Matthew Roth

With BART's operators' union declaring an imminent strike that will shut down the entire system starting this Monday, Bay Area commuters are scrambling to find other options for getting to work, particularly from the East Bay, where BART and the Bay Bridge are the two primary transportation links across the water.

Standing in front of union headquarters in downtown Oakland this afternoon, leadership for BART's Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 1555 announced that their rank and file would walk off the job after the last trains finish their run this Sunday night, effectively shutting down BART across the Bay Area.  ATU 1555 represents train operators and station agents and is the second largest union working for BART, representing roughly 900 employees.

The Government Computer News magazine, part of the U.S. General Services Administration, called the 511 Transit website maintained by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) "a heroic act of interagency coordination" when naming it to it's list of the "10 great government websites nationwide for 2009."

Some of you saw the Examiner piece yesterday about SkyTran's personal rapid transit (PRT) project and were probably looking for a response from us (one of you even asked in comments why we didn't touch it), but I've been very leery of the topic since I saw the "Pod People" post over on New York Streetsblog blow up with 227 polarizing and dogmatic comments for and against PRT (Personal Rabid Transit?), before the editors shut comments down. I'm pretty skeptical of anything taken on faith as good or bad, so why get into the fray, especially with a technology that hasn't been proven at scale?

Despite early fog hugging the coast, the sun finally came out to play around 12:30 pm yesterday and blessed the thousands of cyclists, skaters, bladers and walkers who enjoyed the approximately six miles of the car-free Sunday Streets event in Golden Gate Park and along the Great Highway adjacent to Ocean Beach. 

The next two Sunday Streets are moving from the heart of the busy Mission to two of San Francisco's more picturesque natural locales as it winds through Golden Gate Park to the Great Highway along Ocean Beach.

At a press conference today immediately after Mayor Gavin Newsom swore in SFPD's new police Chief George Gascón, the city's top cop, responding to a question from Streetsblog, addressed a number of issues central to his command, including, notably, how driver behavior can endanger certain neighborhoods as much or more than violent crime.

Cyclists in Oakland's Lakeshore district are celebrating a hard-fought new bike lane that runs along Harrison and Oakland Avenues south of I-580. Jen Jackson, Vice Chair and co-founder of Walk Oakland Bike Oakland (WOBO), helped spearhead the initiative, and was thrilled:

A couple of real stinkers over in Mainstream Medialand today.

When the 17th Street and Castro Street trial Pavement to Parks plaza was implemented in San Francisco, Mayor Gavin Newsom said at the press conference that he would expedite two more plazas immediately, and if the public used them and clamored for more, he would instruct his agencies to build them. Apparently, he wasn't grandstanding.