San Franciscans love arguing so much they sometimes forget to actually discuss anything.

The recent hot debate in the city, surrounding Propositions A and H, is exactly the sort of opportunity for side-taking our community seems ever eager to embrace—Muni versus motorists, left versus right—blinding voters to the weakness of both proposals.

Proposition A, which makes a lot of noise about funding Muni and saving the environment, has seen the usual handful of tenant unions and progressive activists rally around familiar leftist mantras about supporting public transportation and “green” causes. With a few predictably chosen buzzwords, they circle the wagons against exhausted right-wing criticisms about accountability and the importance of commerce.

Proposition H’s supporters, shouting over the familiar hissing and booing of bicycle riders and car-less college students, belt out the usual conservative cry that increased city parking will mean increased commerce and more convenient, attractive city living for car owners.

In the midst of all this chest-thumping and divisive preaching to the choir, nobody seems to have noticed that both would-be ordinances are garbage.

While it makes flailing efforts at a wide variety of policy changes, Prop A basically just gives the Municipal Transit Agency (MTA) more of the power it’s been using to run Muni into the ground since 1999. Every time Muni makes the news, it’s a new (or continuing) disaster, from chronically late bus lines to fatal accidents to last month’s incident, when a train closed its doors on an old man’s hand and dragged him along the boarding platform to within inches of a security gate that would have killed him. Handing a bunch of money and authority to MTA takes all the pressure off of the Board of Supervisors, the elected officials who currently have to answer to voters when our public transit screws up – the last thing we need is to let unelected MTA board members make their own decisions to take on debt in our name. And A’s pro-environment language is facile and glad-handing, drawing favorable attention from green-friendly voters while demanding nothing more than an occasional audit that won’t ever make a practical impact on local policy.

Prop H, on the other hand, allows for a bunch more parking spaces to be developed throughout the city. In general, it’s a good thing to allow developers freedom to improve their property as they see fit—this is a free country, after all—but in a city as built-out as San Francisco, where every inch counts, we have to set limits on how developers impact the land we all share. City Controller Ed Harrington opines in the official Voter Information Pamphlet that H “would affect the cost of government by an unknown but potentially significant amount,” suggesting that MTA “is likely to experience higher costs under the ordinance due to increases in congestion, traffic management needs and construction expenses.” H’s biggest supporters are some of A’s loudest opponents, shouting down A with cries that Muni is terrible and needs to be controlled, not set free. There’s some strength in that argument, but following it up with a slew of parking spaces that will squeeze MTA’s already crushing budget is plainly a mistake.

Conflict often entices its spectators to pick a side and start rooting for the good guy. San Francisco needs to resist that urge and say no to Propositions A and H next Tuesday.