DPT officers get a bad rap. Everyone seems to despise them, yet they are a crucial element necessary to help all of us to effectively share our City streets.

Here are a few of the ways they make our lives better:

• Parking meter enforcement: You think it’s hard enough to find parking now? Without meter enforcement you would never be able find a place to park in the City’s high demand commercial corridors.
• Neighborhood permit enforcement: If you work out of town, where do you park your car after work? In your neighborhood. Without neighborhood permitting you would never find a space. Enforcement is key.
• Transit revenue: Have you ever taken a bus in the City? A great deal of revenue for our public transit system comes from DPT parking fines. This is good.
• Curbed wheels: It’s not just a joke to squeeze money from you, parked cars without curbed wheels can and do injure people.
• Sidewalk blocking: Nobody wants to live in a city where anyone can park their car anywhere they please. Blocking sidewalks is rude to most pedestrians and a major challenge for the mobility impaired.

Frankly, most complaints about DPT tickets include silly disclaimers, such as, “I just double parked for just a second… I didn’t feed the meter, but I was just going in for a coffee… I know there was street cleaning, but…” We receive significantly below market cost parking on our City streets. The least people can do is follow simple rules to share our limited parking resources.

So, dear reader, please shake the hand of the next DPT officer you see and say, “Thank you.”

San Francisco cab drivers face two recent cost pressures: a recent gate fee increase combined with the recent climb in gas prices.

Fortunately, these cost pressures come at a time when aggregate demand for taxis in the City is increasing. More tourists, outdoor City festivals, and frequent conventions bring in more and more cab passengers as the summer approaches.

However, I paint a bleak picture for this winter. As seasonal demand for taxis wanes in November, this winter could be the toughest yet for City cab drivers and companies. Qualified, skilled cab drivers will seek new income opportunities as average take-home pay dips to new lows this winter. Cab companies will likely have a more difficult time than ever filling shifts, putting pressure on hiring managers to accept drivers with less stringent requirements for clean driving records, English proficiency or general City knowledge.

Given this bleak outlook, I think my cab driving may come to an end (or break) at the end of October.

The NY Times reports on the sad news that the New York State Assembly vetoed New York City Mayor Bloomberg’s proposal to charge drivers to enter Manhattan during peak times.

While I do not understand the legal wrangling between agencies such that state representatives vetoed a local city measure, I do understand the underlying strong fear expressed by residents and elected officials of the outer boroughs and suburbs.

Their expressed fear is this: a congestion fee is a tax upon working class people living in outer New York City suburbs imposed by rich, elite Manhattan residents. This is a grave mistake in reasoning that shall cost New York City residents, visitors and commuters dearly for years to come.

Ignoring politician spin, a congestion fee is effectively a progressive tax as vehicle commuters to New York City are on the whole extremely wealthy. (A progressive tax, in theory, is a ‘good thing’ in this case as, on the whole, it taxes the wealthy more than low income residents.)

Low and middle income residents have much higher rates of public transit ridership. The congestion fee proposal under question would have improved public transit with ALL revenues from congestion fee collections going toward public transit. Further, properly pricing the limited resource of New York City roadways would immediately and directly reduce the level of congestion, significantly improving the surface transportation infrastructure including but not limited to taxicabs and busses.

So, by vetoing this bill, regional politicians were able to serve the needs of their extremely high income residents, while snubbing low and middle income residents’ access to effective transit improvements via a congestion fee. And, the regional politicians get a nice lie to tell these low and middle income residents, saying that they kept an unjust tax from hitting their wallets!

Great! Politics at work!

Links:

• New York Times article
• Hippie blog post

I point your temporary attention to a Flash website produced by UC Berkeley j-school grad students Eric Zassenhaus and Amy Jeffries.

The video clips thumbnailed along the bottom are accurate and colorful paintings of a typical taxi shift. Well worth a view.

But wait, there’s more. The site also features insightful interviews with Heidi Machen, the SF Taxi Commission Executive Director; Jim Gillespie, Yellow Cab President; and Thomas George-Williams, United Taxicab Workers member.

Since I drive a cab in the City and can’t shut up about local politics, I have some pointed reactions:

I don’t know who Heidi Machen is or how she got to be Executive Director of the SF Taxi Commission, but she doesn’t seem to have an accurate grasp of the industry over which she regulates. This is a bit scary.

When asked about the recent gate-fee increase, Ms. Machen responds with a bubbly response. “In many ways it’s very positive,” she starts, repeating again for emphasis, “in many ways it’s very positive, because, if indeed the taxi companies needed money to purchase the alternative fuel and hybrid vehicles San Francisco is looking at a clean taxi fleet in 3-4 years. Wow! That’s phenomenal!”

