tonight on kqed newsroom. author and historian gary camille joins us to talk about transit in san francisco, how it's changed over the years and where it may be going next. >> all public transit agencies úand united states have now entered the public transit death spiral. california politicians react to the verdict in the kyle rittenhouse trial. a surprise announcement from representative jackie spear, we will get the latest from our panel of political experts. let's rock 'n roll in this week's edition of something beautiful.

coming to you from kqed headquarters in san francisco, this friday, november 19 2021. hello and welcome to the show. this is kqed newsroom . let's kick off our show with the friday 5, a look at some of the top news stories in california. as we enter the holiday season, about 67 percent of californians are fully vaccinated, even as covid cases continue to creep up. governor newsom eps warning of this other winter surgeon infections and state health officials clarify their guidance to say they are recommending that essentially all adults get a covid vaccine booster. california's gasoline prices reach new heights this week, according to the aaa, the average price of a regular gallon has hit a record four hours $.69. more than a dollar above last year's price at the same time.

an estimated 60,000 nurses, psychologists and other healthcare workers have gone on strike. the workers are striking in solidarity with kaiser engineers who been striking for two months and are demanding wage increases. another budget surplus for the next fiscal year totaling $31 billion. the reason, despite the pandemic, many of california's businesses are booming, which provide significantly more taxable income. the u.s. bureau of reclamation is providing $2.7 million to protect the threatened salmon in the klamath river which flows through california and oregon. that is this week's friday 5. coming up we will delve into the new documentary moving's san francisco. first return to political news.

democratic congress member jackie spear announced she would not seek another term in office. kamala harris is finding herself on the defensive after a pole put her approval ratings at a dismal 28 percent earlier this month. so, first, let's discuss the reaction from california politicians to the verdict in the kyle rittenhouse case in kenosha, wisconsin. the jury said today that he was not guilty of the charges of killing two men and wounding a third with a semiautomatic rifle. what is the response coming out of our state leaders? >> not as much as you might've expected although we are taping

this earlier in the day so we will have to see how that progresses. i was a little surprised at how forceful the governo statement was. he tweeted out america today, you can break the law, carry around weapons bill fo military, shoot and kill people and get away with it and went on to say that's basically the messae being sent to vigilantism nomination today. strong words. we did hear from one of his republican challenger shoot back on twitter saying gavin newsom is attacking the jury, that ordinary citizens reaching a decision based on evidence and the law goes against everything he stands for. i feel like the debate around this trial has been along political lines. >> we will certainly be protests that unfold both in wisconsin and here in the bay area as well. mark, i want to turn to different topic. the house has passed biden social safety net and environmental package, the

build back better bill and it's now gone to the senate. house minority leader. kevin mccarthy gave an eight hour long speech to stall the vote. why did he do this? >> in washington they have what's called the magic minute and only unmatched in washington can you talk eight hours 32 minutes and still be within the eight hour perimeter. nancy pelosi and kevin mccarthy do not like each other and they do not respect one another so i think there may have been a certain amount of one- upsmanship, the previous modern record for speech was given by nancy pelosi, so kevin mccarthy on one after. this was aimed at his caucus. his fellow republicans. if it seems likely republicans take over the house, kevin mccarthy is in line to be speaker but he was passed er once before and there are a lot

of republicans in the caucus who are not happy with him, who don't think he fights hard enough and didn't like the fact that 13 republicans voted for what's called the heart of the structure piece of the package so he had to go out there and make a stand and fight and he got a lot of high-fives remembers afterwards who felt that he did that. it was futile, but he went out there and yell the floor and he fought. >> some political positioning. let's turn to representative jackie spear, she has been a powerhouse in the bay area for many years and she visited us here in the newsroom in 2018, let's listen to a little of what she had to say then and come back and talk about her work. >> i think everyone should take a sedative. i really think it's going to require us to calm down and become very vigilant, because john bolton along with dick cheney and donald rumsfeld are responsible for taking our country into the longest war in our history and that is the iraq war, 15 years.

