guerrilla curatorship

On missing the point entirely.

Confused.. My personal car is electric— city car is a hybrid— I take this quite seriously.

I think this is in response to one of my many snarktastic tweets from last night’s Long Now Foundation presentation on “Cities and Time.” But I can’t direct message him back because he doesn’t follow me, which he must know because we know he loves the Twitter so much. (Isn’t it adorable how the grownups are catching on to the practical application for what the kids have been into for 2 years?) So I’ll just respond here, instead.

So, no, Sir, the issue isn’t whether your car is electric or hybrid, or how many hybrids you’ve added to the streets, it’s that THIS is your car. Does the money for that come out of the MTA budget too? If you start riding Muni with the rest of us, can we have the 26-Valencia back?(Or maybe your friends and neighbors care more about the 3-Jackson? They’re losing that too.) You have TWO cars. Nothing could possibly be less “green,” except for the repeated sacking of our mass transit system.

Last night one of the adoring ladiez packing the theater asked you about bikes (that greenest of transportation modes) and you made sure to highlight your bike share initiative. Does spending money on a barely-adequate and dubiously necessary bike share program make sense when we can’t even add new bike lanes? Where is that money coming from, and why haven’t such available resources been allocated to powering through the EIR and implementing the bike plan, like THREE YEARS AGO? 30% more people are using their own bikes in SF already, and the bike infrastructure is in pitiful condition. Is it possible for you to really care or understand if you don’t ride a bike down Market Street in the morning? And do you realize how many more people have started doing that since commute service on Muni Metro is increasingly unreliable due to deferred maintenance and train shortage?

We know you’ve implemented some great environmental initiatives during your tenure; I was right there with you last night talking about hybrid buses, composting, wastewater, etc. But the kind of lip-servicey PR initiatives like bike share and the TEP service cuts are taking focus away from the mismanagement of resources that impact vital city infrastructure; and even sometimes cannibalizing its own benevolent purpose - yes we now have the biggest hybrid transit fleet, but we also don’t have enough trains and maintenance workers to provide adequate commute service on the Muni Metro lines! That’s the kind of infrastructure that regular people like us depend upon to get around.