I guess your point is that by implementing congestion pricing, San Francisco would become so much mo

A newly updated study ( reported by SF Weekly ) by the SFCTA counted fewer cars at 11 of 15 intersections during evening peak hours this year, compared to earlier counts taken between 2009 and 2012. Driving speeds, monte carlo hotel casino meanwhile, are increasing monte carlo hotel casino moderately.
As SF Weekly s Joe Eskenazi pointed out , the data fly in the face of anecdotes from drivers who almost universally feel that car congestion is always getting monte carlo hotel casino worse. monte carlo hotel casino And given the city s booming economy, population, and construction in recent years, that s one scenario that certainly would have been plausible had the 20th-century status quo continued.
monte carlo hotel casino SFCTA transportation planner Dan Tischler acknowledged that, despite the somewhat limited scope of the study, all of the evidence available indicates that San Francisco commuters are driving monte carlo hotel casino less, and likely switching to other modes to get around.
We are not really sure if traffic conditions are worse now than they were a few years ago, but we do have strong evidence that transit is playing monte carlo hotel casino an increasingly significant role in handling growth in travel demand, said Tischler.
monte carlo hotel casino Most importantly, Tischler noted, driving speeds have largely remained flat, or even increased slightly, from 2011 to 2013. That contradicts monte carlo hotel casino any notion that fewer cars were counted because congestion is causing them to moving through more slowly. (Slower speeds would actually increase throughput, since cars follow one another more closely at slow speeds.)
The SF Chronicle reported  on the increased driving speeds in April, and said the findings were confirmed by a separate study by Inrix, a traffic information company, conducted at the Chronicle s request.
The 15 intersections studied by the SFCTA were all in and around downtown, mainly along Mission Street (six intersections) and Van Ness Avenue (five intersections). Two intersections were in the Tenderloin: Turk and Hyde streets and McAllister and Leavenworth streets. The intersection of Columbus Avenue and Broadway was the only one to see an increase in vehicle traffic, by 5 percent.
One outlier in the data was the 31 percent traffic drop seen at Mission and Fourth streets, but Tischler noted that it was likely due to the closure of Stockton Street to vehicle traffic due to construction on the Central Subway.
Elsewhere, a traffic drop of 22 percent was recorded at Van Ness and Geary Street, a 20 percent drop at Van Ness and Broadway, and a 16 percent drop at McAllister and Leavenworth. The rest of the intersections saw smaller declines, while three saw a similar amount of traffic.
As the Chronicle reported in its April article, the SFCTA s studies showed average driving speeds have increased in downtown, by 3 to 5 percent between 2011 and 2013. Speeds through 95 percent of the intersections monitored monte carlo hotel casino in the city s core remained the same (58 percent) or decreased (37 percent), wrote the Chronicle s Michael Cabanatuan. Freeway speeds showed even bigger increases, rising 15 percent during both the morning and evening rush hours. That implies that fewer people are driving into San Francisco, a supposition other statistics support.
On the Bay Bridge, car traffic decreased by about 2.8 percent from 2013 to 2014, the Chronicle monte carlo hotel casino reported. monte carlo hotel casino Golden Gate Bridge traffic reportedly increased by 3.7 percent, though Caltrans counts from 2011 to 2012 at the Highway 1 and 101 entrances showed traffic holding steady and declining 2 percent, respectively.
One major takeaway from all these numbers: The tired narrative of forever-worsening car congestion is often repeated by those fighting efforts to re-purpose space from cars, and make streets safer or make transit more reliable. But that narrative just doesn t have any grounding in empirical evidence only anecdotes, and often from the windshield perspective.
Even if traffic was getting worse, saving drivers a few seconds still wouldn t be a good reason to abandon measures that save lives and provide better transportation options. Unfortunately, that was the approach SF took for too many decades, and at last we may be starting to see the fruits of efforts based on a more holistic and multi-modal approach.
monte carlo hotel casino This is even more interesting given the fact that the DMV shows something on the order of 20,000 more cars _registered_ in SF in the last decade, if my memory serves (which it probably does not). That would suggest that even though ownership is up in straight numbers, people are driving those vehicles less.
Given the anecdotal aspect, though, one has to wonder whether that has to be chalked up to the fact that we re just fed up with sitting in traffic as a general concept, so it seems more annoying even though it s not as onerous monte carlo hotel casino as it once was.
