It makes sense. It was ridiculous that they were originally proposing ticketing people without there being signage that it was illegal to park there. They need to just paint the curbs.
No. Driving a car is a privilege, and a dangerous one at that, which requires a competency test. It is not unreasonable to expect licensed drivers to know the statewide laws that govern that privilege without reminder signs.
IMHO, that culture needs to be changed: better public transport and walkable cities.
When that is established, then it is also easier to revoke the drivers privilege.
you can live well without
I don't believe any of the above are outlier or unreasonable positions to have.
Yet a family in that situation would severely struggle to fit everything in if they had to rely solely on public transport to get between home, school and after-school activities.
(I grew up in London, where public transport is often faster than driving. In San Francisco, most of my car journeys would take 3-4 times as long by public transport.)
But I think perhaps if someone told me "We don't live well. I can only take my child to swim class on the weekends" I would think that somewhat strange.
My son's swim school is 20 mins away by car, or 60 mins by public transport.
I take your point that these are first world problems.
But my point is that not having access to a car in San Francisco is a significant inconvenience and it's incorrect to say 'you can live well' without that access. You might not be so inconvenienced that you would say "we don't live well", but there's a 'meh' zone in between the two.
LPB is 23 vs 39 for me but I do drive. Either way I wouldn't think it "meh".
But I suppose standards of living in the US are by default so far ahead of other places that these are considered the minimum to not be "meh" here.
LPB is 23 vs 39 for me but I do drive. Either way I wouldn't think it "meh".
- the time between now and the journey start time
- delays
So you would need to budget an hour each way, i.e. a total of 2.5 hours for a 30 minute swim lesson.
Imagine doing that for every single thing you need to do.
These are complaints of generality that don't have relevance in the specific case.
But it's also a chicken and egg problem: often transit is not viable or is too slow precisely because everything is devoted to cars. The SF Van Ness BRT is an excellent example - I used to routinely get off the 49 bus and walk faster than it stuck in car traffic, but after the BRT the bus is a much better and faster experience than driving could ever be.
One of the most common reasons for watering down or canceling pedestrian, transit, and biking infra projects is a refusal to negatively impact driving in any way, even if the net societal benefit (especially to lower income households who take transit at much higher rates) is far greater.
Good governance requires sometimes unpopular choices (see Paris's recent bicycle transformation, or SF's recent recall election over the creation of a new public park in place of a redundant street)
It's funny that you use that particular example considering the SF Supervisors of 1958 are the ones who created that problem by refusing to build the elevated freeway that transit planning engineers correctly envisioned we would need. Tearing down the stub end of it also created the most dangerous intersection in the city at Market & Octavia. As a pedestrian it would be so nice to have cars elevated up off the ground instead of having to wait to cross on foot. A lot of intersections of Octavia and its cross streets don't even allow pedestrian crossing at all lmfao
I saw someone just parked in the right lane (of two) heading up California street at maybe Mason. Just sitting there reading a book. <!>
Or just maybe "driver's license is a privilege that requires you to study and know the rules of the road" is a fallacious claim that rests on pedantic legal formalism and an impoverished sense of human psychology.
In many places in the US, there is a culture of legibility, whereby informational affordances are relevantly and generously provisioned. This allows for more certainty for both facility users and rule enforcers. On the flip side, there are a lot of signs all over the place.
The question still stands. How do you ensure you detect changes rules of the road in order to maintain your privilege?
>>>>>>> Where I live, many people park at intersections right up to the curb
>>>>>> This is now illegal in some states
>>>>> It's illegal in California but in San Francisco official policy is to not enforce this law.
>>>>> If there's no red paint on the curb, they won't ticket you.
>>>> It was ridiculous that they were originally proposing ticketing people without there being signage that it was illegal to park there.
>>> Why? Having a driver's license is a privilege that requires you to study and know the rules of the road.
>> Do you have an rss feed of road rules piped into Anki cards or what?
> No, I don't; there are plenty of places you can't legally park that do not have painted curbs or "No Parking" signage.(Also, in the specific context of this discussion, parking restrictions near intersections are super common; this is not some esoteric new law that has been introduced. See https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume...)
Your claim is now tickets are the loss function for building one's road rule model? What happened to the requirement for study?
1. Media campaigns (posters, PR etc.).
2. A multi-month period last year during which they issues 'warning' tickets (with nothing for the driver to pay).
You could argue that people cannot be expected to carry tape measures with them, because their glove compartments are too small.
But the difficulty of judging the distance from the intersection is a factor in a minority of cases.
SFMTA could have chosen to enforce the law but allow a tolerance of 5 feet. That would start providing safety benefits earlier without surprising any driver who made an honest mistake in their estimate of the distance.