Last weekend’s Save Muni Summit, a non-MTA meeting of community members interested in talking about what’s wrong with Muni with one another, brought up several of the same revenue generation ideas as local think tank SPUR did.
But not everyone is digging SPUR’s much applauded recommendations for cost-cutting/revenue generation for our floundering transit/traffic system! Some merchants interviewed by the Examiner, for example, say that SPUR’s proposal to add meters across the city is “just a revenue-generating proposal” (uh, yeah,?) and another says he’s “gravely opposed” to it.
Over at Beyond Chron, the concerns are less about the inconvenience of meter feeding: in their words, SPUR’s report was “disability-biased” for its recommendation that blue (disabled) parking placard holders be charged $300 per year for the privilege.
As was noted at last week’s MTA meeting, this isn’t something that we can decide on here in SF — this is a call that can only be made at the state level. At the meeting, MTA board member Malcolm Heinecke acknowledged that this wasn’t something that the MTA can, just, do, and asked MTA head Nathaniel Ford if he could explore this with state authorities.
To Beyond Chron, however, the suggestion implies that “SPUR is targeting people with disabilities to make up money lost due to MTA’s lack of enforcement and lack of proper meter maintenance.”
Emails to SPUR to get their thoughts on BC’s assertions haven’t been returned at publication time — we’ll update if and when we get a response.
