What’s next?

Over the years, as a local columnist, I often was urged to write a farewell to one institution or another. But the definition of an institution is entirely subjective as regards to those places and people to which we grow attached. As a practical matter, if you write about one, two more will pop up. Pretty soon, you are on a slippery and unending slope of affection and sentiment.

So, I made up my own rule: I would write only about businesses that survived, whether in the same ownership or new ownership, more than a generation, generally 30 years. Then, it seemed it would qualify as something more like an institution whose passing ought to be noted. More like a notion than a rule.

Anyway, the Fish Market is closing. The site will become a housing project. It is an ideal metaphor for the changes that are taking place here as we steamroll the old and build the new.

Undoubtedly, there was something there before the Fish Market. Or maybe nothing. Go back far enough — as is becoming a common practice to acknowledge at community events — and it probably was underwater, or lands utilized by a local collective of the first native people to come here.

The point (should I ultimately choose to make one) is that this is just one more change. Change can be uncomfortable, even unacceptable to some. But it is constant, and to object to change — new housing may be the most objectionable these days — is to fail to accept that something or someone had to change to make room for us.

We are an impermanent, impertinent nation. We move about freely, change jobs, locations, habits and hobbies. We erase, and write anew. We do so in a fundamentally American belief that something new will come along and in the belief that it can be better.

So, goodbye Fish Market, and thanks. What’s next?

TRANSIT, BRIDGES AND TOLLS: The proposal to increase tolls by $1.50 on Bay Area bridges has generated a wave of responses that misunderstands, almost entirely, the proposal and the nature of mass transit in the region.

The toll increase has two policy goals. Ostensibly, it is to help bail out some transit agencies that have hit financial bottom due to massive ridership losses during the pandemic. But it also is part of an ongoing policy goal among some elected officials to get us out of our cars and on to mass transit. This was a progressive notion a dozen years ago, however, with the booming growth in electric and hybrid vehicles, it may be an outmoded concept.

Mixed into this debate is that long-standing assertion there are 27 transit agencies in the Bay Area, a tremendous and outrageous duplication (and waste) of resources.

As if merging these agencies would magically result in more efficient and less costly operations at places like BART, San Francisco Muni, and Santa Clara County’s VTA. This hands me a laugh.

The 27 agencies data point is a canard. Some of them are small and highly local. Some of them barely qualify as a transit agency. And no one is sure the number is accurate, the proof of this being that everyone uses it without citation.

The better response would be to attach to the proposal a stricter accounting of how BART and other agencies manage their funds, and the elimination of a directly elected board of directors. That’s right. It is widely known within the transit industry that the agencies that seem to operate with the greatest inefficiency are those with an elected board that makes decisions for political and not policy reasons.

AND WHILE WE’RE AT IT: This seems like a good time to reiterate my own belief that we need to put toll gates at the county line on Interstate 280 and Highway 101. There are only three ways in and out of San Francisco, and two of them require you to pay to visit the tarnished Emerald City. Before they get the bright idea to charge us to go up there, we should start charging them to come down here. Where the jobs are.

Mark Simon is a veteran journalist, whose career included 15 years as an executive at SamTrans and Caltrain. He can be reached at marksimon@smdailyjournal.com.