we have spent over $3 trillion there, that's $24,000 for every household in this country. >> what you tell us a little bit more about representative spears impact and what she stepping down. >> we can talk about all the amazing policies that she has pushed, she made a name for herself in sacramento first is a state lawmaker, pushing for things like correction guard reform, prison reform and she went on to take on the military in dc, just hold their feetto the fire in a way that had not been done before around sexual assaults. you can't talking about her without talking about her remarkable life. she was a staffer at the time, a young woman who went on to run the state legislature her husband was killed in a car

accident, just on and on, these things beyond johnstown that she overcame and she's talked about how that gave her the strength to take on these bigger fights. her seat is in the steep little congressional region so we think her seat is safe for the democrats. you say not so fast for several of the seats. what sort of shifts are you seeing? >> california is pretty much a no go zone for republicans running statewide one big reason is this commission active people are complaining about this and that and we have citizens drawing the lines.

we have that citizen commission and the result is we have much more competitive districts and the other thing that's going on, goes back to donald trump who is hasten some changes we've already seen. orange county used to be synonymous. you thought republicans and conservatives. donald trump alienated a lot of suburban voters. democrats picked upfour seats in 2018 and gave back two of them in 2020 and not likely very competitive.

once more we saw that drift away from democrats losing rural support once more under donald trump and we are likely to see some competitive races there. all in all, it should be clear those maps are not finalized. they will be finalized by the end of the year, december 27 in this the dates but we could end up with as many as 10 reasonably competitive races in california which is a lot. let's go back to the national stage, vice president, harris has been defending herself in her work this week after she received some truly spectacularly bad poll numbers. she recently got a poll rating of 28 percent, lower even than vice president dick cheney who was wildly unpopular. hodid she get here and what does this mean? >> this was one poll.

we do have to have that asterisk. the ella tams has been putting together and aggravate and if you look at that her numbers are still underwater but she's more like 41 unfavorable, i'm sorry, 51 unfavorable. polls are snapshots in time and i think there's a lot going on here. i think one of the things happening is that the president is not that popular right now and she is yoked to him. when you add all of the debate over this agenda and how long it's been dragged out, that is certainly hurting both of them. we have to be clear, she has always been held to a higher standard than a lot of her white male peers. there's a big difference in the way she is viewed that her predecessors including joe biden and she also has a history of making missteps and having challenges running offices and getting her staff to get along and we are seeing some of that here and ultimately she's got high expectations. she came in serving under the oldest president ever, there was a sense that she could be the heir apparent and there's a

lot of expectations on her and finally if you dig into a lot of these polls, the number should be surprising. we live in a poll of resignation and publicans are largely against kamala harris. college-educated voters like her, less educated voters do not. a lt of the lines we see among the political parties. it's early yet, they're not even according to the term. >> give it a little time. i've heard that former san diego mayor kevin faulkner is considering running against governor newsom in the general election next year. he did not do particularly well in the recall election, coming in a distant third. what is his thinking here? why is the talk that he might be running? >> to hear him tell it and you can't really disputed, he said the recall was ki of a circus, which it was. his argument is that in a

substantive, one-on-one campaign, him against gavin newsom, he could do much better which is true, and he's got to get to that one-on-one election before he can even have these conversations. he faces a problem that republicans running statewe have faced for quite a number of election cycles now which is this. they have to appeal to the base of the replicant party and beast conservative enough and by making that appeal, then you alienate the larger number of ú we have this conversation about he kept saying if i could get gavin newsom one-on-one, if i could run a four minute mile, i could do a really fast marathon. he's looking at it and he said he will make his decision early next year and he said if he thinks it's going to be a repeat of what happened the

