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Entitlement For Some

By Jim Kirwan
2-26-14

 

An Insult to all!

Emails from The City’s transit agency over the past three years indicate that a “handshake agreement” exists for commuter shuttles to use Muni stops without being cited.

The correspondence also shows that there was internal discussion at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency about whether to ticket for the illegal use of the public-bus facilities, while companies and their lobbyists called for leniency and requested citation dismissals.

The inquiries include emails sent to the SFMTA by shuttle providers and the companies that use shuttles.”

kirwan: A bit of background on this. In San Francisco unauthorized use of bus stop zones is a $300 ticket, unless you’re a member of the very privileged few, in which case the “fine” is only one dollar per bus, per day. These “fines” should be at least $100 per bus per stop, per day ­ if anything like ‘fairness’ to the rest of the public is to be observed.

MUNI is constantly screaming about their lack of funding to maintain their so-called services: Yet when something as egregious as this becomes public they’re turning their backs on the public and their ridership by refusing to charge these outrageous parasites who now want to freely use MUNI stops to further undermine what was the affordable cost of rental-property thru rent-control. The carpet-baggers who use the luxury services are the same people that are pricing San Franciscans out of house, apartment or home, to be on the illegal-routes that now allow them to enjoy their comfortable commute to work and back.

The MUNI-system is already overloaded and crammed with those who can’t afford any other form of transportation to navigate over the 49 hills that make up this city. Meanwhile MUNI and the city are wasting millions on redesigning existing stops and intersections that are taking San Francisco back to the 1950’s, rather than to use that money to modernize the entire system for 2014.

This outrage against all the daily-commuters that need to use MUNI, in the city, as well as MUNI’S refusal to charge serious-rates for the PRIVATE USE of MUNI facilities for private-corporate use - of what’s left of the public’s transportation system - to subsidize the same criminals that are responsible for evicting people in the name of real estate price-gouging. This is being done while their companies continue to spy on every citizen of the United States through the jobs they are being chauffeured to - by private luxury buses.

This outrage will meet with much more serious problems unless the city gets serious and stops bowing down to obscenely profitable private interests…

Viewed as symbols of gentrification, shuttle buses that carry workers in tech and other industries, along with students, to the Peninsula or within The City have recently sparked protests in San Francisco. But for years, they have been a headache for residents, motorists, bicyclists and Muni riders.

Bauer’s Intelligent Transportation, a large provider of corporate shuttles, sent a Jan. 24 email to Ed Reiskin, SFMTA transportation director, after $3,000 in fines were received since April 2013.”

k: The corporate use of the cities bus stops must be charged real rates for their mis-use of San Francisco city property. The only “businesses” with any money at all today are the corporate parasites being served by shuttles like Bauer’s and others: To give these cretins financial breaks, while continuing to screw the public at every turn, is just begging to be met with real demonstrations or more serious actions.

As you probably know, Bauer’s IT was an early provider of corporate commuter shuttle transportation dating back nearly ten years. At that time, we entered into a handshake agreement with SFMTA to use Muni stops,” wrote Michael Watson, Bauer’s vice president of marketing.

In an earlier email, Watson also referenced an “agreement.”

As I assume you know, we have had a ‘handshake’ agreement with SFMTA for many years that allowed us to use the stops under a ‘Muni First’ condition,” the email said.

On Tuesday, Watson declined to comment on the emails.

I’m not able to provide you with any comment on any of that,” he said, noting that, “It’s an extremely sensitive thing.”

Paul Rose, an SFMTA spokesman, said his agency was “not aware of any handshake agreement.”

In looking at the documents, you can see the agency enforced the best it could without a specific policy in place, especially in addressing safety concerns and delays to Muni,” Rose said. “Not having a policy in place created confusion for all parties involved, including the shuttle providers, enforcement and any other official.”

That confusion was evident in the emails when companies complained about enforcement.”

k: When a citizen gets ticketed, they must pay costs plus fines and fees for each infraction. No alleged “handshake” would ever excuse any citizen and would probably result in an increased fine for trying to avoid payment. This unequal administration of the law has to be publicly-corrected along with retro-active fines for every violation going back to the beginning of this vile practice!

In an April 2012 email, Carli Paine, an SFMTA project manger, wrote to Lea Militello, an agency director of enforcement, asking what to do about Google citation complaints.

Google keeps getting tickets at Columbus and Union for loading/unloading in a Muni zone. They have asked me (via a PR firm they have working for them) if I can communicate to PD/PCOs that they are participating in our work to develop solutions for shuttles. I think they want to be exempt from tickets during the policy development process,” Paine wrote. “PD/PCOs” refers to police and SFMTA parking control officers.

The identified representative of Google was lobbyist Ross Guehring of the well-known local firm Barbary Coast Consulting, who wrote in an April 10, 2012, email, “I think it would go a long way if these tickets could somehow be reined in during this policy development process.”

The email also included a request to have several tickets dismissed.

Rose said that to his knowledge, none of the tickets were dismissed and no parking control officers were ever directed to not issue citations.

In fiscal year 2012-13, there were 4,262 bus-zone citations issued, but it’s not known how many went to shuttle operators.

On Jan. 21, the agency’s board of directors approved an 18-month pilot program that will allow shuttles to use 200 Muni stops for $1 per stop per day. A determination that the program didn’t need to undergo an extensive environmental review is being appealed to the Board of Supervisors, with a vote scheduled for April 1.”

k: The City of San Francisco is undergoing a city-wide purge of anything and everything that was once part of what made this city work. Part of that was the city’s bus-system which was clean, fast and affordable, to everyone. In today’s world San Francisco regulates virtually every activity of every citizen ­ it’s against this backdrop that these non-agreements and their private-pleas to be excused from payment, for illegal use of the city’s bus stops must be seen—and paid for.

Entitlement” for some is an insult to all!

An appellant in the case is Cynthia Crews of the SF League of Pissed-Off Voters. On Tuesday, she said a “handshake agreement” has seemingly existed for sometime, given the lack of enforcement, and that the pilot program is just a “wink and a nod.”

They ask for forgiveness rather than permission, and it’s a sense of entitlement,” Crews said of the shuttle culture. “We haven’t seen any evidence that there was the same level of enforcement of the buses as there were for individuals who stopped in public-bus stops. There had to have been some handshake agreement that they would look the other way.”

Critics of shuttles want the agency to charge more for use of the stops. Under state law, such a pilot can only charge enough to recoup costs of running the program.”

Kirwan: The city can and does charge whatever the hell it likes, whenever they’re dealing with the under-privileged or anyone else who’s not part of the “entitlement­class”

Political-Correctness was created eight decades ago by Marxists who were hell bent on destroying Western society ­ and this effort, while small, is nonetheless part of that effort and must be publicly stripped of its’ artificial trappings. (2)

kirwanstudios@sbcglobal.net


  1. Emails Show Handshake Agreement for tech buses using SF transit stops.

http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/emails-show-handshake-agreement-for-tech-buses-using-sf-transit-stops/Content?oid=2715002


  1. The Unholy Commandments behind Political Correctness

http://rense.com/general96/unholy2.html

 


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