Year: 2009

When the first Park(ing) Day was launched by Rebar in 2005, right here in San Francisco, it was on the vanguard of street space reclamation. Four years later, it's undoubtedly part of a larger trend that includes such fine company as Sunday Streets, Pavement to Parks plazas, and the first steps towards a car-less Market Street. Park(ing) Day is now officially an international phenomenon, but its rapid growth could be seen just as easily by touring sites across the city today.

The transportation spending bill passed by the Senate this week includes $50 million in rail safety grants sought in June by environment committee chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) -- but the bill may not become law for months, and today Boxer told California's Metrolink commuter rail that interim safety protections would have to stay in place.

From SF Citizen via Eyes on Blogs comes word of a nasty collision between a bicyclist and an SUV driver in Golden Gate Park Wednesday. The photographer who snapped these shots described the crash on his Flickr post:

They may sound like villains in the next Transformers movie, but "megaregions" are a vital aspect of U.S. life these days. The vast majority of the nation lives in one of the 11 inter-city clusters identified by America 2050 in its new analysis of the future of high-speed rail, making megaregions the best potential sites for rail development.

Today we're talking development and density. Greater Greater Washington has a post about zoning policies and traffic congestion in Montgomery County, Maryland, where a debate over growth policy that would encourage in-fill development near existing transit is getting heated.

15-year-old Boy “Badly Injured” in Tiburon Hit-and-Run (CBS5) San Rafael Cyclist Critically Injured by Driver in Crash on San Lucas Road (Marin IJ) PARK(ing) Day One Sign of “Shift Away From the Dominance” of the Automobile (SF Gate Op-Ed) Presidio Trust to Close Roads in Traffic Calming Experiment (Matier & Ross, SF Examiner) SF Business … Continued

Tomorrow's (PARK)ing Day festivities in San Francisco are likely to be much grander than in years past, with dozens of locations mapped out across the city as spots where metered parking spaces will be transformed into temporary public parks, and other uses, for people, instead of automobiles. Temporary parks are also being planned in locations all over the Bay Area.

"San Francisco's eastern waterfront, from Fisherman's Wharf past the Ferry Building to the Giants' ballpark and Blue Greenway, is a uniquely marvelous setting for a bike ride, whether for fun or utility, one of the city's top two-wheeling attractions for locals and visitors. But it's only just okay for bike traffic — couldn't it be much better? Carrie Nielsen, 2009 Piero N. Patri Fellow, has been working on the long-pondered question: What would it take to provide an excellent waterside bikeway from Mission Bay to North Point, separated from the motor traffic on the Embarcadero roadway and distinct from Herb Caen Way (a.k.a. the Promenade)? Come hear and see what Carrie has put together for a fully-considered vision of a world-class bikeway on the city's waterfront, a next-generation element of the Citywide Bike Network."

In a city where people and cars regularly jostle for space, it's not uncommon to have speeding traffic just inches or feet from pedestrians, homes, and parks. This spatial conflict is especially pronounced on Fell and Oak Streets, which serve all at once as de facto residential highways, major bike thoroughfares, and densely built-up residential and commercial streets, their sidewalks bustling with people on their way home or visiting the Panhandle.