Take a look at this segment created by the “Strava Community” of troubled Strava, Inc. owners, managers, and/or users.
See? This is a bike trip down Nob Hill through the Tenderloin to the Mid Market:
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Note the innocuous-sounding title: Hyde/Market st.
But also note the URL up there. The name of this segment used to be “Hyde Street Bomb!” But that doesn’t look so hot when you’re in the national news for getting sued.
Oh, here it is, have a go on the YouTube – will the cyclist beat all those cagers in Priuseses what stop for red lights? Hells yes:
Now, do you think that the “Strava Community” might have had an effect on the behavior of this cyclist?
You Make The Call.
And oh, here’s how that Strava webpage looked before, was it just a day ago? Two days ago? I don’t know. But this is quite a recent change. Alls I know is that somebody in the “Strava Community,” be it an owner, manager, legal advisor, person following instructions from a legal advisor, cyclist, or, really, anybody in the entire world, created this segment and/or edited it.
The people at Strava, Inc. aren’t what you call transparent, so it’s hard to tell.
Anyway, here’s your Hyde Street Bomb!
Does registering for Strava and racing down Nob Hill in this fashion make you an “athlete?”
Oh, wait, they’re hiring so you can become a hack today. But, so is MUNI, generally, and that’s a much better gig, even if you’d generally rather work for yourself instead of The Man.
Just saying.
Remember how jarring this scene was, back in the day? Look, it’s the Taxi of Yesterday:
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Oh, wait, here’s the Minority Report, below, sort of. (Oh, and here’s another one, one about increasing the price of fares….)
Anyway, this is fresh from this morning. (500 more paratransit cabs? Sounds like a lot…)
“I wanted to alert you to a rather ominous development. At today’s meeting of the Paratransit Coordinating Council (which advises Muni and the city on the paratransit program), representatives from Yellow, Luxor and DeSoto proposed and got passed a recommendation for 500 more cabs, with the medallions going not to drivers, but to . . . guess who . ? . the very companies making the proposal! (And maybe a few others as well).
It’s not a typo: five hundred. And it’s not coming from some sector of the public that feels underserved. That might be understandable, even though the number is preposterously high, because the public doesn’t have a grasp on the economics of our job or the variety of factors that influence the level of service we provide. This is coming from our own industry, people who understand (though they obviously don’t give a shit) how hard drivers work, how little they make, and how devastating this would be to them. This is about the most callous, cynical, self-serving proposal I’ve seen in my 25-plus years in the industry.
We don’t know where, if anywhere, this idea will go from here. The MTA, which has decision-making power, is currently considering a modest proposal for a pilot program of perhaps 25 peak-time cabs. I believe peak-time medallions are a sensible alternative to full-time cabs, and I could support a limited experiment with the idea, provided the medallions go to drivers, not companies; that a thorough evaluation is made of their performance before any additional medallions are approved; and lastly — and most importantly — that the MTA commit to and fund a serious study of a centralized or integrated dispatch system. Such a system could provide substantial service improvements and put more money in drivers’ pockets by greatly increasing the efficiency of the existing fleet.
The city has always fallen back on more cabs as the glib and easy answer to service problems. The fact is that you can never put enough cabs on the street to address the complexities of the service equation. If that number were ever reached, the job of cab driving would simply not be worth having, not even to people starving for work. Greater efficiency is the solution. Systems like Cabulous and the proposed Open Taxi Access can go a long ways toward that goal, and so can an integrated dispatch system. We must insist that the city adopt these approaches before approving any significant increase in the number of cabs.
Lastly — need I say it? — in my mind, the principle that medallions must go to those who are out on the streets, putting in the long, grueling hours, serving the public, rather than to companies that have relegated themselves to the role of rental agencies, whose every interaction with their drivers, from the assignment of cabs and shifts, to the providing of dispatch, to the collection of gates, is performed with a corrupt hand reaching into the driver’s pocket; that principle is sacrosanct, and worth whatever fight it takes to keep it intact. I trust you agree.
Mark Gruberg United Taxicab Workers”
Oh, wait, 25 peak-time cabs? That doesn’t sound like much at all.
Anyway, in honor of Daylight Savings kicking in, enjoy some posts on an evening trip up McAllister last night. These are the kind of things you missed before they Turned Off the Dark.
These guys with the flashlights at night on Post Street (and other places about town) provide the questionable “service” of pointing out where empty parking spaces are. They’ll guide you in and then expect compensation of an undefined amount.
This casual parking program is certainly cheaper than SFPark, cause, you know, that’s going to add up when we start paying back the Feds the eight figures they’re fronting for all those sensors on the ground.
Remember back in the day, back when the SFPark website promised that “Drivers will love SFPark?” Well, I do, and so does the Google Cache, at least it does for now.
Anyway, below you can see the old SFPark homepage, the one that was up until just recently. (The word “love” is highlighted because that’s the search term I used to find it in the cache.) Click to expand:
But, as stated, that love language is gone now, so that’s a good thing. What’s left is a patronizing, cartoonish website with a patronizing, cartoonish video that talks about how a third of traffic (or something) in San Francisco is made up of people looking for parking. That, of course, is fucking absurd. I’m sure that stat, employed using the passive voice, if you’d note, might be operational in Chinatown during New Year’s or in North Beach on any given Friday night, but otherwise, it’s fucking absurd.
And do people really all turn into agitated George Costanzas when they park, all raging at the machine? That’s what it’s like, IRL? Really? I’ll bet if you asked what people were thinking about when they’re parking you’d get all kinds of different answers.
But what about these despondent folks waiting for a #5 Fulton for an excessively long time? Could MUNI make a “whimsical video” about what’s on their minds?
(How about a dozen “MUNI sucks” thought bubbles? That would fit the bill.)
Basically, SFPark will allow the City to collect more money from parking meters. That’s good for some and it’s not good for others. It would be refreshing if the people at SFPark would acknowledge that. Why do they spend so much effort selling a program that’s already a done deal?
SFPark will allow the City to charge up to $18 per hour. That’s something that would be physically impossible with the typical, old-school, non-debit card meters that we’re used to dealing with. Can you imagine putting 72 quarters into a meter to park for one hour? (How often would it have to get emptied?)
Not that it’s not worth it for people to pay $18 per hour to park sometimes. I’m sure that there are lots who would love to pay whatever it takes to park on Columbus right in frontof their restaurant in North Beach on a Saturday night. The problem is that SFPark is going to charge $0 per hour to park in North Beach after 6:00 PM, AFAIK. So does that make sense?
But if Uncle Sucker wants to pay us eight figures to set up this system, that’s its choice.
Obviously, there will be winners and losers whenever a government institutes a new program like this, so it’d be nice not to have such a pollyannish, snow-job website.
Anyway, losing the “love” language is a slight improvement, so hurray for that.
The evening drive is still going on every day at 7:00 PM on Fell Street and the famous gas station is still open for business every day, so why do we allow drivers to park their cars in the new gas queue lane starting at 7:00 PM every day?
Couldn’t the no-parking hours be more closely matched to the ARCO station’s operating hours instead of just being 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM? Sure it could.
Just after 7:oo PM, when all the City’s recent hard work is for naught:
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Are a handful of rich NIMBYs more powerful than the City and County?
