Some news about back home... well sort of. As reported by the New York Times. After reading the article, I am dumbfounded by two things. #1: The bridge toll's $5... how can you be in a financial crisis when you're charging people $5 to cross your bridge one time? Granted, the New York bridges cost more to cross, but that's New York. Everything's expensive in New York.
#2: Why would a poor economy have a huge impact on the traffic across a bridge? I can only think of one reason... fewer jobs in the city meaning fewer people commuting into the city. But such logic would work only under two conditions. The first being that there's a huge drop off in employment rates... I mean, well into the double digit percentages. The second is that a large number of those recently unemployed come from Marin County... or other counties in the northern peninsula.
I don't doubt that there are fewer cars crossing the bridge. I just doubt that there's such a significant drop off in bridge crossing that the private company in charge of the Golden Gate, would be in such dire straits.
The thing is, is that the bridge really isn't all that useful... especially at $5. I can only think of two times in my life when I've crossed that bridge, and I've lived in the area all my life. But of course, I'm biased because I've lived in the East Bay. The bridges I know well are the Bay Bridge into SF, the Carquinez (sp?) Bridge to Sac and the mountains, the Dumbarton Bridge into Stanfurd territory for Big Games, and maybe the San Mateo bridge for my sister church and the Richmond Bridge to Stinson. I think that's all of em except for the Golden Gate. (I just had a Sneakers flashback.) As the article said, the public bridges are all $2. The Golden Gate, however, is $5. In theory, somebody from Marin County going to SF, could take the Richmond bridge and then take the Bay Bridge and "save" $1. But then you think of the extra time and gas wasted... and well, it's not worth it especially working through the MacArthur Maze. A smarter man, however, and probably most people from Marin County, are now carpooling in, splitting the costs of both gas and bridge toll. After all, this is Northern California... a region that prides itself in not being Southern California, through policies like "Spare the Air Day" and carpooling stations.
And lastly, the idea of collecting donations for crossing the bridge by foot or bicycle is an example of horrible policy making. It doesn't take much brain power to figure out that Mr. Blue has ample reason to be skeptical of this plan.