Ticket to Ride

The old SF Greyhound station on 7th was clean, safe
and reliable. It has since moved to the Transbay terminal.

An old-fashioned way of getting the homeless out of San Francisco is being revived: [bold added]

Mayor London Breed on Thursday ordered city employees to offer homeless people a bus ticket out of town before presenting shelter or housing as an option.

...Thursday’s directive marks Breed’s latest effort to prove she’s taking a firm stance to address the city’s homelessness and overdose crises. Breed is in the middle of a tough re-election fight with many voters focused on the conditions of city streets and the state of unsheltered homelessness.

...The program of busing people out of San Francisco has existed for years, but it saw a sharp decline during the pandemic, prompting some critics and at least one mayoral rival to question why Breed’s administration hadn’t pushed the program more forcefully. Officials had already vowed to ramp it up earlier this year.

Frankly, if I were a homeless person in San Francisco I wouldn't take that deal. San Francisco is currently spending more than $100,000 per person on homeless services, and chances are that, if I stayed, some of it will trickle through to me, not all of it being absorbed by middlemen and bureaucrats.

Besides, how would I get my tent and shopping carts full of stuff on the bus?

An Easy Fix

from Instagram

Two months ago we noted how San Francisco parking officers routinely issued tickets to stolen vehicles that have been abandoned. Mayor Breed ordered the practice stopped. [bold added]

Breed ordered the MTA to stop ticketing stolen cars hours after an Oct. 11 Chronicle investigation exposed the practice. The report showed that from May 1 to Sept. 17, SFMTA parking control officers ticketed 411 vehicles that had been reported stolen, issuing fines totaling nearly $70,000. Some were written up multiple times; one received eight citations.

The fix was simple.

The MTA and SFPD said in their letter to Breed that they coordinated with the state’s Department of Justice to obtain California’s stolen vehicle plate file. Then, according to MTA spokesperson Erica Kato, they loaded the file onto ticket writers’ devices. Now, whenever a ticket writer enters a stolen plate number into their device, they receive a message the car was stolen.

By not correcting the problem San Francisco increased its ticketing revenue. When it got caught, no one tried to defend the strategy. It's a small sign of encouragement that City officials had enough of a conscience to feel shame.

Wishful Thinking

The City not only tickets stolen cars, it painted a curb red
while a car was parked, then issued it a ticket.

Yesterday's post was about San Francisco ticketing stolen cars, rather than attempting to reunite them with their owners. Mayor London Breed reacted immediately to the Chronicle article:[bold added]

Mayor London Breed on Wednesday ordered the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency to stop ticketing stolen vehicles and to instead notify their owners that their cars had been found...

Breed ordered the SFMTA and the Police Department to work together to implement a system in which stolen cars are identified and recovered. The two departments have a 45-day deadline to respond to the directive.

Just because London Breed is the Mayor doesn't mean that she's in charge:

San Franciscans will have to wait, however, before the directive becomes reality. City laws governing the use of surveillance technology — such as license plate readers — require multiple reviews by the city’s Committee on Information Technology, as well as a signoff by a supervisorial committee and a full vote of the Board of Supervisors.

The problem of bureacratic obstinacy exists in all governments, no matter who's on top, because bureacrats act in their own self interest, not in the interest of the chief executives or the people who elected them. According to public choice theory

There is abundant evidence that governments throughout history and throughout the world do not do what they are supposed to do. In some cases the government employees do not do anything useful. In others they will not do their job unless they are paid specifically to do a task. The English language calls this payment a bribe but this is a misnomer in that the word bribe is also used to designate a payment made to a government employee to do something illegal. The payment that is mentioned above is one made to get the government employee to do something that is not only legal but is also his or her job.

We wish Mayor Breed all the best, but there's no way she'll have her integrated database up and running in 45 days. The Transportation and Law Enforcement bureaucracies will ensure that it will occur at double that length of time, if at all.