Brother, can you spare some air?

The controversy over the free public transit on spare the air days here in the Bay Area continues. This year the program of no fares on such days has been all day but it seems to me that when the program started it was for the morning rush hour only. And that makes more sense. With transit being free all days at such times we have hundreds, no thousands, sightseeing at great financial expense to the various transit agencies plus inconveniencing the regular commuters who are having great difficulty even getting on their train or their boat. Golden Gate Ferries to Sausalito saw a 512% increase in ridership on those days. I am sure that 500% of them were looky-loos, just out for a fun day in the sun at everyone elses expense. BART trains were crammed full also making it even more difficult for regular riders to get on. The only thing missing last week were the guards with white gloves pushing people into the cars as they do in Tokyo.

Now we have idiots like Alameda County Supervisor Scott Haggerty who proposes free transit all year round. Well that is certainly one way to kill it entirely. There is no such thing as a free ride and if he thinks that the various govermental agencies can pick up the tab, a tab that BART already has trouble dealing with, then he is in need of some reality therapy. Another day dreamer is San Francisco Supervisor Tom Ammiano who is calling for a study of that possibility. This is not done anywhere in the country nor the world for that matter. Some limited downtown shuttles are in place in various cities but those are paid for by the merchants along the routes in conjunction with the municipality that they operate in.

Oh, and then we have the other pie-in-the-sky day dreamers who want to tear down Hetch Hetchy and restore the valley to what it once was. I have yet to hear any solid plans as for where we would then obtain the water that most of us in the Bay Area drink. And who is to say that the valley could be restored to its natural state anyway? With it under water for so long that would be a monumental task in itself. That would cost millions in addition to the billions needed just for draining the reservoir and and then tearing down the dam. Such madness!