How Demoting Christiane Hayashi Backfired

To briefly summarize:

San Francisco voters approved Proposition K in 1978 which put an end of the sale of taxi medallions.

San Francisco voters passed Proposition A in November 2007 giving the Board of Supervisors the option of transferring the powers of the Taxi Commission to the SFMTA. The Supervisors did so and the SFMTA took over the regulation of the taxi industry on March 1, 2009.

In January of 2009, Mayor Gavin Newsom, who had promised not to put medallions up for sale if Proposition A passed, came out with a plan to take all the taxis medallions away from the current medallion holders and sell them in order to cover San Francisco's $500 million dollar debt.

This Week's Town Hall Meetings

There were four sessions of Town Hall Meetings on Tuesday and Wednesday. For those of us who went to them all it was just like a weekend in the Caribbean. 

It was almost more of an event than a meeting.

Various members of the press were there including Zoe Corneli of the online paper The Bay Citizen.

Members of the SFMTA hierarchy showed up including Executive Director Nat Ford who stopped by for about an hour. He was reported as saying that he thought Hayashi was doing a good job.

The MTA also sent Julia Rosenberg (Photo) and Henry Epstein to record the the proceeding and take down the driver's comments. Despite the expression I captured in the picture, she's a very friendly person.

And, of course, no meeting would complete without Tariq Mehmood and his impassioned disciples (See photo of acolyte yelling at Hayashi). They were generally well behaved -  except, of course, for Tariq himself who often acted as if he was running the proceeding, made his usual, paranoid personal attacks on Hayashi and shouted down anybody who tried to keep him on topic. Meaning mostly me. 

There were other angry drivers at various sessions. Drivers Murai and Christopher Fulkerson (photo, standing) also defended Hayashi against the cheap-shot, personal attacks that a few belligerent drivers were making.

On the whole, Hayashi handled the situation very well and many drivers left feeling better about the situation than when they came in.

MTA Board Meeting; or How to Make Gridlock

At the 4-18 MTA Board meeting, Director Nat Ford announced three all-day Town Hall Meetings that appear to be the result of cab driver Tariq Mehmood's uprising at the previous Board meeting. The subjects of meetings will be:

1. Electronic waybills.
2. Credit Cards.
3. Possible meter increase.

Ford did not announce the dates  but he did say that they would be conducted by somebody named "staff." Hopefully, this means that Deputy Director Chris Hayashi will be back from vacation to lead them because, if nothing else, she is a true master at such things.

I haven't been to one of these Board meetings in a long time but, after seeing this one, I'm beginning to understand Emile Lawrence.

Emile used to write a newspaper column called the Midnight Cabbie. He went back to school, got a bookkeeping degree but couldn't get a job. He went back to taxi driving and used to show up at the Board meetings to yell at Ford for not hiring him as a bookkeeper. Very entertaining.

Not that I approve of yelling at the Executive Director but, after witnessing the irrationality of the Board's decision making process last Tuesday, I wanted to scream at somebody.

The particular case in point was the Board's decision to turn to Hayes into a two-way street between Van Ness and Gough. In order to reduce the overflow, they planned to channel part of the traffic south onto Van Ness and then change Fell into a two way street between Van Ness and Franklin so that the traffic on Van Ness could take a right turn onto one lane on Fell in order to head to the Sunset.

You professional drivers have doubtless already recognized this as insane. An intelligent ten year old could tell you that this would result in grid-lock on Hayes, Fell and Van Ness. In fact, if you set out to deliberately shut down the area, you'd be hard pressed to find a better way to do it. The only thing that would beat it would be to change Van Ness south into a dead end street - but this plan would effectively do that anyway.

This appeared to be the brainchild of Director Cheryl Brinkman who likes to bicycle and walk and, ironically, is the former chair of the Board of Directors of Livable City San Francisco. She said that she held a meeting at (I think) the Hayes Valley Community Center and nobody spoke against the plan.

She did not mention whether or not she went to the community centers of the Haight or the Richmond or the Sunset or the Parkside and asked the thousands of people that would be brutalized by the plan how they liked the idea of spending a hellish extra hour or two each week on their commutes so that the a couple of hundred people in Hayes Valley might lead more livable lives. But, then, she didn't have to.

A nice young man, appropriately attired in a dark suit, presented a study to justify the plan. He had calculated the number of cars that go up Hayes, then turn on Franklin and Gough. He hadn't bothered to calculate the number of cars on Van Ness heading south or the number on Fell between Franklin and Van Ness. Nor had he bothered to estimate the number of vehicles on Market that were going be stalled at the inter-section of 9th, Market, Hayes and Larkin by the traffic backing up from Van Ness. Nor did he calculate the cost of hiring traffic control officers at said intersection for four hours a day as the only hope of allowing the cars and buses to pass through.

At one point, he said that he wasn't sure where the cars would go. "Maybe they'll go up Larkin," he said vaguely. Needless to say he hadn't calculated the number of cars that currently go up Larkin during rush hour or he would've already known where the cars will go.

They'll go nowhere!

And, of course, he failed to estimate the additional emissions and fumes, the enlarged carbon footprint, that would be poured into the atmosphere by the impeded vehicles and the lengthening of the commutes.

The only member of the MTA Board to vote against the measure was Director Malcom Heinicke.

You know what frightens me about all this?

It's the possibility that the MTA Board was not paid off by the Hayes Valley merchants and that they really think this is a workable idea.

Screeeeeaaaammmmmmmmm!

Nat Ford Serves a Facial

It's official. As of Monday 9/21/2009, Taxis & Accessible Services became Administration, Taxi & Accessible Services under Director Debra Johnson.

Instead of having our own division within the MTA we are now lumped into a cat-call sub-division that looks like this:

• Equal Opportunity Contracting
• Human Resources
• Marketing and Customer Service
• Employee and Labor Relations (for MTA employees)
• Organizational Development and Training
• Taxis
• Accessible Services

Can't you just see the logic of the grouping?

Christiane Hayashi is still the head of Taxis but she's now Deputy Director who reports to Director Debra Johnson as well Executive Director Nathaniel Ford.

In practical terms, this means that Ms. Hayahsi has lost some of her freedom and power and will have to clear her actions with Debra Johnson before going ahead with them. As to whether this will effect her plans to crack down on illegal taxis and limos remains to be seen.

As to how this will effect the forthcoming Town Hall Meetings is also an open question.

One thing is certain: If Director Ford chooses to ignore the wishes of everyone in the Taxicab Business in going ahead with this change, it must be his way of telling us that:

• What we want doesn't matter.
• The Byzantine internal politics of the MTA are more important than the needs of the cab industry or the City of San Francisco.
• We are under his thumb.

Welcome to the MTA.