The Clogged Bus-Only Lane Theory of Policing: Cite More Motorists and the Rest of the Public Safety Picture Will Fall Into Place

Jim Herd

Here's another way of keeping drivers out of bus lanes

​In Mexico, a visitor will quickly get the sense that society isn't working quite right when she's asked for a bribe by police. In Saudi Arabia, the same conclusion becomes obvious when a woman is arrested for prostitution simply because she's at a restaurant in a group that includes men. And in San Francisco, a visitor might get a sense that the rule of law has broken down upon seeing motorists clog with impunity downtown's ubiquitous transit-only lanes.

San Francisco has 100 police officers assigned to the SFPD's "traffic company," which is responsible for writing $60 tickets to motorists who illegally occupy the lanes. But a recent informal survey conducted by the great publication SF.StreetsBlog.org, found bus drivers who had never once seen a motorist ticketed.

Sure, there are more pressing challenges facing San Francisco's new Police Chief George Gascon. San Francisco police are, on the whole, some of the nation's worst at solving murders and assaults -- and it's clearly worse to have murders operate with impunity than to have motorists needlessly clog up the city's bus system.

But if the "broken window" theory of policing pioneered by Gascon's mentor, William Bratton, has any validity, attacking San Francisco's most visible law-breaking problem might go a long way toward breaking the cycle of impunity enjoyed by the city's more serious criminals.

The theory, pioneered when the now soon-to-retire LAPD Chief Bratton was chief of New York's transit police, states that a broken window sends a message that vandalism is okay, and before long the entire building's a wreck. And if a community tolerates quality-of-life crimes such as drug use, prostitution -- and I'll posit bus-only lane-clogging -- it signals to sociopaths that society doesn't care what happens to it, and more serious crime follows suit.
It's worth noting that transit-lane clogging actually is a serious problem. The city spends $700 million per year doing everything it can to make its buses run on-time only to see those efforts go to naught when bus drivers have to wait through multiple stoplights because scofflaw motorists are in the way.

Since last spring bus drivers have been able combat the more serious problem of motorists who park in the bus lanes. Under a pilot program the city has mounted cameras on buses, with which drivers snap double-parkers' license plates, so that they might receive a $250 citation in the mail.  Since March of last year, the city has mailed out 826 tickets under this program, collecting fines of $118,918.

There's the possibility of pushing the state to allow San Francisco bus drivers to similarly nab motorists who are merely driving, rather than parking, in the bus-only lanes. But the city recently went through burdensome ordeal fighting against civil liberties buffs so as to take the obviously beneficial step of mounting cameras at intersections to catch red-light-runners. Fighting these same paranoid crazies in order to photograph license plates of bus-lane cloggers isn't a step the city will take soon.

"In London they do cite moving vehicles using cameras. But here there are privacy rules around cameras," says Muni spokesman Judson True. "It took a long time to get camera enforcement for double parking. We have to report back on the [double parking] pilot project to the state legislature. We'll outline what we've learned on the pilot, and where else we want to go."

In other words, the ball is still in the cops' court. If Gascon really means to whip our motley SFPD crew of doughnut-eaters into shape, he'll be making them do their job and ticket bus-lane scofflaws on sight.

Photo   |   Jim Herd