Letters: Don't overlook these negative impacts from Bay Area casual carpooling
In the 50-some years of taking on an extra rider or two to skirt the Bay Bridge back-up, drivers have congested traffic in HOV lanes and skimmed fare-paying riders from AC Transit's transbay service.
Before COVID, the line serving San Francisco from my neighborhood had fewer than half as many buses scheduled for the morning commute as there were returning in the afternoon.
Carpools are great for people who are heading to the same off-the-transit-grid destination, who share resources, and who are granted parking or a stipend for making the effort to minimize one driver per car commuting.
Casual carpooling promotes personal car driving and is, essentially, a fare-jumping tactic for would-be transit riders.
Cynthia Ahart Wood, Oakland
Upzoning is un-Berkeley
YIMBY arguments misstate the excesses of the proposed Middle Housing upzoning. It will encourage dense, taller market-rate rentals (5 to 7 units per lot). The increased bulk is counter to the intimate scale and openness that people seek out in Berkeley.
The outcome of the proposed upzoning will make land even more expensive; the rosy vision of equity building for economically disadvantaged residents, as touted by Owens, will not happen. We don't need this gentrifying upzoning.
Previous zoning regulations can provide more cost-accessible infill housing.
Huge numbers of high-rise developments have been built or approved; we can reach our quota of state-required units without adopting extreme infill upzoning.
For the Chronicle to disingenuously advance the developer-serving YIMBY arguments is a real disservice.
Peggy Radel, Berkeley
Attack may unleash Iran
The U.S.-Israel strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities have inspired two opposing narratives.
Former National Security Adviser John Bolton calls them a decisive blow, potentially triggering the end of the Iranian regime. He envisions a crumbling theocracy, weakened by unrest and economic strain, and believes the attacks may finally eliminate a looming nuclear threat.
But Carnegie Foundation's nuclear policy expert, James M. Acton, offers a more sobering assessment: Iran's program is damaged, not destroyed. Its stockpile of highly enriched uranium was likely moved beforehand; its scientists and technical infrastructure remain intact. Iran could easily reconstitute its program within a year, or sooner.
More troubling, Acton warns the strikes may push Iran to abandon its long-held threshold status and build a bomb. The message to Tehran is stark: strategic ambiguity no longer ensures security. Worse, the attacks risk unraveling global nonproliferation norms, especially as Iran further reduces cooperation with the IAEA.
Military action cannot erase expertise. Small, hidden facilities could soon replace bombed-out ones.
If diplomacy is not revived, the strikes may mark a dangerous miscalculation. We've seen this movie before — in Iraq and Libya. If Acton is correct, the ending may not bring resolution, but an emboldened nuclear adversary.
Andrew D. Forsyth, Berkeley
Create real fixes
Regarding 'Adding freeway lanes doesn't fix traffic. Why does California keep wasting billions on it?' (Open Forum, SFChronicle.com, June 24): I have heard that building wider freeways is like loosening your belt to solve your obesity problem.
The difficulty stems from how much our state government is siloed, making it hard to share resources to most effectively come up with solutions to problems that cut across departmental boundaries.
As the op-ed points out, affordable housing, highways, public transit and climate change adaptation must all be factored into a truly holistic solution.
