Muni chief: S.F. too conservative when change is needed.
Jeffrey Tumlin has worked in cities around the world — from Los Angeles to New York, from Vancouver to Wichita, Kan. He’s worked in Seattle, Portland, Ore., and Moscow, too.
And the executive director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency says San Francisco stands out among them all — for being the most conservative.
Wait, what? San Francisco is more conservative than Moscow?
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Definitely.”
Tumlin and I sat on a green bench overlooking JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park for an interview the other day, and there was no sign he’d purchased an illicit substance on his way into the park on his electric bike. He truly believes that supposedly progressive San Francisco makes so little progress that it’s actually among the world’s most conservative cities.
And he’s right. Though he mostly stuck to discussing transit, the idea holds true on a host of major issues including housing, climate change, small business reform and addressing our drug crisis. The traditional hallmark of conservatism is embracing the status quo, and San Francisco seems nearly incapable of major change.
“San Franciscans, on a national political metric, we are far to the left,” he said. “But when it comes to our own city,
we are so resistant to change that the result is a lot of conservatism.”
Just take JFK Drive, perhaps the most controversial 1.5 mile stretch of pavement in all of San Francisco, which is saying something considering the city has 1,200 miles of roadway — enough to drive from Seattle to San Diego.
Before the COVID19 pandemic, Tumlin said, 85% of traffic on JFK Drive was commuter traffic, meaning that it wasn’t all families taking grandma to the de Young or the kids to a picnic at Hellman Hollow. It was drivers opting to get from one place outside the park to another place outside the park — by zipping through the park. That, in turn, made it one of the city’s most dangerous roads for pedestrians and bicyclists.
Since the city made that part of JFK Drive carfree during the pandemic to give people space to social distance while exercising, there hasn’t been a single fatality there. (It would be weird if that wasn’t the case. Unicyclist dies in tragic collision with roller skater!)
But despite San Franciscans pledging to aggressively fight the grave threat of climate change and professing to care about pedestrian and bicyclist safety, if it requires less driving or even giving up access to one part of one road, they balk. City residents have fought over JFK Drive for decades, and there’s still no resolution.
“It’s sometimes very hard for us to make a connection between our national progressivism and local action,” Tumlin said.
To be clear, Tumlin says — and I agree — changes need to be made to JFK Drive before declaring it carfree permanently, including adding as many disabled parking spaces nearby as were lost by the street closure. That should be easy to do.
But then again, a lot of what sounds easy to accomplish turns out to be anything but in slothlike San Francisco. Remember the proposed legislation to prohibit one cranky person from blocking emergency transit projects like Slow Streets and transit lanes for buses?
After two gadflies tried blocking nearly all the pandemic response measures from the SFMTA — costing tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours in staff time — Mayor London Breed and Supervisor Matt Haney proposed allowing such appeals only with 50 residents’ signatures or five members of the Board of Supervisors.
They proposed that in November, so it’s the law of the land now right? Nope. The Planning Commission approved it unanimously, but it still hasn’t even been scheduled for a hearing at the board’s land use committee. That’s right — six months later, the supervisors haven’t even begun talking about it.
Supervisor Myrna Melgar, chair of the land use committee, called the legislation “a good government thing” and said she’ll schedule it for late May or early June. She said she has many important matters to get on the calendar and must spread them out. She agreed it takes way too long to make change in the city — even when it’s the lowhanging fruit like this legislation.
“We get entrenched in our polar opposite viewpoints, and there’s very little room for compromise and consensus building,” she said.
And that’s not true just when it comes to transit projects. In another headslapping delay, guess what happened with Supervisor Rafael Mandelman’s proposal to make it harder to build monster homes for one rich family and easier to turn one home into four apartments for four lowerincome families? I wrote about it January, so guess. That’s right — nothing!
Mandelman has gotten no additional support besides Haney.
“Nobody is enthused,” Mandelman acknowledged. “People are either opposed or annoyed.”
Sounds like San Francisco, all right. Mandelman had talked about allowing fourplexes on all corner lots or near transit stations, but said he’s leaning toward introducing just the corner lot piece on May 18. He might propose allowing fourplexes on all singlefamily home lots in the city next year after housing advocates met his idea with a yawn. Meanwhile, home prices in the city just keep climbing, and a modest home will cost you $1.5 million.
“It has felt to me for some time like San Francisco is stuck on some pretty big, important issues,” Mandelman said.
That’s the truth. Finish this sentence: “It is not progressive to ... ” There are so many options in San Francisco.
It is not progressive to make opening a small business or make slight improvements to your family’s house nearly impossible without hiring a permit expediter. It is not progressive to allow an openair fentanyl market to exist in the Tenderloin that’s killing two people every day. It is not progressive to keep the city’s public middle and high schools closed for students who’ve already been stuck at home on Zoom for 14 months.
But it’s the same city leaders who lament the lack of progress who aren’t doing enough to fix it. Janice Li, advocacy director for the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition and a BART board commissioner, said, “There’s a lack of leadership up and down.”
She said Tumlin can complain about conservatism in San Francisco, but his own agency has bowed to the whims of supervisors who don’t like Slow Streets in their districts rather than advocating for their importance. She also called out Mayor London Breed’s lukewarm rhetoric about preserving carfree JFK Drive.
“This is the time when you get loud about things. Advocates are just like, ‘Schedule the damn legislation to be heard! Approve the damn projects!’ ” she said. “No one is raising their hand to step in and bring leadership.”
Tumlin countered that City Hall showed during the pandemic that it can “get s— done.” It’s a matter of making that the norm, not the exception. He said he intends to finish his fiveyear contract, which expires in December, 2024. And after that?
“I’m here so long as San Francisco is ready for me to make a difference,” he said. “I love my job because I love San Francisco. There is so much potential here.”
If only we would get out of our own way to reach it.