Nothing Sharper

Dead leaves and grass clippings are getting a fair amount of attention these days.  The recent city charter commission was initially charged with reviewing the city’s yard waste protocols, along with minor issues like term limits, the mayor/council balance of power, and the budget process.  The commission’s work was scaled back, but yard waste fights on; the Sacramento Area Bicycle Advocates (SABA) is pushing for a citywide change in how this particular brand of garbage is collected.

After a city charter measure adopted in 1977, the city cannot require use of containers for yard waste collection, and so residents can merely dump their yard waste in the streets for disposal.  This hasn’t really been too much a problem – every two weeks or so, the city simply sends a normal truck out along with a special vehicle that has a ground-scraping claw at the front.  A few years back, the city decided to roll out a voluntary containerized yard waste program which has been doing pretty well, and we’re currently in this middle position with some containerized collection, some street collection.

Compared to containerized collection, where every lawn clipping, pruned branch, or dead leaf goes in a dedicated container like so many aluminum cans or kitchen waste, loose-in-the-street yard waste collection has a few minor problems.  Uncollected leaves and yard clippings  pile up in gutters and cause big flooding problems during storms, especially those first few storms in October and November.  They’re also a bicycling hazard, as many of these piles in the central city are dropped smack in the bike lane.   While state law makes it illegal to obstruct a bike lane and city code holds that yard waste shouldn’t be dumped in a bike lane, neither rule is enforced.  As a result, SABA joined a coalition that strongly lobbies for containerized waste citywide to confront the problem of gardeners and yard owners clogging the bike lanes and is strident about pushing for containers across Sacramento.  This position hasn’t exactly won SABA many friends.

The little day-to-day things are usually what get people the most riled up, and they’re really what Machiavelli warned against messing around with in The Prince.  The more you talk about impacting some yardowner’s sacred right to leave his prunings in the street, the more people will resist, no matter how reasonable and beneficial your idea is.  Containerized yard waste collection has a lot going for it, and it should be able to stand on its own merits.  According to a city staff report, the benefits are myriad:

• 24% lower waste collection bills
• Weekly year-round collection (alongside weekly recycling and garbage collection)
• Reduced greenhouse gas emissions (the city uses one vehicle for container, two vehicles for loose-in-the-street)
• Better-looking streets and neighborhoods
• Better storm drainage
• Fewer leaf piles blockading bike lanes
• Fewer mosquitos (from fewer puddles of standing water and debris they breed in)

Containerized waste is nothing but win. What’s getting SABA in trouble, though, is that it’s an organization that is already known for trying to carve out concessions for a minority (bicyclists) from the established status quo (roads choked with automobiles), and it’s now lobbying hard for something that is not related to its mission (containerized green waste) that will also buck the status quo.  In other words, those same asshole bicyclists that have already convinced the city to cut city streets from three lanes to two just to add some bike lanes are now also trying to make sure that you have to keep an extra container in your backyard, rather than letting you just dump yard waste in the street like you’ve always (since 1977) done.

Of course, the whole bike lane hazard thing is partially SABA’s fault, too.  Had Sacramento no bike lanes, all of these hazardous leaf piles would likely have been left in the parking lane, not in a normal vehicle lane, so they wouldn’t be able to trip up any rider.  My own experience says that drivers will grudgingly give cyclists a few feet in a painted bike lane, and woe to the cyclist that strays outside them, but that increased exposure to bicyclists riding as vehicles (taking a lane on J Street, for example) leads to more road-sharing and fewer hurt feelings all around.

This is a good reminder about the law of unintended consequences.  I recently postulated on the SABA mailing list that maybe as a group we’ve been too successful at minor policy goals like increased bike lanes to pursue more ambitious goals.  I’m willing to bet that 9 out of 10 cyclists would rather see four or five midtown streets converted to bicycle-only routes (often called bike boulevards) than see a bike lane painted on every street in the grid.  For better or for worse, we’re on track to accomplish the latter, even though it means earning the acceptance of drivers and leads to unintended hazards like uncollected leaf piles in bike lanes.

