do, even though I currently buy gas with the lower taxes in place – should I not use gas because of that? That makes no sense.
“Why do YOU want to tell others how they can live?”
Do you mean to ask why do I think that I have a right to participate in the political process, vote for the candidate of my choice and try to influence how my tax dollars are spent?
Why do you want to silence my efforts to be a good citizen and participate in the democratic process?