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The Hill
4 hours ago
- The Hill
Politics won't help the planet — just ask Jay Inslee
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Chicago Tribune
7 hours ago
- Chicago Tribune
Waukegan Community Unit School District 60 receiving additional revenue from state's evidence-based funding program
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Los Angeles Times
9 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
News Analysis: Newsom's decision to fight fire with fire could have profound political consequences
Deep in the badlands of defeat, Democrats have soul-searched about what went wrong last November, tinkered with a thousand-plus thinkpieces and desperately cast for a strategy to reboot their stalled-out party. Amid the noise, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has recently championed an unlikely game plan: Forget the high road, fight fire with fire and embrace the very tactics that virtue-minded Democrats have long decried. Could the dark art of political gerrymandering be the thing that saves democracy from Trump's increasingly authoritarian impulses? That's essentially the pitch Newsom is making to California voters with his audacious new special election campaign. As Texas Democrats dig in to block a Republican-led redistricting push and Trump muscles to consolidate power wherever he can, Newsom wants to redraw California's own congressional districts to favor Democrats. His goal: counter Trump's drive for more GOP House seats with a power play of his own. It's a boundary-pushing gamble that will undoubtedly supercharge Newsom's political star in the short-term. The long-game glory could be even grander, but only if he pulls it off. A ballot-box flop would be brutal for both Newsom and his party. The charismatic California governor is termed out of office in 2026 and has made no secret of his 2028 presidential ambitions. But the distinct scent of his home state will be hard to completely slough off in parts of the country where California is synonymous with loony lefties, business-killing regulation and an out-of-control homelessness crisis. To say nothing of Newsom's ill-fated dinner at an elite Napa restaurant in violation of COVID-19 protocols — a misstep that energized a failed recall attempt and still haunts the governor's national reputation. The redistricting gambit is the kind of big play that could redefine how voters across the country see Newsom. The strategy could be a boon for Newsom's 2028 ambitions during a moment when Democrats are hungry for leaders, said Democratic strategist Steven Maviglio. But it's also a massive roll of the dice for both Newsom and the state he leads. 'It's great politics for him if this passes,' Maviglio said. 'If it fails, he's dead in the water.' The path forward — which could determine control of Congress in 2026 — is hardly a straight shot. The 'Election Rigging Response Act,' as Newsom has named his ballot measure, would temporarily scrap the congressional districts enacted by the state's voter-approved independent redistricting commission. Under the proposal, Democrats could pick up five seats currently held by Republicans while bolstering vulnerable Democratic incumbent Reps. Adam Gray, Josh Harder, George Whitesides, Derek Tran and Dave Min, which would save the party millions of dollars in costly reelection fights. But first the Democratic-led state Legislature must vote to place the measure on the Nov. 4 ballot and then it must be approved by voters. If passed, the initiative would have a 'trigger,' meaning the redrawn map would not take effect unless Texas or another GOP-led state moved forward with its own gerrymandering effort. 'I think what Governor Newsom and other Democrats are doing here is exactly the right thing we need to do,' Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin said Thursday. 'We're not bringing a pencil to a knife fight. We're going to bring a bazooka to a knife fight, right? This is not your grandfather's Democratic Party,' Martin said, adding that they shouldn't be the only ones playing by a set of rules that no longer exist. For Democrats like Rep. Laura Friedman (D-Glendale), who appeared alongside Newsom to kick off the effort, there is 'some heartbreak' to temporarily shelving their commitment to independent redistricting. But she and others were clear-eyed about the need to stop a president 'willing to rig the election midstream,' she said. Friedman said she was hearing overwhelmingly positive reactions to the proposal from all kinds of Democratic groups on the ground. 