Matthew Roth

Newsom Says Streetsblog’s Parking Story is “Factually Incorrect,” Says “Blogs Often Are” (Examiner) Matier and Ross Reiterate Streetsblog’s Parking Story. Gav? (SF Gate) CHSRA Releases Detailed High Speed Rail Alternatives Plan for Peninsula (Merc) Mission Residents Concerned Over City’s Five Year Plan for Mission (Mission Local) Sacramento Installs Illegal-Right-on-Red Cameras. Hey MTA, How About Market/Octavia? … Continued

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced bids for the fourth bore of the Caldecott Tunnel earlier this week, claiming that the new $420 million tunnel on State Route 24 through the Oakland hills will reduce congestion for the 160,000 motorists who use it daily and that it will create 6,000 new jobs.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced today that the state has applied for $4.7 billion in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) stimulus money for the California High Speed Rail Authority (CAHSRA) to start the nation's most ambitious high speed rail project.

Mayor Gavin Newsom has been quietly pressuring MTA Chief Nat Ford to delay or prevent proposals to extend parking meter hours on weeknights and Sundays, despite a looming mid-year MTA budget deficit and studies that show it's good policy, Streetsblog has learned.

Former Talking Heads frontman and current bicycling icon David Byrne used his celebrity and the publication of his new book, Bicycle Diaries, to instruct a capacity audience of more than 900 people at San Francisco's Herbst Theater on the many ways that the bicycle has become a more acceptable and mainstream form of locomotion. Rather than read a single line from his book, he took the opportunity to assemble a panel, including Board of Supervisors President David Chiu, San Francisco Bicycle Coalition (SFBC) Executive Director Leah Shahum, and Berkeley City and Regional Planning Professor Emeritus Michael Teitz, and show a largely older audience of City Arts devotees a number of photos from his travels, photos contrasting cities around the world where bicycle infrastructure is more than a-nod-and-a-wink, to American cities, where the car is king and any other form of transportation has suffered from neglect or marginalization.

Although there are still some kinks that need to be ironed out on Market Street to make the six-week trial diversion of personal automobiles more efficient, the sky did not fall and reaction to the changes was fairly positive, even from drivers in personal vehicles. One consistent complaint was the relatively small signs affixed to street posts, which several drivers claimed they didn't see.

Following the lead of Streetsblog NYC, we're off today in observance of Yom Kippur, though we remind you that your bike commute to work down Market Street tomorrow morning will be quite different than today, should you be riding. With the trial to impose mandatory right turns for private automobiles traveling eastbound at 8th and 6th Streets, your Muni ride might be better, too. At a minimum, pedestrians shopping at Westfield should see a big difference! For more information on the closure, be sure to go over to the Better Market Street website.

Wow, what a beautiful bunch of uploads the Streetsblog community has been tagging for our Flickr pool!  Please keep it up. And plug1 (a.k.a. whatimseeing.com), you rock; we'd put more of your photos up, but we don't have that much server room.  Thanks all for the contributions and please keep sending them our way!

We all know that you don't have to go far from Bay Area cities to find some of the most beautiful mountains and epic beaches in the country, but you might be surprised how easy it is to get to those hikes and natural wonders without a car. Thanks to a beta website called Transit and Trails, hosted by the Bay Area Open Space Council, you can ditch your ride and plan your next adventure taking public transportation to Mt. Tam or Stinson Beach or Briones.

One day after Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger tooted his own horn on climate change and carbon reductions mandated under AB 32, another California transit operator is taking drastic steps to stop the hemorrhaging of its operations budget by cutting back on future innovation, in no small part due to the fact that the governor and the state legislature zeroed out the State Transit Assistance (STA) fund.