[Carfreeliving] Will LA leapfrog San Francisco?

[Tom Radulovich]

Thanks, David, I guess i never felt I had a quarrel with Mike, and  
although I haven't worked with him directly, he is pretty well  
thought of here at the treehouse. I'm sorry he feels like I peed in  
his corn flakes, but I swear I have never been anywhere near his corn  
flakes.

I have been at the receiving end of a lot of vitriol from Mike and  
Oliver, which I feel is misdirected. Killing the messenger, by  
carrying on about how uniformed, misguided, negative irrational etc.  
that I, or Jim Chappell, or other folks on the receiving end, happen  
to be, won't serve to advance their cause. If the TLC/SPUR report was  
hopelessly inaccurate, it is hard to believe that the MTA Executive  
Director (who was given a draft to review in advance of its  
publication, and well as a meeting to make sure we were on the right  
track) had no problems with it, told us that is was pretty much what  
he had in mind, and chose to enact almost all of its recommendations  
as presented. And it's not as though I have any undue influence at  
MTA; this year's awful MTA budget pretty well proves that.

What was very revealing about writing the paper was the extent to  
which the DPW and Muni sides of the house viewed the other as the  
problem. I  received a few calls and emails from Muni folks  
castigating me for the merger proposal, swearing that Jack Fleck  
would be put in charge of the whole thing and it would be the end of  
Muni as we know it. DPT folks also called to tell me that Peter  
Strauss would be put in charge of MTA planning, and that it would be  
the end of the happy DPT family, as well as the bike program, livable  
streets, etc. In the end neither 'side' won; a qualified outsider was  
chosen to lead the combined department. But the more it went on, the  
more the necessity of the merger became apparent; the culture of both  
organizations, so negatively fixated on the other, must change if we  
are make this city livable. And while it may feel like a shotgun  
wedding to those inside, I think that when all of the rancor is over  
(hopefully soon!) that MTA will live up to the promise of its  
creation, which was really quite bold; create an integrated agency  
that runs the transit system, allocates space on city streets,  
controls the on-street and city-owned off-street parking, etc. MTA  
controls most of the policy levers necessary to make this city a  
livable and sustainable one, if they can only figure out how,  
politically and administratively, to work them in concert.

How is that for a half-full glass?

Best,

Tom

Tom Radulovich
Executive Director
Transportation for a Livable City
995 Market Street Suite 1550
San Francisco CA 94103
415 344-0489
www.livablecity.org
tom at livablecity.org



On Aug 24, 2005, at 4:58 PM, David Baker wrote:

> would you guys make up? please?
>
> I agree with both sides to this issue, but let's be inspired to do  
> even better than we've been doing, which given all the issues is  
> pretty good.  When you're close to an issue the problems seem to  
> come to the fore, while visitors to SF from other cities tend to  
> think we've got a little bike heaven going here.
>
> Though Mike, and don't take this personally, it's hard to think of  
> a better word than "glacial" to characterize the implementation of  
> he top 20 bike network projects!
>
> Don't shoot! Please!
>
> db
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/carfreeliving_livablecity.org/attachments/20050824/9e792fcf/attachment.htm