That's the America I know and love. Hell yeah, we all look different and we all love to pet a baby lamb and eat chocolate chip cookies and corn dogs in the sun.

I think we should lean into low media literacy and run something broadly popular, like a ban on a gas tax, as a wholesale replacement of Article XIII of the CA Constitution

Tired: “you have a face for radio”
Wired: “I do lighting for podcasts”

Another example is coming - Connie Chan is trying to rerun Prop L (Waymo/Uber/Lyft tax to fund Muni) … but without a requirement to actually fund Muni, and that would be bad! It both shakes people’s trust in gov’t and takes away room for a tax that could be, by law, dedicated to Muni

At double risk of putting words in people’s mouths, the point I was making (and I suspect @wafoli.bsky.social too) is that ideally your electeds pass special taxes for their specific purpose, not general taxes with an attached memo, and then claim everyone who voted for the tax agreed w/ the memo

At the risk of putting words in people’s mouths I suspect all parties here agree on the answers (no, yes, yes, in that order) and the arguments are about salience of the three questions and how one would spend the money

There are like three entangled questions here:
- did this tax, legally, require the money to go to social housing
- did the campaigners say that it did and did a key number of voters believe it
- should the mayor spend at least this much money on social housing

Well to be fair, it is a broken promise, it’s just Dean Preston’s promise, and it’s broken because it was a lie from the jump

Every word on the flier is factually correct, it’s just missing one sentence after “we were told the tax would fund social housing (we were successfully bamboozled)”

The author may be referencing the number of emails the DNC sent out with him as the sender/in the subject line, which was for some reason greater than zero

The stadium worm has been busy

Am I correct in thinking the fourth track in the Wye would be the platform that doesn’t exist downstairs at 12th/19th St Oakland? Like incoming from the North, outbound towards SF? Is there a tunnel/trainbox for it already or is the cost of digging that included in ~$100M

Yep! That is a good summary. Higher priority capital projects first and then automation

Adding a 3rd track to the Wye cost $22M in 1981 ($42M in 2025). So maybe $50M-$100M for a 4th track now?

$100M of new track unlocks more service than $2B of automation

onlinepubs.trb.org/Onlinepubs/t...

I guess the summary of all of these is that that 5m headways require CBTC and then ops $$, and <5m requires new track _somewhere_ and that’s probably a better place to spend your first capital project dollar than PSDs (though we should have both!)

In BART’s “hey what could we do with CBTC” map, you get 5m peak headways if you serve every line every 10 mins. There’s an operating $ question of “is there enough money to run this,” but the same logic that says this is 5m headways means that today every station but the three blues has ~10m peak

Obviously there are capital solutions to improve this - new tube, new track, rebuild MacArthur/Bay Fair to run more trains on the suburban lines and transfer onto core service. But the headways problem doesn’t sound like just operating funding to me, unless I’m missing something - genuinely curious!

Q: My understanding is that the Transbay Tube and the Oakland Wye really limit headways in a way that the DC Metro doesn’t have to deal with. If you split 30 trains per hour (after the CBTC upgrade) across R/G/B/Y that’s still ~10m peak headways. Is there more they could do with more operating $$$?

“Knows how hard it is to run a small business in San Francisco”