Month: November 2009

Let's get one thing straight right off the bat: We love transit. Love love love.

When Streetsblog San Francisco took part in the Congress for the New Urbanism's Project for Transportation Reform in Portland last week, city planners and transportation engineers treated participants to numerous tours of innovative network solutions that city has embraced, including its greenstreets program for stormwater treatment on street rights-of-way. With nearly five hundred greenstreet facilities already in the ground, Portland has plans to add another five hundred in the next five years, greatly reducing the burden stormwater can place on its sanitation system.

As reported here yesterday, transportation is a close second to electric power generation in the not-so-great race to become the nation's fastest-rising source of emissions.

Today on the Streetsblog Network, we've got a powerful demand for safer streets in Florida. Transit Miami has posted an open letter to Florida Governor Charlie Crist and the state's DOT, calling them to account for the lamentable showing the Sunshine State makes in Transportation for America's recent report on pedestrian fatalities, "Dangerous by Design." Here's a taste of what they had to say:

More headlines over at Streetsblog Capitol Hill.

The moment San Francisco bicyclists and advocates have been waiting for for more than three years is expected any day now: a ruling on whether to lift the bike injunction. Despite indications the ordeal could drag on through spring, there is some optimism Judge Peter J. Busch will unlock the legal handcuffs and allow the MTA to go ahead and implement some of the 45 projects before a hearing to determine the adequacy of the EIR.

The San Francisco County Transportation Authority (TA), the city's congestion management agency responsible for modeling transportation and development patterns, has released its new bicycle route data application, Cycle Tracks, for iPhones and GPS-enabled iTunes players at the iTunes store. Like similar applications that give information such as speed and distance traveled, users of the TA app can map their bicycle ride, but the data they collect will be aggregated anonymously in the TA's server so that it can be applied to their SF-CHAMP modeling and travel forecasting tool.

At last month's Rail-Volution conference in Boston, Streetfilms was able to grab a few moments with William Lind, a politically conservative transit advocate. Lind aims to provide "liberal transit advocates" the language to build support for public transportation (okay, just rail) in terms that conservatives can relate to. Some of Lind's arguments don't reflect our views here at Streetfilms, especially his disdain for buses (which we don't cover in this video), but he makes a thought-provoking case for transit investment. Streetsblog readers won't want to miss his critique of highway spending as a massive government intervention.