S.F. on verge of $4-per-gallon gas

David R. Baker,Michael Cabanatuan, Chronicle Staff Writers

Friday, April 18, 2008

More...

The age of $4 gasoline has arrived. And it's forcing Bay Area residents to change the way they live.

Sometime in the coming week, San Francisco is expected to become America's first major city to pay an average of $4 for a gallon of regular gas. The citywide average, tracked by the AAA auto club, stood at $3.96 on Thursday.

It's the latest milestone in a four-year run-up at the pump, fueled by crude oil prices that have climbed to their highest levels ever.

When gas prices began their current climb in early 2004, the run-up looked more like a nuisance than anything else, costing commuters an extra $5 to $10 per week. Now, the amount drivers pay to fill up has doubled, and it's enough to hurt.

In response, drivers in the Bay Area and elsewhere are re-examining the ways they live, work and shop. Some longtime car commuters have switched to BART, Caltrain or Muni. Others have ditched one of their family cars, traded in their gas-hog for a compact or - in the case of a determined few - said goodbye to the automobile altogether.

They have turned to telecommuting and combining all their weekly errands into a single outing. And the results are measurable.

Gasoline sales in California have fallen for two years in a row, according to state data. Mass transit ridership is rising in the Bay Area, while traffic on the region's toll bridges has shrunk.

"I think the temporary response to the price shock is past," said Rod Diridon, head of the Mineta Transportation Institute at San Jose State University. "People are beginning to move to different habits now. There are a lot of people looking for a permanent way to cut back on gas."

Cutting back on luxuries

Not everyone can. For those people, escalating prices have forced a different kind of change. They're finding ways to spend less on other parts of the monthly budget.

"It's the luxuries we all have - it's movies, dinners, stuff like that," said Michael Feeley, a landscaper who lives with his wife in Berkeley. "We don't actually sit down and say we've got to cut something out, but we're definitely more frugal."

Feeley used to spend less than $200 per month on gas for his Toyota Tacoma truck, which he uses to haul employees, equipment and supplies to job sites. Now he pays $500.

"When people say everyone's driving a gas-guzzler, well, some of us don't have a choice," Feeley said. "I can't run this business driving a Prius."

Many people, however, do have a choice.

The Bay Area, unlike much of the country, has a well-developed web of mass transit lines, linking cities via bus, ferry, subway and train. Their ridership is booming - particularly on regional systems such as BART and Caltrain that are heavily patronized by commuters.

BART has seen a 6.7 percent increase in the number of passengers through this week compared with the same period a year earlier, said BART spokesman Linton Johnson. Average weekday ridership is at 365,463, with riders taking almost 23,000 more trips on BART each weekday than they did a year earlier.

Bill Buehlman, who lives in San Francisco and works for the city's Homeless Outreach Team, has started relying on BART and Muni to commute and get around town. He estimates he's cut his driving from about 1,000 miles per month to 500 miles.

While Buehlman said he despises the oil companies, he's grateful that soaring gas prices are prompting him and others to reduce the amount they drive.

"I look at it as a gift, a blessing," he said. "The profiteers are giving us the opportunity to make a decision to do something better for our planet, for our community."

Mary Ann Buggs, who lives in Berkeley and works near San Francisco's AT&T Park, switched to BART and Muni after years of driving across the Bay Bridge. So did her husband. But she's a reluctant convert to transit.

"I'm not particularly enjoying it," she said, "because Berkeley to SoMa by the ballpark is expensive (in transit fares) and nowhere near as comfortable as a car ride. But it is cheaper than spending $60 twice a week in gas station excursions."

Buggs and her husband are among a growing number of people avoiding the bridge.

According to the Bay Area Toll Authority, the number of drivers crossing the region's seven state-owned toll bridges this fiscal year has dropped 2 percent compared with the previous year. Six of the bridges have seen falling traffic counts - from a 1 percent decline at the Bay and Dumbarton bridges to 4 percent at the Antioch and Carquinez bridges. Only the Benicia-Martinez Bridge, which received a new three-lane span last fall, has seen an increase in traffic.