last time he's not going to do it. i don't see how it comes together but i'm not the one making that decision. >> it will be fascinating to watch. a viewer did remind us that last week we forgot to mention that in this whole missing governor newsom time period of about 11 days, he did pop up at a wedding for the gey family and the timeline didn't quite line up. it wasn't that it was supposed to be in scotland at that point, but he was missing d there was chatter around that so i think it was going to be interesting to keep looking at what happens with the governor, who is coming up to challenge him and if they can really get any traction there. our guest this evening is author and historian gary camille who hosts a new documentary titled moving surfaces go. the documentary chronicles the history of san francisco's

iconic cable cars and the creation of a first in the nation transit authority. it also explores the impact of the latest wave of innovation in moving people around the city their economy services and driverless car technology. >> reporter: always a city of firsts, san francisco has long been a laboratory for how to move people across a difficult terrain. out of the rubble, and a riot. san francisco invented the modern notion of city-owned transit. >> we are joined in studio. welcome to kqed newsroom. >> thank you, it is good to be here. i want to let our audience know, in addition to hosting this film, you have a large history in the bay area. you write a column every week for the san francisco chronicle so you know the area well. >> yes, it's my passion. >> was interesting to me is

that it was really a sociological review of what transportation means to us in community, and it looks at what transportation reveals about who we are and what our values are and what we believe in. was there a story from this film that really exemplify that for you? that showcased our values? ú>> one of the most remarkable stories is the tale of this pioneering african-american businesswoman named mary ellen pleasant who was a very wealthy woman, very well known, but in 1866, she was denied the ability to board a streetcar. >> we have a clip of that, so let's play that and that will come back into the story. >> nearly 100 years before rosa parks and the bus boycotts of the american south, a little- known african-american entrepreneur in san francisco

named mary ellen pleasant stood up for her right to ride transit. she had come to san francisco at the height of the gold rush and began operating restaurants, boarding houses, even brothels. >> so what happens next in her story? >> she is rebuffed from boarding this private streetcar company because she's black. most people would've just accepted that, but she was a very courageous, outspoken woman and she sued the streetcar company and she won. this is right after the civil war. i think she is a pioneering example of the kind of progressive values that at its best, at their best have influenced the way we've moved people across the terrain of san francisco. a woman standing up r her civil rights, a black woman, long before it was common to do

so. that's one example and there could be many. there's also the great freeway revolt which was essentially a coalition but a major part of the coalition opposed to freeways which were going to dominate san francisco's landscape were just grassroots organizaons including a lot of housewives in glen park neighborhood. >> they wanted to preserve the canyon. >> in their wisdom, there was no opposition to freeways anywhere in the united states, it was a vision that freeways would just dominate and allow people to zoom here and there and they were going to run a freeway right across glen canyon . these local women led by the saloon keeper's daughter led a citizens movement and ultimately prevailed over these very dismissive, mostly white men who said, no, you women go

back to your kitchens and shut up and we will take care of this. but they prevailed and they started a grouts grassroots movement that ultimately prevented san francisco from being completely squeezed by the tentacles of 12 different freeways. >> you do point out in the film that the freeways had to go somewhere. and that they then often bisected these communities of color and lower income communities. >> that's the more unfortunate, the darker side, we've talked about inspirg examples of citizens action involving transportation, but san francisco is not immune to the same socioeconomic forces other cities are, and power tended to control where the big infrastructure projects went so the richer, whiter neighborhoods would be able to keep freeways out. the poor neighborhoods with more people of color ended up with the freeways going through them.

