On Bicycles, and.... what else is there?

One or maybe two times per week I ride the 42 miles from home to work with SF2G , a group of long-distance bike commuters which began with Google employees but has branched out to employees of other high-tech companies on the San Francisco Bay peninsula. Really there's no way I would be able to tolerate my commute if I had to take the train back and forth five days per week (or drive even one day per week). And the nice thing about riding is after a good ride in I feel fantastic: full of energy and alert all day. It's great; if it wasn't that riding got me into work on the latish side, around 9:30 am, I'd do it more. John Murphy's been an SF2G regular for longer than I have. This year he's had the audacity to ask three candidates for San Francisco mayor to join us at the start of the ride, typically 6:30 am in Ritual Roasters on Valencia Street. San Francisco is a city of around 800 thousand people ; surely mayoral candidates have better things to do wit...

Here's how I plan to vote on the San Francisco ballot propositions: Proposition A This is a bond to repair schools. Sorry, school repairs should not be paid for out of bond debt. They're an ongoing maintenance cost, and for those you need to raise revenue. I'm against any bond measure which isn't an obvious short-term expense for a long-term benefit. Repairs don't meet that standard. A bond would just rob the school system of future funding as more of the budget goes to paying the costs of this bond. Proposition B This proposition would borrow $260M to pave the streets, among other things. Sure: road maintenance is an important investment, but this is absolutely the wrong way to fund it. The city simply needs to find funds to pave streets from its annual $6.6B budget. If you fund maintenance this year with debt, you just make it that much harder to balance the books in future years as you pay the cost of that debt, and I don't foresee it getting any ...

In the 2011 San Francisco Mayor's Election (election day is this November, but early voting has already begun), there are 12 "major" candidates... from the LOWV debate: Adachi Alioto-Pier Avalos Baum Chiu Dufty Hall Herrera Lee Rees Ting Yee There are four others running: Ascarrunz, Currier, Lawrence, and Pang, but I think it's safe to say none of these four candidates is in the running, given their lack of representation in the debates so far. San Francisco switched this mayor's election to Instant Runoff Voting . The way this works is each virtual "round" the candidate receiving the least non-zero number of first-place votes is eliminated, along implicitly with those receiving no first-place votes. Votes lower than first place on the ballots of those who voted for this eliminated candidate are then promoted until either there are no votes left on the ballot (the ballot is "exhausted") or the new first place vote on the ballot is still...

When Cara said she wanted to go on a vacation I asked her where she wanted to go. Hawaii, she suggested. Hawaii. I'd only been there once: to Oahu for a conference in Waikiki. Nice riding on Oahu, but I knew we'd not be going to Oahu this time. There was only one island which could be on this agenda. Maui. Why? One word: Haleakala. Ever since reading the description in John Summerson's book, I knew I had to go. In the rankings, only three climbs in the United States have a rating exceeding 6: Mount Washington Auto Road in New Hampshire (6.45), Mauna Kea on the epinonymous island of Hawaii (6.33), and Haleakala (6.13). Of these, two have bike races. Of these two, only Haleakala is open to general bike traffic. Mauna Kea (and nearby Mauna Loa, rated 5.26) aren't paved to their summits. So of the four, the clear choice is Haleakala. There are several ways to approach Haleakala. After all, the entire eastern half of Maui sits on the mountain, which rises fr...

I want to revisit Jerry Brown's pocket veto of SB910 , Lowenthal's bill which would require a 3-foot passing margin when passing cyclists while driving more than 15 mph, and would further allow drivers to legally cross the double yellow line when doing so and when line-of-sight allowed: Here's Brown's explanation : On streets with a speed limit of 35 or 45 mph, slowing to 15 mph to pass a cyclist could cause rear-end collisions. On the other hand, a cyclist riding near 15 mph could cause a long line of vehicles behind the cyclist. This conclusion is exactly correct if the bill required a 3-foot passing distance and that the driver go no more than 15 mph. For example, it was proposed cyclists on the Golden Gate Bridge be restricted to riding no more than 5 mph when passing pedestrians. It would then become illegal to pass a pedestrian going at or in excess of 5 mph. But that's obviously not what the bill requires. In fact, nobody giving the bill more than...

First Jerry Brown vetoed Sen. Mark Leno's SB 223 , a bill which would have allowed cities to restore the vehicle license fee which Governor Schwarzenegger had eliminated during his administration. Whether or not you think cities tax too much or not, vehicle fees are fair and rational, because they help reimburse the city for infrastructure supporting motor vehicles. Further they have a negative impact on congestion, promote public safety by getting cars off the road, and promote demand for public transit which helps promote denser schedules. The bill didn't establish a fee, it merely gave cities the right to impose them. But SB910, the Lowenthal's bill to mandate a 3-foot passing zone when a motor vehicle passes a cyclist while driving at least 15 mph, seemed different. There was no reasonable argument against the bill, which had early flaws but which was, after several iterations, pounded into excellent shape. Amazingly, despite the opposition of the Republican minor...

The San Francisco Bike Coalition has been flooding Facebook and Twitter with posts supporting Proposaition B in San Francisco, a bill which would use a $260 million bond to pave roads. The population of San Franciso is 800 thousand , so that works out to a around $300 per person in the city. Now if you got a bill in the mail for $300 so the city could upgrade its roads, on top of the city's rapidly growing budget presently at $6.6 billion (according to last night's mayor candidate debate at UCSF), you might be disturbed. It's extremely unlikely if there was a proposition asking each citizen of the city to pay $300 for roads that it would pass. You can even pro-rate it as you will, make those with higher income, more property, even bigger cars pay more and you'd rightly ask: "but I already pay taxes for a city spending money at an all-time record rate, even adjusting for inflation, why should I pay more for such a basic service?" The proposition would cr...