Let's Talk Traffic

I don't get it. The boat left and I guess I wasn't on board.

San Francisco prides itself on how "green" it is. There's mandatory composting and mandatory recycling. All new taxicabs registered in the city have to be hybrids. Getting a building permit requires a trip through the Byzantine world of the city's sustainability programs. There are new bike lanes being added to the city streets all the time. And so on and so forth.

Why, then, does a city that prides itself on being so environmentally correct have one of the worst traffic control systems in the country? Take a drive down most any major thoroughfare in the city and you'll encounter the same issues time and again. Streetlights that are timed so poorly that you'll literally have to stop at every intersection. Passing lanes that appear and disappear (on the Embarcadero, for example, there's a right lane that appears and disappears no fewer than seven times between Bay Street and AT&T Park). Half-assed paving jobs and/or patches of pavement that require you to slam on your breaks to avoid ripping out your car's undercarriage.

The net result is that traffic gets snarled in San Francisco to a degree that is utterly avoidable. And that's where the environmental issue comes up: there are more cars idling and accelerating/decelerating, that you could put every single person in a hybrid and they'd still be spewing exhaust into the air.

But this seems to be a pretty standard phenomenon in San Francisco. The city's "leadership" constantly pushes new programs like the hybrid taxicab requirement, while ignoring fundamentals that would have far more impact. Does anyone really believe that a few Prius cabs make up for the thousands of cars idling on the Embarcadero, or Market Street, or Divisadero, or any number of other streets?