MTA Tumlin’s Great Highway Stats Appear to Border on Fraud

Tumlin paid consultants $19,000 per day to count pedestrians and bicyclists

Currently, the Upper Great Highway roadway is closed to vehicle traffic on Saturdays, Sundays, and Friday afternoons so that pedestrians and bicyclists can freely use the four lanes.  When the Upper Great Highway is open to cars, there is still a 7.5-foot paved walking path on the east side of the Upper Great Highway, plus up to 7.5-foot shoulders adjacent to each side of the roadway that accommodates bicyclists.  If Proposition K achieves a “yes” vote on the November ballot, cars would be permanently eliminated, and pedestrian and bicyclists would increase their existing 22 feet of paths by another 44 feet.**

Advocates for closing the Upper Great Highway are marketing the proposition as an opportunity to create a beautiful park along the Pacific Ocean for people to stroll and bike.  One minor detail should Prop K pass, no funding currently exists or is allocated to convert the roadway to a park.  Prop K only eliminates cars.  Therefore, the Yes on Prop K brochure that claims Prop K will become a park is a complete misrepresentation.  (Red Flag #1)

Financially, Prop K is like a bankrupt school district that is proposing to tear down a school and replace it with a new school without having funding available.

Opponents of Proposition K claim that closing the Upper Great Highway to cars will create a major inconvenience in traversing the Sunset.  The closure of Upper Great Highway would force all the residents of the southern part of SF, plus all counties south of us, to negotiate a funnel through Golden Gate Park via 19^thAvenue/Crossover Drive.  And before you think you can use The Avenues and Lincoln Way to accomplish an end-run around the westside of Golden Gate Park, think again.  The next incremental step for the Rolling Bike Plan (screenshot below) is to ban cars from JFK Drive and the Upper Great Highway north to Fulton Avenue.  

See black lines representing “car free’

How to make a tough decision?  First, verify the validity of the numbers presented

Sometimes we are faced with an enticing presentation.  Like, the vision of a beautiful park on the Pacific Ocean wrapping around an idyllic college campus atmosphere with Sunset residents circulating on bicycles, walking, and public transportation. 

I see these types of pitches all the time—the new restaurant concept where the promotor sells the sizzle, not the steak, and relies on investors’ fear-of-missing-out.  But the reality is that restaurants notoriously fail for a plethora of reasons, and sometimes the promoter is only borrowing money by creating the illusion the investor is gaining an ownership interest.  Similarly, Sunset-ers believing they will be biking and walking on streets free of cars will find they are smothered with the tons of drivers crawling in the outer Avenues’ gridlock.

When I am faced with a client under a promoter’s spell, I present the client with flaws in the promoter’s numbers and the grandiose assumptions of the project.   Bad books translate to a bad investment.  And once again, the San Francisco Municipal Transit Authority (SFMTA) Director Jeffrey Tumlin has cooked the books on Proposition K in his attempt to swindle more dollars from taxpayers.  Ask yourself, why is the director of municipal transportation so invested in removing a thoroughfare on the outer perimeter of the city?

Tumlin overpaid a consultant to count pedestrians and bicyclists

The legal text of Proposition K (page 3),  states “an average of 4,000 people per (weekend) day come to the Upper Great Highway.”  MTA Director Tumlin hired Kittelson Consulting, of Oakland for the simple task of counting pedestrians and bicyclists accessing the Upper Great Highway.  For their services, Tumlin paid Kittelson Cousulting $57,602. 

Thus, Kittelson Consulting was paid approximately $6 for every person they counted walking or biking on the Upper Great Highway.  I know a lot of bartenders that wouldn’t mind receiving a $6 tip for every drink they serve.  (Red flag #2)

Tumlin/Kittelson’s insufficient sample size

For $57,602, how many weekends do you think Kittelson Consulting was out there counting bodies?   If you guessed only one weekend, congratulate yourself for knowing how little integrity our city family possesses.  $57,602 for a weekend’s work that any middle school student could have accomplished. 

We should ask:

·      Why would Tumlin overpay a consultant to collect a sample size of one weekend?  To influence a specific result?

·      Is one weekend representative of the other 51 weekends?  100% of statisticians would say: No!  (Random test sampling would have been more accurate.)

·      How did Tumlin and Kittelson choose that one weekend? 