I’ve been experiencing some cognitive dissonance lately while trying to figure out Kevin Johnson’s mayorcy.  First, there’s the matter of his strong mayor power grab.  Second, there’s the fact that he talks a lot but doesn’t seem to actually get anything done.

It’s rather clear from at his governing style that he really wants to set policy, but doesn’t want to actually implement it.  That’s why there are much-trumpted task forces on homeless encampments and an arena deal, but no actual movement or permanent solutions.  As of today, his blog reflects this low-accomplishment, high-ideas record.  The biggest definable win is in this bit:

I’m thankful to be Mayor of a city whose residents have answered the call of service and given hundreds of thousands of hours to volunteerism. Our Service Initiative goal this year was 500,000 community hours. We are pushing past 800,000.Let’s all be thankful for the volunteers on every street in every neighborhood.

That’s ambitious and worthy of accolades (two hours of volunteer service from every Sacramentan?  Awesome!), but not exactly something he could run on in 2014.  Yet when you confront him with his record to date on his big ticket goals, he blames the relative impotence of the Sacramento mayor and the need to coddle the rest of the city council.

He’s missing the picture.  Even with the strongest of strong mayor powers, he’s going to have a heck of a time figuring out what he wants to do and protecting his political flank while he gets it done.  Ironically, what he doesn’t want is a “strong mayor” but a weak city council overall, mayor included.  I’d love to point him to the recent News and Review interview with Rancho Cordova City Manager Ted Gaebler; Gaebler’s point is that the city’s political leaders shouldn’t necessarily deal with nitty-gritty details; a city has a prefessional staff for that.  When the political leaders lead on policy and the staff does the hard parts, the end result is that politicos get big things to point at and claim as their vision (while deflecting all criticism of the project details), and the city gets professional production and consideration behind those ideas.

This style of governance seems to be exactly what Johnson wants.  He can task the city’s professional staff with following big policy goals – build a new arena, eradicate homelessness, rewrite the charter, become a Platinum level bicycle city – without having to worry about exactly where the arena would go, where to put the homeless, what the charter should say, or whether bicycles should be allowed on K Street.

And so the strong mayor initiative turns out to be retarded not just to good-government types like me, but even to Johnson himself, whether he knows it or not.  If I were mayor, I wouldn’t want to waste my time trying to figure out if we should push all city residents into using green waste bins instead of streetside dumping – I’d want to focus on the big picture, not the trivia, and I don’t have Johnson’s ambition.

Hence, the cognitive dissonance.  How does he not see this?

DUIs are a big problem in Sacramento, in part because we have relatively few police officers dedicated to traffic patrols, a growing nightlife in the central city, and a very sprawled suburban populace.  So, many people drive in to midtown and downtown, get loaded, and drive back home.

Influenced-driving is a problem with our bicyclists, too.  Midtown and Oak, Land, and Tahoe Parks are chock full of hip young folks going out for the evening, and doing the “responsible” thing by biking instead of driving.  It’s not really well known that it’s illegal to ride a bicycle drunk.

At a recent DUI sweep, though, the California Hgihway Patrol nabbed a few dozen drivers for DUI, but also grabbed a handful of BUIs, too.  And when the Sacramento Bee came for a quote, the department’s spokesman played up trhe BUIs, not the DUIs.

He played this one exactly right.  Law enforcement wants to see fewer people driving and riding the streets after they’ve kicked back a few.  So, they start cracking down on DUIs, but also making sure to sweep up the bicyclists that are falling over, because that’s a) a growing problem and b) a novel story.  That also gives them the chance to step out first on the issue and define the terms.  Rather than turning it into the “biking drunk is safer than driving drunk” storyline you’d hear from just about everyone, it became “biking drunk is just as illegal and has its own penalties".

Almost immediately, that article got some traction.  It was linked to on the SABA mailing list, prompting a discussion there about BUIs.  A Bike Kitchen Google group picked it up, too, and it’s featured in some local blogs like Heckasac.  Now everybody’s talking about BUI, and chances are good that BUIs will drop because of it.  Buzzed bicycling is still drunk bicycling, after all.

If you want to see a textbook PR coup, the CHP pulled one off.  It’s a refreshing break from the norm.