Month: July 2010

Drive north from San Francisco for a few hours, and the 101 will gradually melt into a slim road between giant sequoia trees. You've found your way to Richardson Grove State Park, where you can see thousand-year-old redwoods, the South Fork Eel River, and lots of campgrounds, but you won't see any big box stores.

While the full results of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority's (SFCTA) congestion pricing plan, the SF Mobility, Access, and Pricing Study (SFMAPS), have not yet been released, the agency will hold a series of public meetings starting next week to discuss the general principles of congestion pricing and how it could work in San Francisco. At the public meetings, the SFCTA will detail several possible scenarios to charge drivers for driving into San Francisco's downtown during peak periods, a prospect that should spark significant public and media debate.

Tacoma resident Evan Siroky got a rude reminder of what's in Washington State DOT's project pipeline yesterday, reading in the local paper that officials are looking to revive plans to extend state route 167 as a limited access highway. The new highway segment would reach the Port of Tacoma, and Siroky writes on member blog Tacoma Tomorrow that it's being sold, in part, as a boon for freight movement, though most of its impact will be to induce more driving and sprawl.

BART’s original logo, care of the ever resourceful research of Eric Fischer. More than 75 Percent of BART Riders Opposed to Fare Rollback Plan (Examiner, SF Appeal) Hundreds of AC Transit Operators Call in Sick as Part of Protest (CoCo Times, ABC, CBS) John King’s Musings on the Street-Level Urban Transformation in San Francisco (SF … Continued

Starting last week along Tiffany Street near 29th Street, contractors started cutting up sidewalks, jackhammering them and taking the crumbled pieces of concrete away in trucks. By the end of the week, what looked like an ugly construction zone began to get the personal touch of residents hoeing and digging in the dirt underneath the concrete, preparing it for a block party planting day this last Saturday, when the street was closed to cars and neighbors came together to work and throw a street party.

The invention of cable cars in 1873 by Andrew Hallidie is an oft-told saga, with a perhaps apocryphal point of origin on a rainy winter day in 1869 when he saw a team of horses pulling a horsecar up a steep grade on Jackson Street between Kearny and Stockton. One horse slipped, the car man slammed on his brake but it broke, and the horses and streetcar ended up at the bottom of the hill in a mangled, mutilated mess. Andrew Hallidie wrote that he wanted to construct a public transit system that would alleviate the “great cruelty and hardship to the horses engaged in that work.”

There are plenty of urban issues to sink your teeth into this week. From learning about the potential boons of urban farming in San Francisco and Bus Rapid Transit in San Jose to the discovery of greywater best practices that may reside in your own back yard. Here are the highlights from the Streetsblog calendar:

Who takes transit? That's what the Atlanta Regional Commission is trying to figure out with what it calls the largest-ever survey of riders in the United States. The commission spoke to 50,000 transit riders, a full ten percent of the region's total ridership, on all of Greater Atlanta's seven transit systems. 

As the threat of a Republican filibuster continues to prevent the Senate from passing climate legislation, leading Democrats have tried to scale back their proposal in an attempt to peel off a few votes. In the process, serious attempts to put a price on carbon have fallen by the wayside, taking with them the best hope of reducing transportation emissions. A new bill introduced yesterday by Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley, however, aims to reintroduce transportation into the energy debate, if in a more limited form.