Year: 2009

It has been six weeks since the MTA started diverting private automobiles off Market Street, an effort to improve conditions for pedestrians, Muni vehicles and cyclists in the eastbound direction, while measuring the economic impact of reduced traffic on the corridor. The traffic diversions are part of the Better Market Street vision to revitalize the Central Market streetscape between Van Ness Street and 5th Street, including musical programming, sidewalk tables, and the Art in Storefronts pilot program.

After taking a beating from the never-ending flow of traffic on 19th Avenue and Sunset Boulevard for 30 years, the N-Judah's track will be replaced where it intersects with those two streets starting Friday. For the next two weekends and the first weekend in December, crews will work to rip up the track and replace it with longer-lasting rail, at a total cost of $2 million. The work is part of the MTA's $18 million Rail Improvement Project, which will also include sections of the J-Church and L-Taraval lines, drawing on local, state and federal funds.

Just how dangerous is San Francisco for pedestrians?

Despite the much ballyhooed talk by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom that his city will implement a public bike share pilot (two years of talk that has garnered numerous press hits), the first bike share program in the Bay Area will likely be implemented by the middle of 2010 in Santa Clara County by the Valley Transportation Authority (VTA).  While small size may still be a liability to its success and long term funding sources must be determined, the VTA is miles ahead of other transit operators in completing the process necessary to deliver a pilot.

Alice Rivlin, now at the Brookings Institution, is one of the capital's most experienced economic hands.

The Senate's propensity for filibusters, delay, and fruitless attempts at bipartisan deal-making is earning it quite the reputation these days. And climate change legislation, with its big-ticket implications for transit and urban development in general, is becoming increasingly caught up in the Senate's peripatetic politics.

In a development that flew largely under the radar on Thursday, the Senate beat back an attempt by David Vitter (R-LA) and Bob Bennett (R-UT) to add a citizenship question to the 2010 U.S. Census, with the goal of no longer counting non-citizens as part of states' official populations.

This year the New York City Department of Transportation measured a 26 percent jump in commuter cycling. Coming on the heels of 2008's unprecedented 35 percent growth, that puts the total two-year increase at a whopping 66 percent.

Yesterday, as I was scrolling through the Streetsblog Network feed, I came upon this headline from network member Sprawled Out: "We Americans are all infrastructure -- and no people."