Matthew Roth

Thank you to everyone who came out after Sunday Streets to enjoy the Streetsblog San Francisco party in the parking lane on Valencia Street. We want to acknowledge Valencia Cyclery, who graciously allowed us to set up shop in front of their business, even as the sidewalks got crowded with revelers.

Muni Crash: Driver May Have Blacked Out (SF Gate) (CoCo Times) (Merc) (KRON) (KRON) VTA Double Checks Safety Measures After Muni Crash (KRON) BART Labor Negotiations Continue (Examiner) (CoCo Times) (KRON) (KCBS) Bay Bridge Construction Moving at Feverish Pitch to Reach Labor Day Deadline (SF Gate) Don’t Worry About Car Careening Out of Control Through … Continued

The renegade bicycle stenciler has expanded his/her vision for a slower, saner traffic plan, this time asserting a bicyclist's right to take a lane on Oak Street and not give it back. Sharrows be damned!

West Portal Muni Crash, Possible Driver Error (ABC) (Merc) (KCBS) (SF Gate) (SF Gate) BART Union Negotiations Continue This Week (SF Gate), Chron Editorial Has No Sympathy for Unions Sac Bee Questions Wisdom of Building High Speed Rail During Recession, CAHSR Blog Doesn’t Trinity Plaza Housing Deal Hits Snag, Tenderloin Housing Clinic, Developer Take Same … Continued

We're getting very excited for the weekend, especially the second of two Sunday Streets events in the Mission, this Sunday from 10 am to 2 pm. After you've experience the streets freed from vehicular traffic noise and opened up for walking and bicycling, roll/walk on over to Valencia Cyclery to celebrate a certain blog we like.

The San Francisco Great Streets Project (GSP) has been collecting pedestrian counts and street user surveys, and has used time-lapse photography, to measure users' perceptions about the quality of the public realm before and after the 17th Street plaza treatments were in place. The results of the surveys show what many readers of Streetsblog have been saying all along: residents feel the sense of community and the quality of the pedestrian realm have gone up markedly.

When Mayor Gavin Newsom dedicated the first of three Pavement to Parks plazas at 17th and Market streets, he promised to push forward with the next two trial plazas in short order, including one at the intersection of Guerrero Street and San Jose Avenue, one of the more precarious corners in the city, where traffic speeds down Guerrero after exiting I-280, the footprint of the now-abandoned Mission Freeway. For community residents like Gillian Gillett, who has been fighting to make the neighborhood more pedestrian friendly and less sick with dangerous traffic for years, the news was thrilling.

Zipcar kicked off its second annual Low-Car Diet challenge today in the 13 cities around the country where the company does business. The challenge asks participants to give up their personal cars for one month and walk, ride a bicycle, and take transit in place of driving.

While the dispute between the MTA and NextBus Information Services (NBIS) over how real-time bus data on NextMuni (a separate company from NBIS) is used and licensed continues behind closed doors in downtown San Francisco, across the Bay, BART has flung its proverbial doors wide open to third-party developers to use its real-time data in as many and as interesting ways as they can conceive. In fact, BART is a national leader in data transparency among transit operators, and was second only to Tri-Met in Portland to release its real-time arrival feeds to the public.

San Francisco's traffic managers last week approved a trial closure of one block of Mason Street in North Beach from August 1st to September 27th to test what their models tell them: that they can close the street permanently to allow expansion of the North Beach Branch Public Library and the park at Joe DiMaggio Playground. Mason Street currently serves as a direct route to Fisherman's Wharf from Columbus Avenue and detractors are concerned that traffic will worsen on adjacent streets and that drivers will have difficulty understanding the change.