“If indeed?” If indeed? Ms. Machen, your job, for which you are paid a bulbous salary of some sort, is to be Executive Director of the Taxi Commission. There should be no “if” in your response. You should know whether or not taxi companies need money to purchase alternative fuel and hybrid vehicles BEFORE implementing fee increases.

Continuing, “On the other hand you look at the controller’s report and the controller said this would have an immediate detrimental effect on taxi drivers’ incomes. So, that can be a negative, obviously, because taxi drivers, a lot of them, may be hanging on marginally. On the other hand, maybe it encourages taxi drivers to become more efficient. Some would fear it would make taxi drivers more reckless.” Ponderously she summarizes, “I think there are some positives and some possible negatives that we’re looking at.”

My fear is she doesn’t seem to “get it.” A key sticking point: taxi companies need CPI gate increases but drivers also need correlated revenue increases. The discussion of green cabs is a sideshow distracting from this core issue.

On the other hand, Mr. Gillespie in his role as General Manager of Yellow Cab understands the situation perfectly. Unfortunately, his role is not an advocate for drivers but instead for revenue maximization for Yellow Cab. (This is not a judgment of his motivation, just a recognition thereof.) But, at least he “gets it.”

Thomas George-Williams, an active member of the local United Taxi Worker union “gets it” too. But, as most drivers are not members of the Union, its influence, regardless of Mr. George-Williams “getting it,” is unfortunately questionable.

Link

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) is a bureaucratic whale, containing, in separate stomachs, the Department of Parking and Traffic (DPT) and the San Francisco Municipal Railway (Muni) public transit system.

Recently, the SFMTA crunched some numbers and said, “Uh oh, we won’t have enough money to cover our costs over the next two years.” Fair enough. Next step, “We need more money.”

Ideas? The Examiner and the Chronicle report the SFMTA has publicly discussed two classes of options: increasing transit fees and increasing parking fees.

Are these ideas justified? Most definitely yes — these fee increases are justified and necessary.

But, I believe the SFMTA needs to increase some fees significantly MORE than has been suggested. If we’re smart and look at the dirty details (below) we can find some fees that we can significantly increase. This has a multiple benefits — controlling traffic congestion, reducing total personal vehicle miles driven and rationing limited road real estate while ALSO generating significant revenue for the cash-strapped SFMTA. Win, win, win?

• Increasing transit fees: Monthly Fast Pass (unlimited bus pass) cards cost $45 per month and are priced below market. $1.50 each way to work plus 2 weekend trips per day makes a frequent Muni rider pay $90 per month if they pay per trip. The SFMTA’s analysis of neighboring communities’ monthly pass prices is wise and on par. An increase to $60 per month is more than reasonable given the value offered by the pass. At $60, the Fast Pass is still a bargain for regular transit users.
• Increasing parking fees:
  • Parking meters are priced at $.25/10 minutes = $1.25/hour = $12.50/day. This is below market value compared to garages. This could be increased.

    Idea: Why is Sunday meter collection or extended metered hours not discussed? Meters are not collected on Sundays. Meters are not collected after 6pm. Not only is this lost revenue but it causes inconvenience for City residents struggling to find spaces in highly trafficked commercial corridors at peak times. (This is the reason we have meters in the first place — to ration limited spaces. These spaces are still in high demand after 6pm and on Sundays in many metered commercial corridors. Just look at the Mission on Sunday afternoons; it’s a zoo.)

    Idea: Why aren’t meters priced based on demand? If meters had variable pricing, the City could collect significantly more revenue on Friday and Saturday nights, in addition to busy Saturday and Sunday shopping times on commercial corridors. This is a significant revenue opportunity lost that also serves City residents and visitors who are more than willing to pay market price for convenient parking.

  • Yearly residential permits are priced at $60/year = $5/month. Residential City parking permits are SEVERELY undervalued and could easily be doubled without approaching the true market cost of parking. Yearly residential permits should be priced $120/year immediately, with a yearly increase after that.

    At $120/year this is still an amazing bargain: I can park in my neighborhood ALL YEAR LONG for only $120? Remember, monthly private spaces cost as much as $250 per MONTH.

    People may complain, but even at $120/year this would result in no fewer permits purchased. Not until we pass $200/year will quantity demanded of yearly permits even begin to see a dent. Assuming about half of SF has a residential parking permit, just doubling this permit results in about $30 million incremental revenue per year.

• Congestion fees: Why is this not discussed as a revenue source? (Answer: The City can’t implement fast enough to be included as a revenue source for this 2-year projected shortfall.)

  Let’s change this. The City should implement congestion pricing within the next year.

  Variable City congestion pricing serves double duty as a significant revenue generator for the SFMTA AND as a traffic and transit speed increaser. It increases the speed of its public surface street-shared transit system and increases the convenience and utility of currently congested streets for frequent City street ‘power-users’ like delivery vehicles, taxis and persons with an absolute need for personal vehicle use.

