Month: October 2010

Staff at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) and its consultants presented the SFMTA Board of Directors yesterday with a rough sketch outlining the steps needed to get a municipal bond rating and consider issuing bond debt to pay for capital projects. They emphasized the opportunity to issue debt to pay for projects in a very competitive construction environment, but highlighted the implications of such debt on future operating expenses.

It is nearly universally accepted that transit agencies must serve entire regions to succeed in American cities. They can't be splintered into separate entities with one serving the center city and another serving the fringes. As homes and jobs have traversed city borders, transit agencies must not only get suburban residents to downtown jobs, but increasingly, carry urban dwellers to suburban jobs.

More headlines at Streetsblog Capitol Hill

After four years of an agonizing bicycle injunction that prevented the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) from adding any significant improvements to the city's bike network, a judge earlier this year finally freed the SFMTA to begin building out the city's long-promised Bicycle Plan.

Most of our readers have probably already watched the amazing historic film of Market Street in the early 1900s, but you probably didn't realize the video was shot in April, 1906, merely a week before the 1906 earthquake and fires destroyed most of the buildings that lined the street in the film. 60 Minutes aired an excellent story about the video on Sunday, which you can watch above. One point worth noting: Some of those cars driving in and out of the picture were staged by the filmmakers, likely as an example of the technological innovation represented by those earlier vehicles. How times change.

Rail~volution is underway in Portland, Oregon, bringing together more than 1,000 city planners, engineers, transit advocates, bike policy experts, and elected officials to strategize about making cities and towns better for transit, walking, and biking.

Allow me to speak for the Streetsblog Network as a whole when I say, everyone is excited about the Center for Transit Oriented Development's new national database.

More headlines at Streetsblog Capitol Hill

The Reclaiming Vacant Properties Conference wrapped up in Cleveland on Friday. It brought hundreds of people together to strategize a way out of the state of abandonment so many urban areas are in.