While some people rely more on mass transit to avoid high gas prices, others have gotten rid of their least-efficient cars.

For Kim Howard and her husband, Edison Peinado, that meant selling their Jeep Cherokee. The sport utility vehicle got 11 miles per gallon in city driving - not good considering the couple lives north of the Golden Gate Park Panhandle in the middle of San Francisco.

Now Peinado, a pilot with SkyWest Airlines, takes BART to and from the airport when he can. Otherwise, he and Howard must split the use of their one remaining car, a 12-year-old Audi.

It's a juggling act. Howard drives to Campbell for her job as marketing director for the Infonetics tech-industry research firm, but she's able to telecommute much of the time. Peinado gets the car when his return flight to San Francisco arrives too late at night for BART.

"It was more painful in the beginning, but we're getting used to it," Howard said. "It's like most things - you adapt."

She says the change is worth it, both to save money and help the environment. But it's a trade-off, with the couple sacrificing convenience to make it work.

Trying telecommuting

Like Howard, many Bay Area residents have tried telecommuting as gas prices rise.

Barbara Heninger manages a team of technical writers at the Synopsys software firm, with five writers in Sunnyvale and three in India. One of her local employees lives in Santa Cruz and comes to the office once a week. Another, who lives in San Jose, averages three days in the office each week. They work from home the rest of the time.

"This last year or two has been the first when employees cited concerns about the environment and commute costs as some of the reasons for working at home," Heninger said. The arrangement works, she says, as long as telecommuters make a point of communicating regularly with their co-workers.

If gas prices keep rising, she said, she expects more people to try telecommuting. "It will either be that, or people will really start considering how far away they want to live from where they work," said Heninger, who lives in Los Altos. "When I started in the tech industry, it wasn't that unusual to have people commuting here from Danville, because they wanted the big house on the hill."

Still, there remain people who have to drive for work. In some cases, they must drive a lot.

San Francisco cab driver Jorge Perez now spends about $50 per day on gasoline. In addition, he has to pay $100 per day to lease his cab, he said.

"What happens on top of that is what I make for the day," he said. "Sometimes it's difficult to make that much."

It doesn't help that Perez drives a Ford Crown Victoria, which gets about 15 miles per gallon. "They're good cars for the hills of San Francisco," he said, "but they aren't known for their fuel efficiency."

E-mail the writers at dbaker@sfchronicle.com and mcabanatuan@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/18/MNO4107CO5.DTL

This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

My Kinda of town.....

I bet many joined the chorus.... Chicago is.

Right on for the countries second city. However, I am referring to my adopted home town, San Francisco. The democratic race for presidency is not enough to hold its attention, the town's Mayor aspirations for Governorship, the city's deficit that already affected schools, health care with across the board cuts -- it got into a quasi global fracas about Tibet, China, Burma, Darfur et al... Here is a town that needs no reason to protest, except some group believes a protest is what is called for, to shine a spot light for their particular issue du jour. The larger irony of the counter protest, as it is characterized by pro-China forces, how little critical thinking occurs within. Nationals in various media, feel national pride over rides increasing evidence of many abuses of a "non communist" regime.

I am not adverse to mass protest, with varying groups coming together to offer or object to a position/action/practice. To offer a reasonable, achievable alternative if wrongs are discover to be true.

more to follow.

Obama at the Helm

Blogger comment later...

Obama at the Helm

By Peter Beinart
Tuesday, April 8, 2008; A19

Washington Post

Deep into a primary campaign that was supposed be over by now, Barack Obama must still answer one fundamental question. Jeremiah Wright notwithstanding, it's not whether he's too black. It's whether he's too green. Hillary Clinton has made Obama's inexperience her chief line of attack, and if she goes down, John McCain will pick up where she left off. Luckily, Obama doesn't have to rely on his legislative résumé to prove he's capable of running the government. He can point to something more germane: the way he's run his campaign.

Presidents tend to govern the way they campaigned. Jimmy Carter ran as a moralistic outsider in 1976, and he governed that way as well, refusing to compromise with a Washington establishment that he distrusted (and that distrusted him). Ronald Reagan's campaign looked harsh on paper but warm and fuzzy on TV, as did his presidency. The 1992 Clinton campaign was like the Clinton administration: brilliant and chaotic, with a penchant for near-death experiences. And the 2000 Bush campaign presaged the Bush presidency: disciplined, hierarchical, loyal and ruthless.

Of the three candidates still in the 2008 race, Obama has run the best campaign by far. McCain's was a top-heavy, slow-moving, money-hemorrhaging Hindenburg that eventually exploded, leaving the Arizona senator to resurrect his bankrupt candidacy through sheer force of will. Clinton's campaign has been marked by vicious infighting and organizational weakness, as manifested by her terrible performance in caucus states.

Obama's, by contrast, has been an organizational wonder, the political equivalent of crossing a Lamborghini with a Hummer. From the beginning, the Obama campaign has run circles around its foes on the Internet, using MySpace, Facebook and other Web tools to develop a virtual army of more than 1 million donors. The result has been fundraising numbers that have left opponents slack-jawed (last month Obama raised $40 million, compared with Clinton's $20 million).

But the Web is the political equivalent of gunpowder: It can mow down your opponents, but it can also blow up in your face. In 2004, Howard Dean's campaign also raised vast sums online, but it spent the money just as fast. By embracing the anarchic ethos of the liberal blogosphere, Dean generated enormous excitement, but he couldn't harness it. Within his decentralized, bottom-up campaign, a thousand flowers bloomed, but not at the right time and in the right place. "You cannot manage an insurgency," said Dean's Web guru, Joe Trippi. "You just have to ride it."

The Obama campaign has proved that adage wrong. It has married Web energy with professional control. It has used the Web masterfully but, unlike Dean in 2004, sees it as a tool, not a philosophy of life.

At the top, in fact, the campaign is quite hierarchical. There's no question who's in charge: David Axelrod, a grizzled Chicago street-fighter whom Obama has known since he was 30. Axelrod and his subordinates believe their guy represents a new kind of politics, but they're not above using old-school, hard-ball tactics -- even against his own supporters -- to help him win. Last spring, for example, when the Obama campaign realized it couldn't control a popular Obama page on MySpace, it persuaded the company to shut the page down.

It is this remarkable hybrid campaign, far more than Obama's thin legislative résumé, that should reassure voters that he can run the government. As president, he'll need to keep his supporters mobilized: It will take a grass-roots movement, breathing down Congress's neck, to pass universal health care. But in dealing with those very supporters, he'll also have to be ruthless so as not to get caught up in the kind of side skirmishes, such as gays in the military, that weakened Bill Clinton early on. Obama's experience whipping up support on MySpace while simultaneously tamping it down is exactly the kind he'll need in the Oval Office.

The danger is that Obama will fall prey to the malady that ruined Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter: self-righteousness. Elections are winner-take-all, but governing isn't. Candidates can denounce Washington, but presidents have to live there. If the lesson Obama draws from his outsider campaign is that he and his supporters are children of light while those who oppose them are cynics, he'll find it hard to compromise. Successful presidents know how to make half a loaf look like a big win, and presidents with messiah complexes don't do that very well. But if Obama can come across as idealistic without being moralistic, if he can keep his supporters' spirits high and their expectations in check, if he can fuse exuberance and discipline, he might just run the government pretty well. That won't be easy, but then, neither is running for president. Just ask Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

Peter Beinart, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes a monthly column for The Post.

Obama, Ferraro, Wright: 'Postracial' Meets Racism

This article can be found on the web at

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080407/younge

---

beneath the radar by Gary Younge

Obama, Ferraro, Wright: 'Postracial' Meets Racism

[from the April 7, 2008 issue]

"The way we see things is affected by what we know and what we believe," wrote John Berger in Ways of Seeing. "The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled."

When former vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro sees Barack Obama--a black man, raised by a single mother, whose middle name is Hussein and whose surname rhymes with Osama--she sees privilege.

"If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position," she said. "And if he was a woman of any color, he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept."

