Matthew Roth

At a press conference this afternoon to celebrate the city's first new bike lane in three years, Mayor Gavin Newsom and MTA Chief Nat Ford learned that Clear Channel had backed out of its option to implement a public-use bike share program in San Francisco. Ironically, just as Mayor Newsom was answering a question from Streetsblog about the future of bike share in San Francisco, Ford approached him with the news, which he had just found out about.

Mission Street from Cesar Chavez to Highland Avenue is a vibrant commercial and pedestrian strip, though it also suffers from a good deal of speeding traffic. The strip is also notorious for the noise from motorcycle owners gunning it up the hill and along the long blocks just south of Cesar Chavez.

In an annual performance review of San Francisco's Muni transit service presented at the final MTA Board Meeting of 2009 yesterday, several troubling indicators cast a shadow on the agency's efforts to improve its reputation and service performance.

More headlines over at Streetsblog Capitol Hill.

Among the many users of San Francisco's streets, pedicabs occupy a space somewhere between a bicycle and a motorized taxi cab, though their movements are restricted far beyond other modes, in part because pedicab owners don't have the budget to lobby city leaders and don't have an obvious constituency to advocate on their behalf. This could change as new pedicab businesses move to the city and push for their right to use the roadways for their enterprise.

More headlines over at Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Disney's Magic Highway USA is one of the more extraordinary examples of the myopic devotion to automobility and its infrastructure I've ever seen. It's probably also required viewing at the Reason Foundation and among Senator James Inhofe's staff in Washington DC.

Though we're taking the rest of the week off for the holiday, we thought you'd be excited to see these photos, which represent the first pavement treatments for the new Calm the Safety Zone projects on Market Street, meant to improve pedestrian safety by re-enforcing the separations between motorists and pedestrians. As we reported two weeks ago, this treatment is the next phase after the stop bars were moved back from the crosswalks and fits into the larger rubric of the Better Market Street Initiative.  Thanks to Dennis Lee at the Great Streets Project, who snapped these photos at 4th Street and Market.

The recently released Transbay Transit District Draft Plan is the culmination of two years of detailed work by the many city agencies and consultants that had a hand in it, and its objectives for creating a vibrant, walkable public realm and its goals to promote transit and reduce automobile traffic make it a valuable mission statement for growth in San Francisco's downtown over the next 25 years.

More headlines over at Streetsblog Capitol Hill.