·      Skewing numbers even more, Tumlin and the MTA announced that they were going to be counting pedestrians on October 12-14, eliminating the randomness of the sample, and ensuring that proponents could juice the numbers (Red Flag #3)

Flaws with the counting of pedestrians and bicyclists

How many bodies do you see walking in the picture (below)?

If you are the San Francisco Recreation & Parks, Kittelson Consulting, or the San Francisco Chronicle,  there are 6 people in the photo.  That’s because, 99% of walkers on the Great Highway start from Point A, walk to Point B, and then retrace their route.  While a biker can go north on Upper Great Highway and then return on (Lower) Great Highway, there isn’t even a sidewalk for pedestrians on the west side of (Lower) Great Highway.  There is a 100% probability that none of the Kittelson counters could have memorized each person walking in one direction, and not double counted them on their return trip. (Red Flag #4)

There is also an issue with people crossing the Upper Great Highway at Lawton and Taraval Streets to access the beach. Weren’t they counted as people using the vehicle lanes for walking, when all they wanted was to walk on the beach?

Tumlin’s $57,000 count

Confirming there are also unexplained anomalies with Kittelson Consulting’s pedestrian count, note how on Thursday October 12, 2023, 471 pedestrians were counted at Upper Great Highway and Lawton, while four times that amount (1,854) were counted at Taraval Street.  No Friday, Saturday, or bike count deviated that much.  It reeks of bad accounting (Red Flag #5)

Tumlin presented totals, without presenting the comparisons.

1)        The text of Prop K states it will cost $1.7 million (page 5) annually to maintain the Upper Great Highway and remove sand.  There is a glaring absence of how much it will cost to maintain the Upper Great Highway for bike and pedestrian traffic after cars are eliminated.  Does Tumlin believe that the wind will stop blowing sand on the thoroughfare once cars are eliminated?  Why is Tumlin hiding this projected number; so we can’t compare and gain context?  (Red Flag #6)

2)        Tumlin and the MTA provide a total for the number of pedestrians and bicyclists that use the Upper Great Highway.  To mislead voters, they conspicuously never mention how many more drivers use the Upper Great Highway daily.  Before Covid, 20,000 vehicles used the Upper Great Highway daily.  To be conservative, I am going to use 15,000 vehicles that will potentially be greatly inconvenienced with the closing of the thoroughfare.  15,000 drivers dwarfs the 4,000 pedestrians and bicyclists  (Red Flag #7)

But here is the other missing element:  There is a 100% chance that more than one occupant is in the 15,000 cars.  That means significantly more than 15,000 people will be burdened with closing the Upper Great Highway.

3)        District 4 Supervisor Joel Engardio, an advocate for closing the Upper Great Highway, minimized the comparison of an open Great Highway commute to a closed Upper Great Highway commute as only a 3-minute increase for drivers.  Just 3 minutes? 

Let’s examine: the average time, during the middle of the day, to get from Sloat Boulevard to Lincoln on the Upper Great Highway is 6 minutes.  So, Engardio slickly refrains from exposing those 3 minutes are a 50% increase to the current 6-minute commute.  Plus, with Upper Great Highway closed, there will be a compounding effect with an even greater bottleneck at Golden Gate Park at 19^th Avenue.

Joel, here is the wasted time cost to drivers by your proposal: 15,000 commutes x 3 minutes = 45,000 minutes/ 60 minutes x 250 weekdays x $16 minimum wage equals $3,000,000 in lost wages for taxpayers.  That is almost double the $1.7 million annual cost of maintaining the Upper Great Highway for vehicles.   Joel, just 3 minutes longer?

4)  When the Tumlin authorized only one weekday census of pedestrian and bicycle traffic, on Thursday October 12, 2023, Kittelson Consulting arrived at 1,854 people.  That stands as the only comparison between a closed Upper Great Highway and an open one.  Then, I received the San Francisco Recreation and Parks’ census that included weekdays (below).

