Many thanks to the AAA of Northern California for sending me a concise roundup of all the driving-related state laws kicking in in 2008.
First and foremost is the one that has probably led to more confusion than the last 100 California ballot measures. I confess that just prior to July 1 of this year, I thought we were supposed to go hands-free with the mobile phone or face the consequences (Those would be $20 for the first offense, $50 thereafter, which I suspect for many will considered the cost of doing business).
But, as AAA’s Sean Comey notes, that particular law, along with its no-cell-no-text-no-anything-while-driving-under-18 counterpart passed this year, don’t actually kick in until July 1, 2008. So Californians, gab away, but try to practice with the earpiece occasionally so it won’t be such a shock this summer.
I was delighted to see that our very own news organization did a story on construction workers commuting from places like Fresno (weekly) and Chico (daily) into San Francisco to help build One Rincon Hill and other monuments to the divide between Bay Area haves and have-much-less-than-it-costs-to-live-heres.
In the piece by Anrica Deb, one of our student correspondents from the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, I found my doppleganger of sorts in an ironworker named Elvis, a.k.a. John Saenz:
“There’s no one north of Santa Rosa,” said the new father, who keeps a picture of his 7-month-old daughter on the inside of his hard hat. Saenz owns a house outside Healdsburg, 70 miles Read the rest of this entry »
Last night I watched “The Amazing Mrs. Prichard,” a British television series about a grocery store manager who become prime minister of the UK because of that longing many of us have for our leaders to use common-sense governance.
As one might expect, much of the drama comes from home-grown logic colliding headlong with the complexities of how things work in the developed world.
In this episode, Mrs. Prichard is frustrated that a G-8 Summit (eight leaders of the world’s economic powers) has come up with nothing concrete to deal with global warming. So after insulting the U.S. president, she proposes her own stab at the problem: On every Wednesday, no one in Britian drives.
I’ve actually seen this happen in a developed country. On Yom Kippur in Israel, 5.5 million citizens Read the rest of this entry »
We journalists are fond of disseminating news, or information that is new or previously unknown.
But today I’m going to tell nearly every one of you something that we’ve known for some months now, on the theory that one or two of you will be backing out of your caves on Labor Day weekend with the intention of driving somewhere.
Just to get your attention, I’ll put it the way Caltrans does on its variable message signs on all routes leading into the Bay Area:
Turns out this was a one-shot deal. I just heard from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission that there won’t be any more free transit after today.
I know this will be an outrage to many transit supporters, but I wonder if the transportation hierarchy doesn’t have a point about putting the money to better uses.
This is not Spare the Air. We’re not trying to convince people to take transit when they have no other reason to. They have a very good reason to Read the rest of this entry »
While free public transportation offered on Spare the Air days was an experiment in social engineering with mixed results (10 percent jump in ridership, but disappointing smog prevention for the high cost), this afternoon we are about to see a much more compelling combination of carrot and stick getting cars off the roads.
It’s the sort of scenario that transit advocates dream of: Make it more painful to drive and less painful to ride BART, buses and ferries. No free parking downtown for commuters, variable Read the rest of this entry »
I was delighted to see that our very own news 
Last night I watched “The Amazing Mrs. Prichard,” a British television series about a grocery store manager who become prime minister of the UK because of that longing many of us have for our leaders to use common-sense governance.
While I was busy oohing and aahing over BART’s little Embarcadero-to-City Center 
Are we just too good at this?
While free public transportation offered on Spare the Air days was an experiment in social engineering with mixed results (10 percent jump in ridership, but disappointing smog prevention for the high cost), this afternoon we are about to see a much more compelling combination of carrot and stick getting cars off the roads.