It looks like this person has literally shut down the passage from lake merritt to Laney college. I don’t know how this has been allowed to persist for so long. Any one know what’s going on here? Why has it not been cleaned up?
There is pretty much no way it will be two republicans in the general election for governor. The polls are showing Bianco is polling quite low. Certain candidates are using the argument that "it will be two republicans" to consolidate power and discourage you from voting for the best candidate. I just wanted to encourage people to vote for the candidate they think is best and not vote for a "safe" candidate because they're worried about two republicans in the general.
I wanted to post a follow up about the SF Chronicle piece regarding the Oakland housing market being the worst in the country. I feel the article is a little misleading. Are folks aware that the article is looking just at something called the "Zillow Home Value Index" essentially a blended average of zillow zestimate data? It's not actually looking at the price of homes sold and how that's changing YoY. Not sure how familiar people are with zillow Zestimate data, but I would categorize it as fairly inaccurate in my Oakland neighborhood.
I feel like the article is using a snappy headline about Oakland with a negative narrative to drive clicks.
To be clear, there are some issues in the Oakland housing market. The condo market has taken some real hits. But if you look at the sale price of SFHs across Oakland, there are many places where it is flat / up YoY.
Reposting this from Aakash Gupta:
BART spent $90 million on new fare gates. They're recovering about $10 million a year in fares.
That's a 9-year payback on paper. The actual return hit in six months.
Embarcadero station went from 112 hours of corrective maintenance in the six months before installation to 2 hours after. Daly City saved 109. Balboa Park saved 75. Across the system, 961 hours of cleanup work disappeared. Corrective maintenance is the term BART uses for graffiti, heavy soiling, vandalism, the damage that needs a crew not a janitor. At several stations it dropped to zero.
Crime fell 41% year over year. Riders who reported seeing fare evasion on their trip dropped from 22% to 10%. Citations issued by BART police went from 2,200 in January to under 1,000 in July, because there was nothing to cite.
The gates were a filtering project disguised as a revenue project.
Old BART gates were waist-high orange fins designed in the 1970s. You could hop them in under a second. That made the station effectively a public space, and the rider mix reflected that. The new gates are 72 inches of polycarbonate with 3D sensors that detect tailgating. You either pay or you don't enter. Once you don't enter, you also don't smoke on the platform, sleep in the elevator, or harass other riders.
BART tried hiring more police for years. Blitz operations at high-traffic stations. Increased patrols. Dedicated transit cops. None of it moved the numbers the way six feet of polycarbonate did.
The $10 million in recovered fares is the smallest line in the return. Fare revenue used to cover 70% of BART operations. After the pandemic it collapsed to 22%. The gates won't fix that gap directly. They fix the precondition for fixing it: a system that office workers, families, and tourists are willing to use again. Ridership growth at stations with new gates outpaced ungated ones before the rollout finished.
A $400 million annual deficit is heading to voters in November as a sales tax measure. Voters don't approve sales taxes for transit agencies they don't feel safe in. The $90 million on gates is buying BART the right to ask the public for more money.
That's the real return on six feet of polycarbonate.