Tag: San Diego

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I have lived in Southern California for over 30 years and everyone here claims to want mass transportation but very few choose, including myself, to use mass transportation. My reason, as I suspect most other people’s reason, is, despite the effort, it is neither convenient or timely. Or this is my impression of mass transportation.

Every time I have experimented with mass transport I have had the same problem — it is easier and quicker to have taken a car. Now, things change and I experiment so little, I could be wrong. Mass transport could be better, easier and quicker but that just isn’t my perception and, as an old boss told me once, perception is reality. The truth is irrelevant if people think the service is bad and a lot of people think the service is bad.

I have visited cities were mass transportation is both good and more timely. For instance, New York and San Francisco have mass transportation that any rational person would choose over a car. So I can be convinced to change my mind but nothing has happened to convince me I am wrong.

Here is my reality. My partner and I were going to a football game. On game days, the city encourages people to take the trolley as there is limited parking and heavy traffic near the stadium. A perfect time to experiment with mass transport. The trip to the stadium was uneventful but the trip home was much more problematic. Some time after departing the stadium, the carriage I was riding in filled with smoke. The passengers were forced to walk back to the station were an already large number of people were standing waiting for the next train which wasn’t coming because there was a stalled trolley blocking the track. Once the trollies began moving, every car was full. Another person couldn’t be pushed into it even if someone tried. And, believe me, people tried. Eventually we made it home but the conclusion we reached was it would have been far easier, even with limited parking and excess traffic, to have taken the car.

In case you are saying well that is unfair. I shouldn’t judge the system based on one system breakdown. And I didn’t. A few years later I had to abandon a smoke filled trolley car and walk back on the tracks to the next available station. Since I have only used the trolley system a handful of times, this has left a particularly bad impression of the system. I am not going to get where I want. I am going to end up walking on trolley tracks to station that doesn’t have my car and I will have to find some other mode of transportation to get where I want to go.

More problematic is that even a good experience with the trolley, and I have had them, you realize that taking a car would be quicker. My best experience was when a new line opened to La Jolla. This one went smoother. No smoke, no abandoned cars, no walks on the tracks. It took a good 40 minutes. If I drove my car it would have been all of 20 minutes and there was plenty of parking at the shopping center where I was going. I could have done this faster in my car and had a much more pleasant experience to boot as there was a homeless man ripping up a stack of free newspapers and throwing the torn pages on the ground. I probably should stopped him but he was much younger and appeared to be a bit crazy.

This brings me to an even bigger problem. The city parents are trying to make San Diego a mass transportation, bicycle riding city without doing any work to make this palatable to the residents of the city. The number of mid-rise buildings going up in Hillcrest, my neighborhood, is alarming mostly because the already bad traffic is now becoming even worse. Trying to make a left hand turn on the street where I live is nearly impossible at some points in the day. There are too many cars and not enough nice people to let you in. They have taken away parking along the avenues to make bike lanes. Bikes lane that so few people use that when I see someone using a bike in them I am startled and will excitedly point them out to anyone with me at the time.

The plan, as I see it, is the city parents are trying to make car driving so miserable that people will choose to take bad and inconvenient mass transit instead. Now this is a big problem because the citizens may make other choices. Like move to other cities. Or to the suburbs. Or elect a less environmentally conscious city council. The solution, as I see it, is to prove to a doubting public that the city can provide reliable, quick and convenient public transportation. This they are failing to do.

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The biggest problem I face living in San Diego is the sidewalks. I have yet to be bothered by an immigrant but I am terrorized, particularly at night, by the general disrepair of the sidewalks here. I have a trick ankle that occasionally gives out on me which means when ever I encounter uneven pavement there is a chance I will be thrown off kilter and find myself on the ground. When I was young, I just got up, dusted myself off and proceeded to where I was going. Now, at 68, I come up bruised and battered. I am increasingly afraid of breaks especially after my partner broke his ankle in a fall on a sidewalk.

That Trump’s focus is on immigrants and not sidewalks is telling. Infrastructure repair would have a bigger effect on my life than the removal of any immigrant. But criminal immigrants sell what Trump and the Republicans are pushing which is the federal government takeover of the cities. So I guess I will continue to struggle with the treacherous sidewalks while Trump rids the streets of immigrants. Something that doesn’t bother me and I don’t care about. But, anyway.

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I live near downtown San Diego and drive an automobile. This means I experience two problems whenever I leave home. Parking will be limited and I will probably have to pay for it. The easiest and cheapest way to park is street parking which, depending on the time of day, will be metered. So far so good and I accept that this is the way things are.

What I don’t accept is that fucking meters are out of order half the time I pull up to one. In a fair world, this would mean that parking is free. The machine that the city provides to give payment is out of order. How can I pay? But reason is irrelevant when dealing with San Diego Treasury department who are responsible for the parking meters. You are supposed to pay even if there is no way to pay. Understand because they are very firm about this.

So, when I find myself in this dilemma, I scan the street quickly to see if I have an alternate. Hopefully this gave you a few moments of amusement because you already know that there is rarely an alternate and that I have already spent the last half of an hour driving the neighborhood looking for an open space. I am tired of looking, late for my appointment and now angry at the world for putting me in this position. In these cases, I usually make a quick sign of the cross and risk it. Sometimes I get a ticket, sometimes I don’t.

What irritates me is the city’s position on this. I made a genuine effort to feed the beast but the beast refuses to bite. Perhaps, and I am guessing here (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) that part of the problem is the parking meters are a good source of revenue for the city. In the last fiscal year $7.3 million in traffic fines were collected. Now if all this money came from malcontents trying to dodge the meter, I would say fine the shit out of them baby. However, as I have pointed out, some of this money comes from good and faithful citizens trying to do their civic duty and pay the God damn machines and who were unfairly fined because of broken parking meters.

To make matters worse, I hear that the City Council is making it easier for new building contractors to get exemptions on the new construction laws which require that new buildings have a parking place for each person in a unit. They are, in fact, allowing new condos without any parking whatsoever. Why anyone would buy a new condo without parking is beyond me but then I suppose the desperation to own something, anything at all, has gotten so bad that there are people who will pluck down a million dollars to own a condo without parking in the most congested part of the city. But I digress.

Oh, and then there are the bike lanes. Yes the bike lines put in by the city in the hopes of changing San Diego’s dependence on the car and pursue a more ecologically minded form of transportation like bicycles. Well, unsurprisingly, it has failed miserably. I can stand in a bicycle lane for hours at a time without seeing a bicycle. The net result for the city’s efforts is less parking spaces and the streets are more dangerously narrow to the extent that I can hold conversations with the drivers in the next lane.

So in review:

Parking is difficult in San Diego.

So parking must be paid for.

Even if the parking meter is broken and is unable to take your payment, you have to pay.

The city is exempting contractors from building more parking in new buildings so they are making parking even worse than it already is. Why they are doing this is a mystery. Oh, wait, it may not be a mystery at all — campaign donations from contractors might have something to do with it. I am not sure but I am throwing that out there for your consideration.

In order to encourage better ecological behavior on its citizens, the city has also taken away parking by building new bike lanes thus making parking even more challenging and driving more dangerous. All to accommodate the 5 bikers who use the bike lanes.

On the other hand, I do live in America’s finest city.