Matthew Roth

The SFBC and the Department of Public Health (DPH) recently announced a bicycle rack design competition as part of a $100,000 community-based planning grant from Caltrans for the Treasure Island redevelopment plan.

Although this is only tangentially related to our coverage of transit and livable streets in the Bay Area (Oakland Airport Connector is as good as I can get), artist Aaron Koblin has created a remarkable series of visuals and animation that show the flight patterns of U.S. airplanes over a twenty-four hour period.

Though Chronicle Watch can at times be interesting, today's post is misleading, even oxymoronic. The headline "Muni Buses Delay Traffic at Intersection" implies cars are more important, though San Francisco's Transit First policy mandates the MTA and other agencies prioritize the movement of buses, light rail vehicles, bicycles and pedestrians before motorists.

Kirkham Street is one of the Big 56 bike lane projects that hasn't raised many eyebrows. Unlike the looming battle over 2nd Street or 5th Street, the Kirkham lane will be on a relatively quiet residential street that runs east-west from Ocean Beach to 6th Avenue, where it will connect with the remainder of bicycle Route 40.  

Anthropologists and transit advocates have long bemoaned the rise of The Sacred Rac, its subsequent worship by the majority of the people of the Asu tribe, and the attendant demise of bipedus norteamericanus, or the common pedestrian.  But new evidence appears every day that the once-endangered pedestrian may be seeing a resurgence in urban habitats throughout the nation.  

Far be it from us to take political sides on Livable Streets issues--you don't have to be a donkey or an elephant to appreciate pedestrian safety, traffic calming, and quality public space--but why is it that two of the best columns connecting transportation policy reform, land use, and energy independence have come from conservative pundits? 

Though David Brooks might argue in his New York Times column that Americans want to live in small towns and suburban dreamscapes, the fact is more and more of us live in metropolitan areas, and discussions about what we want should have to do more with the context of those metropolitan areas.  Brooks should be looking at the quality of the public spaces where people live, and the walkability and ease of transit in those neighborhoods.

Urban space advocates the world over use best practice examples from other cities to raise the bar on policy and praxis in their own cities.  For years in New York, Transportation Alternatives and the NYC Streets Renaissance Campaign invoked the phrase "Lessons from London," pointing to congestion pricing and the pedestrianization of Trafalgar Square, among other excellent projects, that demonstrated that city's commitment to reconquering its streets for people over cars. They also pointed to Paris, Copenhagen and Bogotá for examples of brilliant bike share programs, four decades of urban design giving primacy to pedestrians and cyclists, and innovative use of street space and buses to move more riders on Transmilenio BRT than most cities move on their entire transit systems.

Transportation and social justice advocates packed the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) board meeting today to demand that the agency not spend a proposed $70 million of federal stimulus money on the Oakland Airport Connector (OAC) project.  MTC commissioners heard testimony for over two hours from some of the more than one hundred members of the public who were mostly opposed to the OAC, claiming it would take money from the operations of AC Transit and other transit operators.