Year: 2009

"In recent years, the Planning Department has set out to make vast improvements to the city’s public realm by drawing on the best thinking from urban designers such as Allan Jacobs, Elizabeth Macdonald and Jan Gehl, while also gleaning lessons from other world-class cities. Join us for a discussion with David Alumbaugh, the acting director of Citywide Planning and manager of the Planning Department’s City Design Group, Adam Varat, manager for the Better Streets Plan and Neil Hrushowy, manager of the City’s pedestrian program."

"Web 2.0--shorthand for Internet applications that rely on users to generate content--has the potential to transform transit systems and operations, while also enabling the general public to collaborate directly with public agencies. Andy Nash, a veteran transportation and land use planner based in Vienna, Austria, will present his latest research on how Web 2.0 has improved planning, efficiency and reliability and public participation. Nash's talk will build on his past experiences conducting research at ETH Zurich's Institute for Transport Planning and Systems and, in the 1990s, as executive director of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority." 

"From Pierre L'Enfant’s plan of 1791 to James McMillan’s Plan of 1901, Washington D.C. is a city with a rich planning tradition. The Nation's capital is also home to a dizzying array of monuments and memorials, with more to come in future years. Find out how Washington D.C. itself is planning for its next 100 years, and how the region's suburban transit oriented development may or may not be a model that other regions can draw upon. Join Rod Freebairn-Smith, architect and urban historian, SPUR Deputy Director Sarah Karlinsky, and SPUR Regional Planning Director Egon Terplan."

What a joy to ride my bike through the insanely congested Bangalore streets, surrounded by a group of rambunctious bicyclists! The first anniversary of the Bangalore Critical Mass attracted about 50 riders and felt shockingly familiar, taking me right back to the first anniversary of our Critical Mass in 1993, when SFBC volunteers presented Critical Mass riders with a big birthday cake on the Panhandle. The Bangalore Critical Mass ended at "Food Street," a famous alley that's evolved from a magnet for street vendors to a sort of Indian food mall.

So the snow that hit the Northeast over the weekend is gradually sublimating and melting away, and a couple of the blogs on the Streetsblog Network are looking at the difference in the way municipalities treated pedestrians and motorists during and after the first big storm of the winter.

Bicycle Bridge at Site of Fatal Crash Over Highway 101 Years Away (San Mateo Daily Journal) El Sobrante Man Charged in Hit-and-Run Death of Bicyclist Pleads Not Guilty (Merc) Hit-and-Run Driver Injures Jogger in the Bike Lane in San Ramon (BCN via CBS5) San Carlos City Council Member Omar Ahmad Appointed to SamTrans Board (Merc) … Continued

A 54-year-old San Francisco woman was sent to the hospital with life-threatening injuries this morning after being hit by a driver at the intersection of Van Ness Avenue and Grove Street near San Francisco City Hall. The victim, whose name has not yet been released, was undergoing surgery this afternoon.

Well, no. We’ve had a great run in the 2000s. Averaging between 750 and 3000 riders on any given month, the birthplace of Critical Mass keeps going strong, in spite of the total lack of promotion or organizing during this past decade. But many of us long-time riders have been dismayed to see the persistence of silly, aggressive, and counter-productive behavior that makes the Critical Mass experience worse for our natural allies on buses, on foot, and even folks in cars who might join us in the future. Not to mention that it makes it worse for us cyclists too, to the point that many former regulars have stopped riding. Part of the frustration for us long-time riders is that we went through all these issues quite intensively back in the early-to-mid 1990s, and to see them cropping up again is a harsh reminder that we’ve done a piss-poor job of transmitting the culture, the lessons learned, from one generation to the next. Plenty of current Critical Massers were under 5 years old when we started it, and the ride’s culture has been more loudly and consistently transmitted by distorted representations in the mass media than it has by those of us who put our hearts and souls into it for years.

Transportation advocates were thrilled last week when the nine-county Bay Area regional transportation planning and funding body, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), established a fluid pot of money for innovative transportation projects, from Safe Routes to School programs and bicycle educational campaigns, to parking policies and demand management strategies meant to reduce the over-reliance on automobiles [pdf].