Trouble is, little or no competent city planning has taken place in San Francisco since the 19th Century, if even then. Generations of corrupt politicians and incompetent bureaucrats have reduced city planning to a process of merely rubber-stamping the self-serving proposals of unscrupulous developers and real estate interests.
Even when an actual city planning project was carried out -- the municipal subway line built during the 1970s -- it was designed so poorly that the trains have never been able to run on any kind of schedule. Commuters and tourists enter the stations with no notion of how long they might have to wait for a train to their destination within the city.
The streets in San Francisco are constantly being dug up to access utilities and then patched, leaving them rough and pot-holed, with no thought ever being given to building utility tunnels or even to coordinating utility improvements with routine repaving schedules. Consequently, newly repaved streets are typically dug up again within a few weeks or months, leaving ridges and potholes in the pristine pavement. This is the typical behavior of San Francisco officialdom.
Is it any wonder, then, that a rain storm that many other cities would consider an ordinary occurrence would paralyze parts of San Francisco and leave office workers groping in the dark? The city squanders huge amounts of money and other resources on projects that are unnecessary or poorly thought out, while failing to plan with foresight and imagination.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