Rec & Park stats

Leaping off the page was the gross disparity between Kittelson Consulting’s numbers and the sensors used by the Rec & Park:

a)        Rec & Park’s total of 1,262 pedestrian for 52 weeks of Mondays translated to an average of only 24 people using the 7.5-foot bike path every Monday. (above) To my public records request, the Rec & Park did not release any of the details of the weekly Monday count, just the gross number of 1,262.  It seems extremely unlikely that Kittelson Consulting counted 1,854 used the walking path on a single Thursday in October, while the MTA determined an average of only 24 people used the path on Mondays—that’s a 99% decline.    When I questioned the Rec & Park on the disparity with Kittelson Consulting, I was told that someone vandalized their sensors.  Then why release obviously false number? To make it look like people only want to walk in the street? (Red Flag #8)

b)  On October 13, 2023, the Rec & Park’s sensors counted 1,054 pedestrian and bicyclists (below), while Kittelson Consultants, incentivized by the fee that equated to $6 per person, reported 2,058 people at Taraval and Upper Great Highway.  That’s a 100% discrepancy.   

Rec and Park Stats

Similarly, on Saturday October 14, 2023, Kittelson Consulting counted 3,964 bodies, while Rec and Park’s sensors recorded 2,900 for a 33% difference.  That a huge difference between MTA and Kittelson Consulting. 

Because Kittelson Consulting’s one-weekend sample size was ridiculously small, Tumlin has relied heavily on the Rec & Park’s sensors count throughout the year.  Yet, when you have 100% and 33% disparities between independent calculating machines and humans incentivized by dollars, every statistician in the world would advise invalidating Tumlin’s counts without an explanation for the differences. Jeffrey?

Is there an ulterior motivation to close the Great Highway?  Don’t you smell the money?

I understand the east-of-Twin-Peaks bicyclists’ reasoning for closing the Upper Great Highway to cars.  They despise cars and project that the westside of SF has the same topography as the pancake Mission.   Then there are the YIMBY-ers (“yes in my backyard”), who believe homelessness is not caused by drugs or mental health, but by the high cost of housing. Build more housing, and the homeless will trade getting high for making a mortgage payment. Yeah right.

What I find suspicious is how Nancy Pelosi, Scott Wiener, and Mayor Breed are so zealously lined up to closing a thoroughfare on the most western piece of land on the continental US.  Are they planning to turn the (Lower) Great Highway into a Waikiki-Miami Beach?

Don’t you smell the money?

The cost per square foot of the single-family homes along the (Lower) Great Highway are microscopic compared to Southern California urban beach frontage.   If you currently own a single-family or duplex on (Lower Great Highway) and suddenly you were looking at a quiet park versus a thoroughfare, how much do you think the passage of Prop K would elevate the value of your property? 

Then factor in the increasing vertical environment where a seven-story 1234 (Lower) Great Highway will replace an existing two-story hotel.  Or, the speculator’s bluff of a proposed 50-story building on Sloat Boulevard, with the intention of settling for a smaller project that still dwarfs the surrounding buildings.  Or connect the dots that the real estate industry is a heavy contributor to Wiener.^[i]  

Add to this cocktail, Tumlin, the man who destroyed businesses on Valencia Street and is trying to do the same to West Portal businesses.  Isn’t Tumlin knowingly making false statistical misrepresentations about pedestrian usage on Upper Great Highway, to deceive voters, who justifiably rely on his presentations and will be harmed?  BTW Jeffrey, aren’t those the criminal elements of fraud?  All while the city family receives even more real estate developers’ political contributions?  Ahhh, our typical San Francisco corruption carousel.

And should the Mission bicyclists, YIMBY, and the politicians propped up by the real estate industry prevail with closing Upper Great Highway, my financial advice is to try and buy on the (Lower) Great Highway ASAP…….. cause those properties are going vertical just like their prices.  And I’m sorry if you own property east of (Lower) Great Highway, because your single-family home is going to be gridlocked in the shadows of the Pacific Ocean Fontana Apartments.

The dots say closing the Great Highway is all about real estate.

Note: Supervisor Myrna Melgar, along with saying she wanted to defund SFPD, worked to make West Portal inaccessible by car, and fought to preserve the homeless living in RVs in District 7, is advocating for the closing of the Upper Great Highway to cars.  Meanwhile, she flaunts riding a bicycle, but has to use an electric motor for assistance, which drains our dwindling electric supply system. What a poser.  Do not put Melgar’s name anywhere on your ballot!

** Timestamped photo of my measurements on Upper Great Highway on September 24, 2024 at 6:45pm.

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^[i] San Francisco Business Times, October 4-10, 2024, Page 17.