Stop, Drop and Roll

22 June 2007 | Alameda Community, Alameda Community Development Forum, Measure A | John Knox White

Ok, so there’s absolutely no connection between the title of this post and what follows, but having had a Neil Diamond theme running through my titles all week, I felt this song couldn’t be left out and therefore just bit the bullet and used it.

There’s this general idea floating around out there among a small group of Keep-Measure-A-or-bust (KMAB) folks that anyone interested in talking about Measure A and it’s possible constraints (yes, and benefits) is assuming that “everyone” will take transit, or bike, or walk.

The assumption is that anyone interested in the discussion is advocating for “thousands of new homes” to be built (quote courtesy of the Don Roberts Show (DRS), I watch occasionally, because you don’t). While I plan on using Wednesday night’s DRS discussion because it’s easy to refer to, I in no way mean to say that Don and Pat are the only purveyors of these fallacies, there are others, many of whom are named Dave for some reason.

Ms. Bail and her chuckling cohort riffed most of the night on the ridiculousness of transit, bicycling and walking in ones every day life. The story that caught my ear was Ms. Bail proving her assertion that no one uses transit or carpools by referring to a recent SF Chronicle “Two Cents” piece on Carpooling in which all six writers said that they didn’t carpool into SF. Not one of them said they carpool or use transit to get to the city, thus it is proven again that no one uses transit or carpools.

Missed in this fabulous point, which I contend is a perfect example of the arguments used by KMAB, is the fact that the Chronicle only took comments from “people who commute to San Francisco by car and do not carpool.“ I cut and pasted that line from the Two Cents email that was sent out to people interested in commenting. Notice how the sample of people is specifically limited to people who drive into SF? What’s the likelihood that a non-carpooling, auto-commuter is going to write in to talk about their carpooling and transit experience? Nil? That is my guess.

I have never heard anyone say that by increasing the density of housing in XXXX specific place in Alameda (for some reason Don and Pat were talking about the Northern Waterfront, though typically this discussion centers around Alameda Point), then everyone will take transit. I have heard, in fact I have said, that by selectively creating residential spaces of various densities will increase the “per household” ridership of transit and other means UP and that if one were to keep the number of households equal in a Measure A configuration and a non-Measure A configuration, the amount of driving caused by the housing would be decreased.

“AHA!” shouts KMAB! (they like exclamation points and capital letters, what can I say). “Manhattan is dense and Manhattan has traffic, therefore density = traffic!”

Manhattan is overrun by over One Million cars a day that come from low-density areas surrounding Manhattan. Many of these cars are coming from the sprawl around Manhattan, not being generated by the households in Manhattan. This example actually proves the point. The more sprawl, the more traffic. (One can say that it’s better to sprawl and therefore the additional traffic is acceptable, but making the argument that traffic is reduced by sprawl is nonsensical).

Despite being an island, human behavior is human behavior. It is possible (and therefore should be studied) that building denser housing at Alameda Point will allow for better transit and therefore lower traffic per household. Those concerned about traffic, rather than just using it as a scare tactic, should be encouraging the city to look at all methods of lessening its impact caused by whatever development happens at the point.