For old times sake, here's the Bay Guardian Wank of the Week.

See, there's talk of raising the MUNI fares by another twenty-five cents in order to fix budget deficits. Okay, not good, although in a relative sense, another quarter ain't that big of a deal (it's a friggin quarter). I'm not exactly for it, but I also haven't heard of a decent way to fix the problem. So what we need is a debate on how best to handle this problem, one that's smart and sane and works. Which, of course, won't happen in San Francisco because things that are smart and sane and work doesn't happen because nobody believes in being smart and sane. At least politically. How can you be smart and sane when you have to deal with logic like the one thrown out in this editorial against the fare hike?

'ANOTHER QUARTER, please." The bus driver was glaring at me and my 17-month-old son as I fumbled for an additional quarter. My fingers clawed their way into the dark recesses of my backpack. Brushes, crumpled receipts, paper clips, pens, old address books intertwined with new address books, erasers, old watch bands, and ... oh, ahhh, could it be true? A quarter? Clutching the sliver of metal, my fingers climbed back up through a hidden passage of Mt. Backpack. But alas, it was just a nickel. "Would a nickel be OK? It's all I have right now?" I plead.

Not since I read Steinbeck have I read such a tale of poverty and woe.

"No, it's $1.25; you can get off at the next stop."

Just give that bus driver a name like Cranky McDriveshafts and you got yourself a Dickensian villian here.

Since I started school in January, I've been taking Muni more than usual, and a bus pass was too rich for my meager, working-poor single-parent budget, so every week I begged, borrowed, or stole my way onto San Francisco's main transportation system. Until now.

There's a new thought to the whole debate- raising bus fares increases panhandling and crime. Remember, this is over a friggin quarter a ride.


The Municipal Transportation Authority is proposing a rate hike to $1.50 a ride to offset its $24 million budget deficit. This fare increase would make it almost impossible for very-low-income folks like me to ride the bus at all. And considering that we make up the majority of bus riders, I have to ask: Who is the MTA targeting for these rate hikes?

Uh? People who ride the bus?


Yes, it's true that in San Francisco, conscious, privileged people with homes and high-paying jobs ride the bus because they want to – after all, it's better for the environment – but so do poor immigrants, fixed-income elders, youths, poor workers, and disabled and houseless folks. We all have different reasons, but we all ride.

Have you ridden the 71 or the 14? There' s a lot of unconscious people who ride too.

Of course, all public services in California are facing budget deficits – but let's take a moment to connect the dots, or rather, the corporate welfare recipients. We could start with Enron, which stole all of California's surplus with its fake energy crisis

Yeah, okay, Enron happened. So what?


...and the Governator, who didn't go after Enron for that stolen revenue (he also owns interests in energy stocks) and who decided owners of expensive cars like his Hummer needed to pay less taxes, which took a major local revenue source away from desperately needy city budgets.

Okay, that's true. Kind of. I have a feeling, though, that the huge budget problems in California and San Francisco didn't come out of small, minor, tax cut for Hummer drivers.

Corporate-esque (corporate-esque? Don't they mean People of Corporations?) MTA board members like Ted Tedesco, previously with American Airlines, and bank executive Thomas O'Bryant are voting against their own best interests when they make public transportation increasingly costly for poor workers. Cheap transportation enables the urban/suburban apartheid they rely on to get through their daily lives. If it weren't for cheap public transit, the poor service workers like maids and dishwashers couldn't get from the poor areas of the city to the wealthy neighborhoods across town, where people like those MTA board members reside.

Ah yes, the Aparthied of the Bay Area. How true it is. And when will Steven Van Zandt and Bono do "Don't Wanna Play San Francisco"? And way to appeal to those corporate-esque people, by saying that their hired help couldn't come in to work for them if they raise the bus fare.

Last week a new coalition representing some of the poorest citizens of San Francisco presented its own "Platform for Transit Justice" to the MTA, declaring public transportation to be a human right.

Wasn't that one of Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, the Freedom to ride MUNI for free? Or Wilson's Fourteen Points? And isn't that in the consitution, that we "hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, the pursuit of Happiness, and BART?.

The coalition believes that as a transit-first city, San Francisco should encourage use of public transit instead of cars and proposes a variety of revenue-raising measures that would eliminate the deficit.

Agreed

As the Muni bus doors close on me and my son with an extra wumph, I consider illicitly entering through the back door of the next bus without paying the fare. Then I remember that when they hiked the rates in 2003, they also jacked up the issuing of tickets to people trying to ride without paying the fare – criminalizing the poor while targeting the poor.

And here I was thinking they were just trying to make sure the fares got endorsed. The funny thing about all this is until recently, I always paid just a buck and nobody said anything.

Without options, I gather our stuff and we begin the long walk home.

Sorry. I can't write right now as I'm too busy crying into my handkerchief