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| August 1996 | by Jym Dyer |
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| August 1996 | by Jym Dyer |
Fresh on the heels of the discovery and publication of some old Mark Twain manuscripts, we are reminded that the red-legged frog -- the hero of Twain's "Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" -- is endangered.
My but this frog has gotten good press! Every paper in the area had something to say about it, some with color photos. The very same editors who concocted various and bogus "Owls vs. Jobs" headlines waxed eloquent about their schoolday memories of reading Twain.
The frog is now something of a media star. Its appearances no longer go unnoted. CalTrans' plans to bypass Devil's Slide would deplete red-legged frog habitat, and now people notice! And BART's plans to extend to the San Francisco Airport include restoration of habitat for endangered species, with the frog mentioned prominently.
The search is on for more undiscovered Twain manuscripts. Surely there's got to be a copy of A Marbled Murrelet in Emperor Norton's Court stashed away in somebody's closet somewhere.
Public transit subsidies show up in the news quite regularly, certainly more often than similarly boring topics. The matter is rarely looked at deeply enough: usually there's no context provided, just a series of dollar figures and percentages plucked from a balance sheet and rendered into sentences. On this issue, reporters regularly miss the forest for the trees.
On May 28, the Contra Costa Times featured a story on the front page that did go into some detail, but alas, it wasn't a particularly useful sort of detail. In this case, reporter Robert Oakes provided the inside scoop on a study that missed the forest by focusing on the leaves.
Contra Costa's transit authority, County Connection, conducted the study as the first "performance review" of its bus lines, to measure each line's "productivity." As anyone familiar with corporate America (or reads Dilbert) knows, a performance review is generally used as a rationale for downsizing. Nobody's saying that outright, but then, nobody in corporate America says that outright either. Oakes cites a spokewsoman from County Connection who envisions that the study's findings will "adjust service, improve ridership and boost revenue."
The article is peppered with dollar figures broken down by route. "When a passenger boards a little-used County Connection bus route in Concord and pays the $1 fare, taxpayers toss another $5.46 into the fare box."
A bus route with fewer riders will of course collect fewer fares, so it's not exactly front page news that these routes are going to be "more subsidized." But to focus on this or that particular route obscures the fact that the routes are an interdependent system. You'd think an outfit named the "County Connection" would know better.
Cutbacks are not unheard of in this business, because they "improve ridership and boost revenue" -- provided your scope is limited enough. Targeting a "more subsidized" route for cutbacks, however, could take away ridership from a route that's "less subsidized." This will of course give you new figures to work with, to which you can apply the same reasoning, until you find yourself in a downward spiral of cutbacks -- as we've seen in Alameda County, right next door.
Cutbacks aren't mentioned by name in Oakes' article, though an allegorical reference is made to tightening belts. The only example of belt-tightening in the article is the consolidation of two similar routes.
That's not so bad, though anything that makes public transit less convenient is going to put more people behind the wheels of cars. Cars seem particularly convenient because, while their subsidies are much greater, they're hidden where reporters can never seem to find them.
The press does manage to notice the high cost of building roads, at least. It's that time of year again, after all: summer's here and the time is right for jackhammering the streets.
On May 6, the San Francisco Chronicle debuted a series of "Commuter Chronicles," discussing various transportation issues on the front page. The first article got to a promising start with a glimpse of the overall economic picture:
Everyone in the region is affected, because even if they don't drive a car, take a train or ride a bus, they pay for transportation with property and sales taxes. Last year, the public investment in Bay Area transportation -- from fixing potholes to buying new railcars for the San Francisco Municipal Railway -- came to $3.5 billion. Of that, $2.5 billion went to highways and bridges and about $1 billion went to public transit.
Alas, the article then launched into the usual paragraph of public transit subsidy facts 'n' figures.
All of the freeway building projects in the Bay Area are adding carpool lanes, and the press seems to like them. On May 27, the Oakland Tribune headlined its local news section with a big story entitled, "I-80 commuter salvation" (can I get a witness?). And then there's this snippet from the "Mr. Roadshow" column in the San Jose Mercury News on the same day: "Screw environmentalists who think their way is the right way. ... Eliminate diamond lanes now!"
Actually, that was one of Mr. Roadshow's correspondents. Mr. Roadshow likes carpool lanes and replied, "OK, then what is the solution? Four lanes of congestion on 101 instead of three?"
There are a number of things missing from all this coverage, though. The June 17 installment of the Chron's "Commuter Chronicles," was headlined "Carpool Opinions Collide," but the opinions mentioned didn't cover much ground. In general, where there is debate, the debate is over whether to keep commuter lanes restricted or to open them up for more (single occupant) traffic. Other alternatives aren't even mentioned. For example, The Modern Transit Society has calculated that a 40-mile light rail system down San Pablo Avenue could be built, staffed, and maintained for a year for the price of the I-80 expansion effort -- and that estimate was made a few years back, when the expansion effort's price tag was rather smaller.
Air quality is also given scant mention, even though it's part of the original rationale for carpool lanes. Indeed, one would not be able to tell from the mainstream press that a number of these carpool lanes were specifically mandated as a mitigation measure for the increased air pollution that a freeway widening would bring.
There's also a body of evidence, some of which is supported by CalTrans' own studies, that freeway widening of any type only brings temporary relief from congestion. The wider the freeway, the more development it attracts nearby. While public transit authorities in Contra Costa are talking about tightening belts, transportation analysts are fond of comparing the strategy of widening freeways to ease congestion with "loosening your belt a few notches to lose weight."
(Mr. Roadshow got a letter on June 10 that used this analogy, though it was using the analogy in support of carpool lanes. Whatever value carpool lanes do have is more along the lines of limiting the number of notches that your belt can be loosened.)
Finally, there's been very little attention paid to the impact that all this road-building has had on the many tiny marginalized pieces of roadside land all around the Bay that serve as wildlife habitat. The Trib article mentioned "a lawsuit filed by environmentalists" over the I-80 widening, but failed to mention that it had anything to do with the impact that the widening would have on the Emeryville Crescent.
Perhaps this will change, just as soon as we manage to dig up the long-lost manuscript for The Celebrated Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse of Alameda County.
The folks at the Montara Mountain Free Press, published near Devil's Slide, have put up a web page about red-legged frogs.
This is more of a backdate than an update, but you can learn more about the I-80 widening effort and its impact on the Emeryville Crescent in my June 1994 article, CalTrans Coverup?
The "Commuter Chronicles" series continues to this day. It has never been anything but insipid. 18 months after its debut, the Chronicle bragged that the series had won them an award from the Metropolitian Transportation Commission. Ron Curran of the San Francisco Bay Guardian astutely remarked that it's "unusual for a newspaper to take such pride in an award given by a government agency that the paper covers." Since the MTC plays a major role in the sad state of transportation in the Bay Area, it has ample reason to be grateful when the issue is covered insipidly.
For more detail, read Ron Curran's excellent Guardian article.
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