Micromanaging your way to nirvana

The San Francisco Chronicle reports on Berkeley's efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions:

Six months after Berkeley voters overwhelmingly passed Measure G, a mandate to reduce the city's greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050, the city is laying out a long-term road map for residents, business and industry. It includes everything from solar panels at the Pacific Steel foundry to composted table scraps.

Some measures will be popular and easy, like a car-share vehicle on every block and free bus passes.

Free bus passes? Well, only in the most liberal definition of "free." To start, only renters will get them and they will have to pay for them with rent increases:

Landlords will be required to provide free bus passes to tenants. [...] Landlords would be allowed a small rent increase (equal to $7 per month in today's costs) to pay for tenants' passes; funding of passes for all residents has not been identified.

Notice that this is of no help to tenants who might want to walk, bicycle, or telecommute their way to work and back. The rent increases will not be used to subsidize any of these: only the government approved bus pass solution.  This is the liberal one-size-fits-all government-know-best approach to fixing problems.

This would appear to be counter to history which has shown that individuals can be so much more creative and effective at solving problems than bureaucracies. Liberals, however, instinctively trust bureaucracies.