Matthew Roth

Despite continued cash flow crunches facing nearly every transit operator in the state, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said absolutely nothing about transportation or fixing transit's woes in his State of the State address today. Transit operators are still bracing for the expected budget proposal this Friday that would thwart the state Supreme Court's ruling declaring the governor's raids on transit funds to fill general fund coffers illegal.

With national data transparency efforts like President Obama's Open Data Initiative and municipal projects like New York City's Big Apps or San Francisco's Data SF, government agencies across the country have been opening their raw data sets, some more reluctantly than others. With the debut of City-Go-Round and media coverage generated about transit data transparency, many transit operators have taken steps to release their schedule and route information to third party developers, who in turn use the data to develop an array of applications to improve rider experience.

Despite California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's pledge to be a good steward of his state's environment, the governor is expected to release a budget proposal this week that would gut transit funding and contravene both a state Supreme Court ruling and numerous public referendums mandating secure transit funding, a slap in the face to a proven green transportation strategy, say transit operators.

Among the many strategies to reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and attendant greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from private vehicles, Bay Area smart growth advocate TransForm has developed a new certification called GreenTRIP to encourage architects, developers, and municipal officials to build transit-oriented development and implement transportation demand management (TDM) solutions for future tenants [PDF].

Transportation advocates were thrilled last week when the nine-county Bay Area regional transportation planning and funding body, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), established a fluid pot of money for innovative transportation projects, from Safe Routes to School programs and bicycle educational campaigns, to parking policies and demand management strategies meant to reduce the over-reliance on automobiles [pdf].

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has announced the dates and locations for nine Sunday Streets events for 2010, starting on March 14th along the Embarcadero and finishing October 24th around Civic Center.  Building off the tremendous success of the events in 2009, Mayor Newsom announced the events will expand to new communities and run for an extra hour, eventually becoming a permanent San Francisco tradition.

In another rebuff to California's practice of moving spillover funding from the State Transit Assistance (STA) fund to fill the hole in the state's General Fund, a Superior Court ruled on Monday that the state had to pay back the approximately $1.2 billion it diverted from transit operators in the 2007-2008 budget cycle. The state has until April 1st to present the courts with its plan to restore the STA and replenish its reserves, though transit operators and their lobbying association hope negotiations and the blueprint for repayment come much sooner.

More headlines over at Streetsblog Capitol Hill

The software developers and open data advocates at Front Seat, known more familiarly for their Walk Score rankings of the most walkable U.S. cities, have turned their focus on transit agencies that have resisted opening transit data to third-party, open-source developers. Their new website, City-Go-Round, is an effort to encourage agencies to release their schedules in Google Transit Feed Specification (GTFS), the standard for programmers. With the data, Front Seat expects software developers will continually improve the interface between operators and their riders.

For all of you with a second at work today, check out the awesome trend on Twitter that has been building the past few days: #whyweride.