True Believers talk to each other

From a Streetsblog interview with the new Executive Director of Walk San Francisco:

Streetsblog: During your years with the Bicycle Coalition, what was your greatest accomplishment?

Jodie Medeiros: Getting past the injunction.

Streetsblog: The Rob Anderson environmental lawsuit? That really jammed things up, but it also forced some creativity, didn’t it?

JM: (Nods) We weren’t able to paint anything on the street. We weren’t able to put up a single bike rack. It was really an interesting time in our city’s history. Out of that period came the Great Streets program at the SFBC–--and that lead[sic] to Sunday Streets, and parklets, and institutionalizing the parklets program. 

These are now things that we see every day in San Francisco. Parklets are flourishing. We’re using our streets for better uses than just car parking. That period was the greatest in my transportation history. I’m very proud of it.

Rob's comment:

Out of the mud grows the lotus! The injunction against the city we got way back in 2006 was traumatic for the anti-car folks. It was one of the few events that pierced their normally impenetrable political bubble (see Susan King, the injunction, and PTSD and The Guardian rewrites history).

Note how Streetsblog and Medeiros talk around the issue without any specifics. How and why exactly did we get Judge Busch to issue an injunction against the city's Bicycle Plan? Because the city was obviously violating the most important environmental law in the state, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) that requires an environmental study before implementing any project that even might have an impact on the environment. The city was beginning to implement its 500-page Bicycle Plan on the streets of the city without doing any environmental study

Yes, the city and the anti-car folks came up with the parklet idea, which they like because constructing parklets requires taking away parking spaces from those wicked motor vehicles (Parklets: Institutionalizing the smoking section). 

Why anyone but smokers want to sit next to motor vehicle traffic with the accompanying diesel and carbon monoxide fumes is still a mystery to me.

More from the interview:

SB: If that was your brightest accomplishment, what is your biggest disappointment

JM: Change in San Francisco is too slow. That’s definitely something that I’ve learned in my career in the SFBC and the Housing Coalition. Unfortunately, policy and engineering takes time.

SB: We aren’t on track to attain the Vision Zero goals either.

JM: (nods) It’s horrible, it’s tragic–--what’s most tragic is it’s preventable. We know just 13 percent of our streets are responsible for over 75 percent of severe and fatal injuries, so our streets are dangerous by design. It’s not rocket science. We have the tools to re-engineer our streets.

Rob's comment:
All the "improvements" made to city streets under the Vision Zero idea have made no difference at all in the number of traffic accidents or fatalities in San Francisco. 

That result would give pause to everyone but the True Believers at the Bicycle Coalition, Streetsblog, Walk SF, and the SFMTA. For the latter---and the Department of Public Works---the Vision Zero bullshit is also a source of jobs to implement all that "re-engineering."

More on the interview tomorrow.

This day in history: Origin of Species published in 1859

From This Day in History:

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, a groundbreaking scientific work by British naturalist Charles Darwin, is published in England. Darwin’s theory argued that organisms gradually evolve through a process he called “natural selection.” In natural selection, organisms with genetic variations that suit their environment tend to propagate more descendants than organisms of the same species that lack the variation, thus influencing the overall genetic makeup of the species.

Darwin, who was influenced by the work of French naturalist Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck and the English economist Thomas Mathus, acquired most of the evidence for his theory during a five-year surveying expedition aboard the HMS Beagle in the 1830s. Visiting such diverse places as the Galapagos Islands and New Zealand, Darwin acquired an intimate knowledge of the flora, fauna, and geology of many lands. This information, along with his studies in variation and interbreeding after returning to England, proved invaluable in the development of his theory of organic evolution.

The idea of organic evolution was not new. It had been suggested earlier by, among others, Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin, a distinguished English scientist, and Lamarck, who in the early 19th century drew the first evolutionary diagram—a ladder leading from one-celled organisms to man. However, it was not until Darwin that science presented a practical explanation for the phenomenon of evolution.

Darwin had formulated his theory of natural selection by 1844, but he was wary to reveal his thesis to the public because it so obviously contradicted the biblical account of creation. In 1858, with Darwin still remaining silent about his findings, the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace independently published a paper that essentially summarized his theory. Darwin and Wallace gave a joint lecture on evolution before the Linnean Society of London in July 1858, and Darwin prepared On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection for publication.

Published on November 24, 1859, Origin of Species sold out immediately. Most scientists quickly embraced the theory that solved so many puzzles of biological science, but orthodox Christians condemned the work as heresy. Controversy over Darwin’s ideas deepened with the publication of The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), in which he presented evidence of man’s evolution from apes...