Matthew Roth

The debate over how to spend the federal transportation stimulus money at the regional level is heating up and may boil over tomorrow morning at the next Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) meeting. 

As we wrote a couple days ago about Jefferson Street, merchants on the commercial street there and throughout the city often assume parking spaces in front of their stores are vital to business, that their customers drive to buy, and that driving customers spend more because they can carry more goods home in their vehicles. 

Electric Vehicles (EVs) are all the rage these days and the press seems to treat them as a palliative for all that ails our fossil-fuel-driven, automobile-dependent transportation network.  The New York Times has fallen in love with Better Place, an electric-car battery maker that seeks to replace much of the U.S. fleet of vehicles with ones that run on electric batteries, which could be changed at battery stations much the way we currently fill up at gas stations.

The City Design Group at the Planning Department has released its proposal for transforming Jefferson Street at Fisherman's Wharf into a single-surface pedestrian priority street, the first of its size in San Francisco.

File the following in the "Can't Believe My President Gets It" category. 

Automakers Come Back to Public Feed Trough for $14 Billion (SF Gate) (NYT) Obama Signs Stimulus Bill Into Law (NYT) The Politics Behind Obama’s Funding of High Speed Rail in Stim Package (Politico) Reaction to Politico Article at HSR Blog (CHSRB) Transpo Sec LaHood on How Stim Money Will Be Spent (Transportation for America) Good … Continued

With overwhelming approval for the Proposition K half-cent transportation sales tax in 2003, San Franciscans  signaled they not only wanted to maintain a state of good repair and operational solvency for their transit system, they were willing to dedicate more than 25 percent of the tax to expansion, including a network of transit preferential streets and Bus Rapid Transit (BRT).  The first two BRT corridors will be on Geary Boulevard and Van Ness Avenue, the latter with a target opening date by Muni's centennial at the end of 2012.

5328 bikes, to be exact. 

The Metropolitan Transportation Commission's (MTC) main auditorium in Oakland was standing-room-only  Wednesday for an Allocations Committee meeting where the MTC board debated proposals by staff on how to spend the expected stimulus money when President Obama signs the bill into law.  MTC Executive Director Steve Heminger explained the need to get the discussion started even before Washington made anything final because the deadlines for spending the stimulus money are so tight and the MTC doesn't want to return unspent funds.

Until the city certifies its Draft Environmental Impact Report in a few months and Judge Busch lifts the bicycle injunction, we have to get more resourceful about maintaining our safety as cyclists.