April 25th, 2007 9:06 am
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Why is SF lagging behind London and NYC? Aren’t we supposed to be the most progressive city - particularly when it comes to environmental measures. SF needs to get on board with these other cities and charge drivers a congestion tax for driving downtown. This would make the city cleaner, easier to get around, and a hell of a lot more environmentally friendly. The revenue, of course, would need to go toward expanding and improving the quality of the city’s public transit options. I guarantee there’d be far fewer cars downtown if, for example, BART extended further down the Peninsula and up into Marin, or if Caltrain went all the way downtown instead of stopping at King, or if Muni were a little cleaner, faster, and more reliable.
Jim Stack
- : 1.0
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April 27th, 2007 at 3:40 am
Cal Train is going all the way downtown. They are extending it to the Transbay. I think BART should be extended all the way down to SJ too, but that’s not really a San Francisco city issue. Bart to Marin was the original plan but a study decided against it because the cost of building a transbay tube or putting trains on the Golden Gate was too much/not structurally possible. I think Commuters from Marin are the least of the transit problems though.
I totally agree on taxing drivers. And I say this as a downtown resident who also drives because public transit isn’t good enough. I want to use public transit, but its just not good enough yet. Charging a toll to cars entering the city would help fund public transit improvement and possibly reduce cars in the city. It would be easy charging cars from the northbay and east bay because they come over on the bridges, how to toll cars coming up from the peninsula, though seems a bit more tricky.
Even so, this needs to be done RIGHT NOW. San Francisco is WAY too car based and I think this idea would be too controversial, that’s probably why Gavin is being all quiet about it in an election year. Hopefully he’ll start talking about this again after he’s re-elected.