So, SFMTA, go along with your plan, but let’s instead double yearly residential parking permits and let’s introduce congestion pricing immediately.

Mayor Newsom signed a bill last week that increases gate fees for most cab drivers by $5 (effectively a $.50/hr paycut) and increases the gate fee for Compressed Natural Gas and hybrid cab drivers by $13.50 (effectively a $1.35/hr paycut).

I first learned of the gate fee increase when I showed up for work this weekend. All around the cab yard there were signs posted alerting drivers of the gate fee increase which clearly identified the Mayor and Board of Supervisors as the culprit, not the cab company itself.

The Mayor’s office issued a press release that would, in theory, summarize this news. It does not. In fact, it paints a rosy picture that this legislation makes the City’s cab fleet more green and that cab drivers will jump for joy like leprechauns at the end of the rainbow to the news that we’ll all be driving Prius cabs.

What follows is the actual press release and a bit of cynical discussion, as usual.

Mayor Newsom Signs Alternative-Fuel Taxi Legislation

3/6/08 – Today, Mayor Gavin Newsom signed legislation that will enable the purchase of more alternative-fuel taxi cabs for use on San Francisco streets. The legislation will help the City meet its commitment to reducing green house gas emissions with a higher gate fee, which will allow taxi cab companies to purchase new alternative fuel vehicles and supply them to drivers. Taxi drivers also benefit with lower gas costs associated with more efficient vehicles that get better gas mileage, or use less expensive alternative fuels.

“Transportation accounts for over half of San Francisco’s greenhouse gas emissions, and it is imperative that we look to this sector for commensurate emissions reductions,” said Mayor Newsom. “The legislation I am signing today complements the pledge I made in 2006 for an all-green taxi fleet and provides a mandate for cab companies to convert their vehicles.”

Mayor Newsom’s 2006 State of the City Address challenged the Taxi Commission to create a 100% “green” taxi fleet. Approximately 15% of today’s fleet is either Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) or hybrid vehicles. This legislation is expected to increase that percentage to 100% by 2011.

Last week, the Board of Supervisors passed legislation codifying the Taxi Commission’s policy and added a gate increase of $7.50 per vehicle. Specifically, the legislation amends the San Francisco Police code by raising the taxicab gate cap to $96.50 and ratifies gate fees previously charged up to $91.50 per shift for the period of January 1, 2003 to October 27 2006; to authorize a $7.50 surcharge on the gate cap for low emission vehicles; and to require taxi companies to reduce average per vehicle greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent by 2012.

“This legislation came about because the status quo gate cap cannot continue,” said Supervisor Michela Alioto-Pier. “I’m pleased we found a way to green the taxi cab industry without bankrupting the companies and without doing so on the backs of cab drivers.”

The 2007 Taxi Emissions Resolution required that the San Francisco taxi industry reduce its total Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions by 50% from current levels and 20% from 1990 levels by 2011. Under the resolution, the San Francisco Taxi Commission committed to work to achieve zero net carbon emissions by offsetting the total amount of GHG produced by the San Francisco taxi fleet with an equal amount of renewable energy or energy efficiency by 2015, and by 2020 will work to achieve zero gross GHG emissions by permitting only zero emission vehicles. Additionally, the Resolution urged the Board of Supervisors to enact legislation to raise the per-shift gate fee to subsidize the purchase of high-efficiency vehicles.

The magic of PR spin never fails to amaze me. Is it so hard for our elected officials to be honest? Do they actually believe the things they spin? They must not. They must understand the reality. Do we live in Disneyland? Are we on Mars?

The headline should read, “Mayor signs taxi gate fee increase, lowering pay for City workers.”

As the SF Taxi Live blog points out, the choice quote of this press release has to be Supervisor Michela Alioto-Pier’s statement, “I’m pleased we found a way to green the taxi cab industry without bankrupting the companies and without doing so on the backs of cab drivers.”

“…without doing so on the backs of cab drivers?” Ms. Alioto-Pier, have you read the legislation you just passed?

Look, Mayor Newsom and Ms. Alioto-Pier, YES we need to match gate fees with inflation and increase gates slowly.

But, don’t pull bullshit like this and pass off a gate fee increase as green legislation. Your press release is dishonest and sidesteps discussion of an important issue: City taxi drivers will pay more for their cabs at a time when gas prices are already taking more money than ever out of their pockets. We should be discussing how drivers can ensure their take-home pay increases with inflation, just as cab companies’ gate fees do.

Mr. Newsom and Ms. Alioto-Pier, please be cognizant of the effects of legislation you pass. You may live in Disneyland, but your citizens do not.

Links

• SF Taxi Live Post
• Official Press Release

The Examiner has an update on the saga of supervisor Alioto-Pier’s original proposal to considerably increase gate fees. (A gate fee is the rental price of a taxicab charged to cab drivers.)

