Day: November 3, 2010

Ready for some good news? Voters around the country got to decide on 29 transportation-related ballot initiatives yesterday. According to an analysis by the Center for Transportation Excellence, transportation advocates and reformers won 73 percent of them. If you add in other initiatives that passed earlier this year, the victory rate jumps to 77 percent.

Unfortunately for San Francisco transit riders, new revenue projections for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), which runs Muni, show a decline in parking citations and a resulting budget deficit, just as the agency has been trying to restore service that was cut in May.

The SFMTA has released a much-anticipated bus stop consolidation plan [pdf] and while it is only in the planning stages and will take a concerted outreach effort to pass, the agency is finally publicly embracing a measure long pushed by transit advocates as an inexpensive way to speed up the system and make it more reliable.

The series of frustrating and consistent delays that have plagued the Muni Metro system for the last few months have been narrowed to three causes that SFMTA Transit Director John Haley told the SFMTA Board yesterday have mostly been fixed for now.

After yesterday's electoral drubbing, the Obama administration will have to deal with a starkly different Congress when they make their expected push for a multi-year transportation bill early next year. We know that some influential House Republicans, like John Mica, don't necessarily believe that bigger highways will solve America's transportation problems. And we know that some pro-transit voices in Washington originate from the right. But no one expects the GOP ascendancy to make transportation reform any easier.

The biggest news from last night, of course, is that the GOP won control of the House of Representatives. That means Republicans now control all the House committees, and Ohio's John Boehner -- a believer in wider highways -- will wield the Speaker's gavel. The Democrats hung on to the Senate, though, and pundits are forecasting two years of gridlock.

There will be fits and starts on the long journey toward overhauling transportation policy in this country. But in an era of energy uncertainty and crumbling infrastructure, the single occupancy vehicle is an unsustainable, expensive and inefficient way for people to move. Transportation reformers have the stronger arguments to be made.

And in non-election news: