Matthew Roth

The MTA Board is just hours away from finally approving the Bike Plan, and is currently hearing testimony from 200 supporters -- a cross section of cyclists including business and home owners, mothers with children, families, and people with disabilities -- who were organized by the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition.

Last week I tried to download the real-time transit data application Routesy from the Apple Store, only to find that the Store didn't carry it. Some friends had recommended the application as an improvement over iBART and iMuni, which only provide the static schedules published by the transit operators, not real-time data. I wasn't too pressed to find the application at the time, though, so I didn't investigate further and didn't realize there is a very interesting story behind why Apple yanked the app from the store.

State Mediators to Join BART Negotiations (Examiner) (SF gate) (CoCo Times) SF Bike Plan Certified by Planning Commission (SF Gate) (Examiner) Does NextBus Own Real-Time Muni Data? It Seems to Think So (SF Appeal) (SF Weekly) Walnut Creek Residents Seek Ballot Initiative to Control Growth, Add Parking (CoCo Times) AC Transit Service Cuts a Week … Continued

After three years of waiting, three years without a single bicycle infrastructure improvement in San Francisco, the Planning Commission tonight unanimously certified the Bike Plan EIR, the first step necessary to lift the bicycle injunction.

The meeting San Francisco bicycle advocates and commuters have been waiting three years for, the first of several steps required to lift the bike injunction, will take take place at City Hall Room 400 at 6:30 pm tonight.

Chronicle Bike Plan Overview Ahead of Tonight’s Vote at Planning Commission BART Unions Request State Mediator to Resolve Impasse (SF Gate) (CoCo Times) (Examiner) Details of the Sticking Points in BART Negotiations (CoCo Times) Both Sides Continue to Attack Each Other for Bad-Faith Bargaining (KRON) SF Employers Urged to Help Employees With Flexible Schedules if … Continued

This artwork along Regent's Canal in North London goes to interesting depths to get cyclists to slow down while using the bike and pedestrian path. Given the sentiment among commenters to our post about bike and pedestrian conflicts on the Golden Gate Bridge paths, particularly that there are a few too many Lance Armstrong wannabes charging by, would a hyper-realistic path painting of the channel below be a deterrent to speeding or just too dizzying?

With BART contracts expiring next Tuesday night and regional planning organizations urging Bay Area residents to create a contingency plan for getting to work if there is a strike or labor slowdown, BART management and labor representatives are accusing each other of bad-faith negotiations. Though they are bargaining around the clock and both sides insist they don't want to resort to a lock-out or a strike, rhetoric suggests those options are a real possibility.

A Closer Look at Treasure Island Development Proposal (Examiner) Oakland Trib Asks Whether BART Susceptible to DC-Magnitude Train Crash BART Considers New Revenue Sources Like More Retail Shops in Stations (Examiner) Traffic Calming and Ped Safety in San Leandro Abandoned for Lack of Public Interest (CoCo Times) Marin IJ Editorial Urges Smart Growth for Marin … Continued

One of the tasks our New York City executive editor put to us at Streetsblog San Francisco when we started was to hold "mainstream" journalists' feet to the fire when they write stories about transit, bikes, and pedestrians from a windshield perspective. You know, pieces like Mike Aldax's story in the Examiner today, which goes out of its way to focus on the negative impacts of the Bike Plan to vehicular traffic, impacts that are based on misguided vehicular Level of Service standards that hold ease of movement for motorists to be a proxy for environmental standards.