If you want to drive your neighbor to work in San Fran, you are allowed to do so. If your company wants to drive your neighbor to work it takes a lot of money, loads of bureaucracy and the unions will force you to take YEARS before you can do this—while you are saving the taxpayers lots of money. Unions hate when the free market provides services for people—they prefer to have a monopoly and force workers to pay extortion and agencies to pay blackmail if the buses and government transportation systems are to run.
“The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s Board of Directors is set to vote on making permanent the Commuter Shuttle Permit Program at their regular meeting on Tuesday, which among other types of shuttles would legalize regulations of tech shuttles in San Francisco.
The commuter shuttle program regulates not only inter-city shuttles traveling to Silicon Valley but also intra-city hospital shuttles, among others. There are 17 shuttle operators in the program that 9,800 San Franciscans board every day, according to the SFMTA.
Data collected by SFMTA staff for its board demonstrate in some ways the program has had an effect on shuttle behavior.
The union has lost control on close to 10,000 workers—no longer can the unions stop them from getting to work—or the taxpayers subsidizing the heavy unions costs of a government program. Wouldn’t it be great for a PRIVATE transportation system to be established—maybe UBER buses? What a great idea.
Transit board to vote on making ‘tech shuttle’ program permanent, drops shuttle hub proposal
By Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez, SF Examiner, 2/20/17
“Google buses.” Job creators. Environmental saviors. Harbingers of gentrification.
The shuttles that ferry tech workers from San Francisco to Silicon Valley every day have been sanctified and vilified, and called every name in the book — but no matter what you call them, after Tuesday, their operation may finally be permanently enshrined in local law.
And as part of that proposal, a controversial “hub” model for the Peninsula-spanning shuttles to only pick-up and drop-off in one, or a few locations, was dropped.
The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s Board of Directors is set to vote on making permanent the Commuter Shuttle Permit Program at their regular meeting on Tuesday, which among other types of shuttles would legalize regulations of tech shuttles in San Francisco.
The commuter shuttle program regulates not only inter-city shuttles traveling to Silicon Valley but also intra-city hospital shuttles, among others. There are 17 shuttle operators in the program that 9,800 San Franciscans board every day, according to the SFMTA.
Data collected by SFMTA staff for its board demonstrate in some ways the program has had an effect on shuttle behavior.
During the shuttle program pilot and subsequent evaluation period, from August 2014 to August 2016, parking control officers issued 2,267 citations worth $360,895, and the program reduced the number of shuttles operating in restricted streets (usually residential) from 3,600 in April 2016 to 334 in August 2016.
And the percentage of newer shuttle vehicles that are more environmentally friendly increased from 59 percent to 76 percent in the same time period.
The vote to make the shuttle program permanent comes a year after a bargain between the SFMTA and the Board of Supervisors to compromise on several aspects of the program, including to study a proposed hub model to reduce the shuttles’ presence on residential streets.
Now, as November’s election has given the Board of Supervisors a moderate majority, the hub model has quietly been dropped from the SFMTA’s proposal.
“This alternative was not pursued for several reasons,” SFMTA staff wrote in a report, including a survey of some riders that found shuttle ridership might drop between 24 and 45 percent if a hub model was implemented.
Sue Vaughan, a member of the SFMTA Citizen Advisory Committee and who previously joined a lawsuit against the SFMTA for the shuttle program, wrote there were “serious deficiencies” in the SFMTA’s research into a hub model in an email to supporters last week.
“Nor has any city agency conducted the agreed upon plan to study housing impacts of the availability of the shuttle buses — the impacts to evictions, displacement, increased suburban sprawl, and associated decreased air quality and exacerbated greenhouse gas emissions,” Vaughan wrote.
By contrast, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce lauded the program as “very successful” in an open letter to the SFMTA.
“In our view, the proposed ongoing Commuter Shuttle Program thoughtfully incorporates lessons learned over the past 2.5 years to ensure the continued mobility of San Franciscans,” wrote Jim Lazarus, senior vice president of public policy at the chamber.
The program was in a pilot phase from 2014 to 2016, and allowed commuter shuttles to use Muni bus stops, white curb spaces and for companies utilizing the shuttles to repay the cost of administering the program to the SFMTA. The program entered into a one year evaluation phase that is set to end March 31.
The current phase of the program only allows for a maximum of 125 commuter shuttle pick-up and drop-off zones. State law mandates the SFMTA can only collect fees to recover costs of administering the program, which it assessed as $3.8 million through January 2017.
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