A much more reasonable $5 increase (compared to nearly $20) was put forward by supervisor Aaron Peskin. Supervisor Chris Daly opposed any increase, notably commenting, “To charge the lowest-earning segments of the taxi industry for a large share of cleaning up the industry is the wrong way to go.”

Another blogging cab driver had a bunch of posts related to this news.

Links:

• Examiner article
• Fellow blogging driver
• Original gate fee increase discussion

On a recent episode of KQED’s Forum, Dave Iverson discusses the possibility of congestion pricing in the City with two main guests: Ken Cleaveland, director of government and public affairs with the Building Owners and Managers Association and Zabe Bent, senior transportation planner with the San Francisco Transportation Authority.

To some degree, Ms. Bent and Mr. Cleaveland both live in their own respective fantasy lands. Mr. Cleaveland is in car fantasy land. He believes we can continue adding cars ad infinitum to City streets. Whereas, Ms. Bent is in SF Transportation Authority fantasy land as she believes Muni is a world-class public transit system. Despite these extreme views, or perhaps because of them, this is a great discussion.

Ms. Bent doesn’t do a great job explaining why the City needs congestion pricing. Indeed, the City DOES need congestion pricing. Here’s why:

Congestion pricing is not a tax, as Mr. Cleaveland insinuated multiple times. Congestion pricing is a user fee. Are user fees really so bad? No. User fees can be very useful to ration extremely limited shared resources. Our downtown City roadways are extremely limited shared resources.

Most private goods and services are paid in full via user fees at time of consumption. Take McDonald’s: you pay $1.00 for a hamburger when you want a hamburger. If you paid McDonald’s like you currently pay for roadways, every citizen of the United States would pay a monthly McDonald’s hamburger ‘subscription fee’. Here’s where the silly comes in: anyone, at anytime, can stop by a McDonald’s and eat as many hamburgers as he or she pleases.

As you can imagine, there would be a number of problems with the national compulsory McDonald’s hamburger subscription plan.

What if someone is a vegetarian? They’re still required to pay the hamburger fee, yet they eat no hamburgers.

What if someone eats 400 hamburgers per day? They pay the same fee as everyone else, yet they consume vastly more resources than others.

What happens during the lunch rush? McDonald’s couldn’t possibly keep up with the extreme demand for hamburgers during lunch. Remember, these hamburgers would seem ‘free’ at time of consumption. Since hamburgers are ‘free’ at time of consumption, demand for these hamburgers is very high. A very natural method of rationing, the queue, begins to develop. Long lines start at McDonalds before the lunch rush, perhaps as early as 10am and last until 3pm. The dinner rush starts an hour or two later. It may take as long as 2 hours just to get your hamburgers. At some prime McDonald’s locations there may be queues at all hours of the day. If your time is valuable, you will seek alternatives to these hamburgers.

Most people would agree that a compulsory McDonald’s hamburger subscription plan would be absurd. Why, then, do we price our roadways in this fashion?

First, most people don’t think of it this way, since our roadway ‘subscription plan’ is mixed into a number of other payments in the form of local, state and federal income, sales and property taxes. Most importantly, it would be impractical to operate on a pure user fee model with all roadways. We can’t erect tolls, even automatic ones, at the foot of every person’s driveway, nor would we want to.

But, we have a glaring need to restrict uncontrolled usage of limited downtown roadways, a defined area around which we could erect automatic tolls. A user fee is an excellent method of rationing usage of this scarce resource.

Where else do we have user fees? User fees exist on ALL alternative forms of ground transportation in the United States, save for walking and biking. By not charging user fees for our roadways, but charging for all other forms of transportation, the government is effectively subsidizing the use of personal vehicles.

It’s time to put the personal vehicle on par with all other forms of transportation in the US.

If the hamburger example was hard to swallow, let’s focus on a more concrete aspect of congestion pricing. Uncongested roads have HIGHER throughput than congested roads. (Source)

Variable road usage fees will increase the efficiency of our streets. This allows those who need the roadways the most to pay for that right. Without user fees, vehicles that have a very high, nearly inelastic demand for the roadway (delivery vehicles, taxis, busses, emergency vehicles) have no way of paying for this priority. The rich can resort to helicopters, but that doesn’t work for the rest of us.

Naturally people complain about this proposal — we don’t like paying for things we expect to be ‘free’. But, our roadways are not, and never have been, ‘free’. We’ve simply been pricing them incorrectly in highly congested urban areas. It’s time for congestion pricing in San Francisco.

Links:

• KQED’s Forum Episode
• PDF about “HOT Lanes” — variably priced highway lanes
• Illustration of congestion fee collection technical implementation
• A photo of congestion fee roadway marking warnings in the United Kingdom

PS. Yes, gasoline taxes are a good attempt at a roadway user fee. But, they don’t do anything to limit usage of particular stretches of roadways.