it was ever thus, but it doesn't make it right, and of course obviously as i say in the film, it's not even desirable not to have any freeways, but it's unfortunate to say the least that freeways a blighted or were intended to flight neighborhoods of the less powerful, less privilege and often people of color lived. >> it's interesting because this film fills very much of the moment. you talk with various people in oakland about how they are looking at changing those situations that have been brought about by these policies of the pa and really looking at, can they bring down freeways and how can they change the fabric of the places they lived to make it more of a community, more of a connection rather than having these places that are cutting across. i do want to turn to the early days of house san francisco transportation was first put into place. there were a lot of challenges, these early developers had with

the hilly terrain in san francisco and you say that real estate development tended to drive a lot of the development of transit. >> absolutely, san francisco's terrain is incredibly intractable, the early city was confined to a very small area by the hills and the enormous sand dunes that used to be 80 foot high sand dunes covering market street, so opening up the city required a lot of ingenuity, and in fact, one of the iconic symbol of san francisco transportation, the cable cars, came about to try to conquer the hills, and it also had a deeply humanitarian origin. the man who invented it witnessed a terrible accident with horse-drawn streetcar where the horses slipped back and were horribly mangled and he determined right then and there that he didn't want this to happen anymore so this led to this extraordinary invention of this endless wire rope

they call it that he had used in the sierras to hold or, but he had the incredible idea of putting an underground and everyone thought he was a visionary maniac and had no chance of doing this. he had trouble raising the money, so there was kind of a can-do and inventive entrepreneurial streak that came out in that case and it came out throughout the expansion of the city and the real estate interest as you say, a lot of these early streetcars, it was what they call vertical integration. they were the very company is running streetcar lines into neighborhoods that had hitherto been sand dunes and were owned by real estate interests so when they opened up these areas, they then profited both from the franchise of the streetcar lines and from the real estate that they then would build in these areas.

there was always a deep business interest in the expansion of san francisco. >> you talk about the way in which san francisco's public transit system became just that, was public, rather than private. so if you could tell us a little bit about how we ended up as a first in the nation úci transit, and the concerns we have now about whether public transit can move forward and is viable. >> in the 19th century like all american cities, the mass ansit franchises were privately owned and in san francisco this led to an enormou amount of corruption, there was a lot of pay to play franchises, they would bribe the board of supervisors in order to get their franchises, and this one along and everyone put up with this for a really long time, but eventually a pioneering reform movement led by the progressive mayor and just a general revulsion against the corruption that

prevailed in urban affairs led to san francisco becoming the first american city to have an urban owned, city-owned transit system. >> why is that trend at this point? >> obviously we now have this very touchy situation, a very worrisome situation where mass transit is underfunded, we have not managed to make the switch yet away from the almighty automobile which has dominatd the planning of transit throughout modern history of the united states and we are trying to beef it up, but the problem is when you don't ve enough funds, it gets less writers and there's even less money, so the transit really needs an infusion of some fundamental rethinking of how important a role in needs to play.

going down that road alone is not going to solve our transportation problems. >> this is been a fascinating conversation for those who want for the future transit and ext public transportation. they can watch the film that will be on kqed 9 on this channel on monday night, november 22 at 9 pm. gary, thank you for being here in studio with us, i really appreciate it. >> thank you for having me. two weeks ago we enjoyed skating on ice, this week we are skating again, but indoors at the golden skate roller rink in san ramon. with disco lights and a family vibe, it is this week's look at something beautiful.

the golden skate's management has announced they are closing the ring soon but not until after the holidays so there's still time to go skating. that's the end of our show for tonight, thank you for joining us. if you want to look behind the scenes hang out with us online, too. kqed newsroom is on twitter and facebook and you can reach me on twitter. you can also email us. our show will be taking a break next friday for the thanksgiving holiday so we will see you in december. have a great weekend, and happy thanksgiving.

yamiche: the verdict is in. >> we the jury find the defendant kyle h. rittenhouse not guilty. yamiche: kyle rittenhouse found not guilty. >> it's a good thing for the constitution of the united states. >> we deserve to march and rally peacefully without having our supporters murdered in the streets. yamiche: the nation reacts to the homicide trial in kenosha, wisconsin. meanwhile, the trial of three men accused of murdering ahmaud arbery unfolds. plus president biden celebrates signing the infrastructure plan into law. >> build back better bill is passed. yamiche: the house voteses to pass its larger policy bill and that heads to the senate for another round of negotiation.