San Francisco operates a network of 27 cameras positioned at busy intersections. The cameras snap pictures of lead-footed drivers who barrel through red lights. The City plans to install another 10 cameras in coming months.
How have the cameras done? Well, last year the cameras snapped photos of more than 11,000 motorists running red lights. Each motorist received a $370 citation in the mail. That's a total of more than $4 million coming into the City.
The majority of the cited motorists live in the East Bay. Every weekday afternoon there is a parade of anxious, impatient, itchy workers who dash out of Financial District office buildings and push and shove their way to their cars. Then they use their vehicles as weapons to cut-off some, swerve in front of others and liberally honk their horns at anyone daring enough to get in their way. They have a sense of entitlement. They seem to think they collectively own the streets and intersections of San Francisco.
Quite the opposite is true. Most of those cited drivers live in another community and in another county. They pay taxes someplace else. Yet, they clog our streets, endanger our pedestrians, fill our City with smog and smudge, and make it just about impossible for San Franciscans to get around our own City.
Finally, because of the intersection cameras, we are able to nail some of these impatient East Bay commuters and exact some money from them to pay for the mess they create every work day.
But ... enterprising lawyers hungry for fees have convinced thousands of those commuters to sue the City and County of San Francisco to stop the cameras. It seems those commuters are not only rude and impatient; they are greedy as well.
Yesterday, however, lawyers representing their class-action clients withdrew the lawsuit because San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera made it clear that if the plaintiffs lost (which it seemed likely they would) the City would sue every one of the plaintiffs to recover the City's legal costs. The lawyers for the commuters decided to drop the case. It was a victory for San Francisco and another job well done by Herrera and his staff.
Now, if we could manage to come up with a way to keep those East Bay commuters from being so rude and obnoxious when they fill the BART stations at Embarcadero and Montgomery every weekday afternoon, we will be batting a thousand! Typically, the workers in the high-rise buildings flee like rats running from a burning building. They crowd, shove, push and elbow their way to the BART escalators, rush down the moving escalators bumping more centered and relaxed people, and then cue-up for the East Bay - bound BART trains completely blocking the aisle for everyone else.
It gives me great pleasure to know that we make more than $4 million a year from those East Bay commuters and the additional ten cameras the City plans to install will probably increase our take to something in the neighborhood of $6 million a year.
But ... what about those damn BART commuters? What can be done to slow them down from being in such a hurry to get back over to their East Bay homes at the end of the day?
It's a job for the Bay Bombers! Remember the roller derby champs, the Bay Bombers? They wore padded-everything and skated around oval tracks slamming, shoving, crashing and tripping their opponents into oblivion. Maybe we can bring back the Bay Bombers to roll through the BART stations knocking all the cued-up East Bayers flat on their bottoms.
Hmmmm. Great idea.
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