'The response that I get is, 'Finally, we're fighting. We have a way to fight back that's tangible,'' Friedman recounted. Still, despite the state's Democratic voter registration advantage, victory for the ballot measure will hardly be assured. California voters have twice rallied for independent redistricting at the ballot box in the last two decades and many may struggle to abandon those beliefs. A POLITICO-Citrin Center-Possibility Lab poll found that voters prefer keeping an independent panel in place to draw district lines by a nearly two-to-one margin, and that independent redistricting is broadly popular in the state. (Newsom's press office argued that the poll was poorly worded, since it asked about getting rid of the independent commission altogether and permanently returning line-drawing power to the legislators, rather than just temporarily scrapping their work for several cycles until the independent commission next draws new lines.) California voters should not expect to see a special election campaign focused on the minutia of reconfiguring the state's congressional districts, however. While many opponents will likely attack the change as undercutting the will of California voters, who overwhelmingly supported weeding politics out of the redistricting process, bank on Newsom casting the campaign as a referendum on Trump and his devious effort to keep Republicans in control of Congress. Newsom employed a similar strategy when he demolished the Republican-led recall campaign against him in 2021, which the governor portrayed as a 'life and death' battle against 'Trumpism' and far-right anti-vaccine and antiabortion activists. Among California's Democratic-heavy electorate, that message proved to be extremely effective. 'Wake up, America,' Newsom said Thursday at a Los Angeles rally launching the campaign for the redistricting measure. 'Wake up to what Donald Trump is doing. Wake up to his assault. Wake up to the assault on institutions and knowledge and history. Wake up to his war on science, public health, his war against the American people.' Kevin Liao, a Democratic strategist who has worked on national and statewide campaigns, said his D.C. and California-based political group chats had been blowing up in recent days with texts about the moment Newsom was creating for himself. Much of Liao's group chat fodder has involved the output of Newsom's digital team, which has elevated trolling to an art form on its official @GovPressOffice account on the social media site X. The missives have largely mimicked the president's own social media patois, with hyperbole, petty insults and a heavy reliance on the 'caps lock' key. 'DONALD IS FINISHED — HE IS NO LONGER 'HOT.' FIRST THE HANDS (SO TINY) AND NOW ME — GAVIN C. NEWSOM — HAVE TAKEN AWAY HIS 'STEP,' ' one of the posts read last week, dutifully reposted by the governor himself. Some messages have also ended with Newsom's initials (a riff on Trump's signature 'DJT' signoff) and sprinkled in key Trumpian callbacks, like the phrase 'Liberation Day,' or a doctored Time Magazine cover with Newsom's smiling mien. The account has garnered 150,000 new followers since the beginning of the month. Shortly after Trump took office in January, Newsom walked a fine line between criticizing the president and his policies and being more diplomatic, especially after the California wildfires — in hopes of appealing to any semblance of compassion and presidential responsibility Trump possessed. Newsom had spent the first months of the new administration trying to reshape the California-vs.-Trump narrative that dominated the president's first term and move away from his party's prior 'resistance' brand. Those conciliatory overtures coincided with Newsom's embrace of a more ecumenical posture, hosting MAGA leaders on his podcast and taking a position on transgender athletes' participation in women's sports that contradicted the Democratic orthodoxy. Newsom insisted that he engaged in those conversations to better understand political views that diverged from his own, especially after Trump's victory in November. However, there was the unmistakable whiff of an ambitious politician trying to broaden his national appeal by inching away from his reputation as a West Coast liberal. Newsom's reluctance to readopt the Trump resistance mantle ended after the president sent California National Guard troops into Los Angeles amid immigration sweeps and ensuing protests in June. Those actions revealed Trump's unchecked vindictiveness and abject lack of morals and honor, Newsom said. Of late, Newsom has defended the juvenile tone of his press aides' posts mocking Trump's own all-caps screeds, and questioned why critics would excoriate his parody and not the president's own unhinged social media utterances. 'If you've got issues with what I'm putting out, you sure as hell should have concerns about what he's putting out as president,' Newsom said last week. 'So to the extent it's gotten some attention, I'm pleased.' In an attention-deficit economy where standing out is half the battle, the posts sparkle with unapologetic swagger. And they make clear that Newsom is in on the joke. 'To a certain set of folks who operated under the old rules, this could be seen as, 'Wow, this is really outlandish.' But I think they are making the calculation that Democrats want folks that are going to play under this new set of rules that Trump has established,' Liao said. At a moment when the Democratic party is still occupied with post-defeat recriminations and what's-next vision boarding, Newsom has emerged from the bog with something resembling a plan. And he's betting the house on his deep-blue state's willingness to fight fire with fire. Times staff writers Seema Mehta and Laura Nelson contributed to this report.