Quite what concept Ferraro was referring to is difficult to fathom. Of the ten whitest states to have voted so far, Obama has won nine of them. Of the ten blackest states to have voted so far (including the District of Columbia), he has won nine of them. The votes are not weighted for melanin content. His lead is the product not of affirmative action but of democratic election.

Shortly after Ferraro made her comments, we saw just how advantageous Obama's race could be when controversy over his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, forced him to deliver a landmark speech about race. Every presidential hopeful has his racial moment. For Reagan it was the Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi; George Bush Sr. had Willie Horton; Bill Clinton had Sister Souljah; Bush Jr. had Bob Jones University. Each one sought to comfort white voters with at worst their bigotry and at best their ambivalence toward African-Americans.

That was not an option for Obama. Boy, was he lucky. All he had to do was address black alienation and white disadvantage, set it in a historical context and then call on people to rise above it. In so doing, he had to acknowledge not just the fact of physical segregation--schools and housing--but psychic segregation. For while Wright's sermons clearly shocked many whites, to many blacks his sentiments were as banal an addition to the dinner table as hot sauce.

In truth there was only so long you could keep that elephant in the room before it dumped on the carpet. Obama cleared the mess up pretty well. Shifting the stains will be trickier. For all his talk about transcending race, not even this biracial, Ivy League, intact-black-family man could escape America's racial dysfunction.

Which brings us back to Ferraro. For if her initial comments were ridiculous, her response revealed just what Obama is up against. "Every time that campaign is upset about something, they call it racist," she said. "I will not be discriminated against because I'm white. If they think they're going to shut up Geraldine Ferraro with that kind of stuff, they don't know me."

And so Ferraro turns the world on its head. The perpetrator claims victimhood and takes to the airwaves to claim she is being silenced. Having asserted her right to be offensive, she then seeks to deny the right of others to be offended. Accusations of racism, real or imagined, are portrayed as more egregious than racism itself. Obama is lucky because he's black; Ferraro is discriminated against because she's white. White is the new black. We have race without racism.

There are many problems with her retort, but for now let's just deal with two. First, no one from Obama's campaign actually called her a racist. Obama called her comments "divisive" and "patently absurd." His chief strategist, David Axelrod, called her "divisive" and "polarizing."

Second, the comments are patently racist. Indeed, they are taken straight from the playbook of late-twentieth-century racism. Before the civil rights era the accusation used to be that black people could not succeed because they were black. Once affirmative action was introduced the emphasis shifted to suggest that they succeeded only because they were black. Either way the point is clear: black people are genetically ill equipped to succeed on their own merits.

This was no one-off either. Shortly before the New York primary in 1988, Ferraro declared, "If Jesse Jackson were not black, he wouldn't be in the race." One wonders what a black candidate would have to be or do to meet with Ferraro's approval. In November, after Hillary Clinton was subjected to tough questioning in a debate, Ferraro said, "It's OK in this country to be sexist. It's certainly not OK to be racist. I think if Barack Obama had been attacked for two hours--well, I don't think Barack Obama would have been attacked for two hours."

There is a word for people who consistently deny the existence and effects of racism while denigrating black achievement. It's called racist. It is not a word that should be used casually, and it is a word that has at times been misused. But it is not a word that we should refrain from using simply because some people might be offended. Ferraro is a racist. That's not all she is. And that's not all she has to be. But that is what she has consistently chosen to be in her response to black men in politics.

To insist on this is divisive only insofar as it divides racists from antiracists. Those who seek to set underrepresented groups against one another must be challenged. There can be no progressive coalition in this country that does not include black men and white women. But that coalition must be based on antiracism and antisexism. Feminism that does not embrace antiracism, like antiracism that does not embrace feminism, is little more than a campaign for sectional interests masquerading as a struggle for equality. It seeks not an end to inequity but just a different division of the spoils.

Given his looks, oratorical skills and intelligence, it is difficult to imagine what Obama couldn't do if he were a white man; but it's pretty obvious that he wouldn't have had to make that speech. In the end, though, it may be less useful to speculate about what his candidacy would look like if he were a different race than to wonder how he would fare if there were no racism.