Matthew Roth

At yesterday's Interdepartmental Staff Committee on Traffic and Transportation (ISCOTT) meeting, where decisions about temporary street closures are decided by all the agencies that have anything to do with streets and events on streets, the trial pedestrian plaza at 17th Street and Market Street received easy approval for a four month extension. Heads of MTA, DPW, the Planning Department, as well as Mayor Gavin Newsom, the two merchant organizations in the area, and many immediate community organizations all voiced support for the extension, many of them urging that the successful plaza become permanent.

This just in from the "you've got to be sh*tting me" files: an Oregon woman, Catherine Stotts, 62, who was driving illegally in the construction lane of Route 20 in Mendocino County Tuesday afternoon, hit a Caltrans worker and then had the nerve to suggest he should have jumped out of the way faster to avoid her.

The San Francisco Airport (SFO) Commission asked BART today to waive the new SFO surcharge for workers at the airport, whom they assert cannot afford to ride BART to work now. The new surcharge increased from $1.50 to $4.00 on July 1st with the 6 percent overall fare increase approved by BART's Board of Directors.

Celebrated Colombian urbanist and former mayor of Bogotá Enrique Peñalosa told a standing room audience of more than one hundred people at the San Francisco Public Library last night that San Francisco can be friendly to cars or to people, but not both. Further, he argued that there is no fundamental technical reason why streets have to function only as free-flowing arteries to move cars, but that the state of our cities in America is a political decision that we can overturn and that American's perceptions of what is possible in cities will follow suit.

A state appellate court in Sacramento ruled two days ago that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger can't continue taking money out of the Public Transportation Account (PTA) to help balance the budget, something the governor has done repeatedly while in office, costing state transit operators $1.19 billion in 2007-2008 alone. Many Bay Area transit operators might not have had to cut service, raise fares, nor stage epic battles with their unions if that steady source of funding had been allocated to them.

When Oakland installed its first pay-and-display parking kiosks in early 2007, parking managers ordered employees to remove the heads of the approximately 5,000 single-space meters they were replacing. Just like other cities transitioning from using single-space parking meters to newer multi-space pay stations, the parking managers failed to realize the utility of those old meter poles for cyclists, who used them for locking up their bicycles. 

With BART and its unions agreeing on a nine-day extension to contract negotiations, the fear of a strike that would incapacitate the Bay Area's transit networks and gridlock its roads has been temporarily alleviated, though ten days from now the entire region could be in the same predicament if the gap between management and labor is not bridged. What is clear is that the acrimony between those at the bargaining table is intense and, judging from the tenor of public reaction in news reports and polls, it's clear the public has little patience for the drama amid wider economic concerns. 

BART and Unions Agree to 9-Day Contract Extension (SF Gate) (Examiner) (CoCo Times) (Oak Trib) BART, Muni, AC Transit, GG Transit to Raise Fares Weds (SF Gate) Coverage of Bike Plan Passage (Examiner) (SF Gate) Third Spare-the-Air Day in a Row Called for Today (CoCo Times) Chronicle Calls SF Downtown Center Garage an “Efficient Beauty” … Continued

At a press conference this afternoon characterized by relief and jubilation, Mayor Gavin Newsom, representatives from the city agencies responsible for San Francisco's streets, and bicycle advocates celebrated the MTA's adoption of the Bike Plan and the legislation of the first 45 of the 56 priority bike-lane projects. Mayor Newsom seemed as thrilled as the bike advocates that much of the details for moving the legal process forward had been surmounted with last night's Planning Commission's certification of the Bike Plan EIR and the MTA Board's unanimous vote of approval today.