Thousands (?) of SF residents now get carted to work in a private bus, Caltrain ridership has doubled. Caltrain median income is over 6 figures, shuttle bus median income is probably higher than Caltrain.
Own a car, and use it for long distance pleasure trips only. That was my model while living in Noe Valley, we walked to the grocery store and mostly took the car out if we left town to some far flung place adding monte carlo hotel casino little to local congestion.
If we didn t own the car to begin with we might have just rented cars, but given we had established parking at home, there was little incentive to sell the car. Even after moving to the netherlands we didn t add a second car, and we rent a car 2-3 times a year when situations arise, for less than the cost of insuring a second car, let alone depreciation.
Btw, even moderate drops in car modeshare can lead to disproportionate drops in congestion for various reasons. One might be the fact that up to 90% of car traffic in some neighborhoods is simply due to drivers endlessly cruising monte carlo hotel casino around and around for on-street parking. This kind of heightened concentrated repetitive searching around the block creates a *lot* of congestion per car. So going by another mode not only takes away a moving car on the way but takes away a lot of that endless circling at the end.
I was actually just thinking how noticeable even slight traffic drops are. Yesterday was Veteran s Day, which is a day some offices take off but probably a majority don t. Yet the difference during rush-hour was palpable on Van Ness. There were still plenty of cars, but everything was very free-flowing instead of the normal constant stop-and-go backup. So the moderate (5%? 10%?) drop in traffic made a world of a difference, especially being on a bus.
Octavia was built to replace the elevated section of 101 that really didn t cause congestion monte carlo hotel casino to Octavia nor congestion trying to get across monte carlo hotel casino Market Street. We all voted (eventually, after three ballots) to instead provide local access to 101 via Octavia, and that is exactly what we ve got, with all the congestion there that that implies.
What I m pointing out is that this is a stub of the Central monte carlo hotel casino Freeway (not part of 101 that s Van Ness) that was intended to cut through SF, including through GG Park. It was stopped as part of the Freeway Revolts in 1955, but this legacy route remains despite how deleterious it is to the communities monte carlo hotel casino through which these cars travel and idle.
I guess your point is that by implementing congestion pricing, San Francisco would become so much more pleasant that the demand for living here would go even higher, drawing more higher income people into the city, thus driving out lower income people who can t afford to live in such a desireable place?
The perception of traffic and the reality of traffic don t always coincide. Traffic for me the few months has been awful due to constant construction monte carlo hotel casino in my neighborhood, but in reality, there were probably few cars overall. People who could divert, did. That being said, I think the major reason is more related to the shuttle busses removing cars from the roads, and the fact that many of the tech companies and workers who have recently moved to the city have done so to avoid commuting by car. It would be really interesting to see traffic stats, public monte carlo hotel casino transit ridership, and economic growth in the city all plotted together. I suspect that there are probably some areas where traffic got better, and some areas where traffic got worse.
That ll show those gentrifiers! And will *definitely* help the socioeconomically disadvantaged, for sure. Especially by making snooty transit and snobby walking less viable and totally egalitarian driving easier. Because monte carlo hotel casino people of lower socioeconomic status in SF are the ones driving everywhere, of course, unlike those selfish transit-taking, elitist walking gentrifiers.
How is charging car drivers that create congestion on city streets regressive ? Let s say this all together again people who own cars are not the poorest among us. By and large, monte carlo hotel casino the people who don t own cars and take public transit are, and they get shafted by every car driver that blocks a bus during rush hour. If you really want to be progressive , level the playing field by taxing the people who slow down transit.
Despite the fact nearly 90% of people already arrive at Columbus Ave via a non-car means anyway and those 10% that do are disproportionately of privilege. Yet the public right of way devotes far more than 10% of space to the free movement and free/cheap storage of private autos for people mostly of above-average socioeconomic status.
Yes, working people often do need cars, especially those who now have to commute monte carlo hotel casino into the city, from areas without good public transit. Building more public transit is the solution, not making working people s lives more difficult than it already is.
This has been shown in practice on freeways to be true only above 42 miles per hour. At speeds monte carlo hotel casino slower than that cars cluster closely enough together that the fewer vehicles can pass in a given amount of time effect begins to exceed monte carlo hotel casino and eventually overwhelms the cars stay farther apart at higher speeds effect.
Just think about it. If one slows traffic down to 1 mile per hour (88 feet per minute or 1.47 feet per second) monte carlo hotel casino it will take almos