Melanie Curry

UPDATE: This post has been edited to clarify a point about the SFBC board's actions. Please see note at end.

Gabe Klein joins us this week to talk about how to get things done and make big changes to improve city streets and transportation. Gabe has served as the transportation chief of both Chicago and Washington, DC, and prior to his stint in government was an executive with Zipcar (he is also currently on the board of OpenPlans, the organization that publishes Streetsblog USA).

Eric Jaffe, in CityLab, recently reported that Caltrans “admitted” that expanding highways increases traffic by posting a policy brief on the subject of induced demand to its website. He called it a rare admission from a state department of transportation.

Last week, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) officially dubbed the state's cap-and-trade system “a success.”

In an effort to help cities and towns throughout the state update their planning documents, the state's Office of Planning and Research (OPR) is updating its General Plan Guidelines.

We're still digesting all the reports and conversations that occurred at the California Bicycle Coalition's biannual bike summit in San Diego this week. In addition to some very hard conversations about equity and diversity in bike advocacy—a subject that needs its own report—there were more planner-y presentations about on-the-ground bike issues. Caltrans was very active at the summit, with various Caltrans employees giving presentations on bicycle safety goals within the Strategic Highway Safety Plan, new sustainability goals for the department, and the Active Transportation Program.

City engineer Michael Sacuskie took these photos of the construction on the new buffered bike lanes and road diet in Modesto, and as you can see people are already using them, even though they won't be finished for another month or so. The project includes a road diet on College Avenue and buffered bike lanes that will connect two campuses of Modesto Junior College to the rest of Modesto's growing bike network.

We're getting excited about the upcoming Bike Summit organized by the California Bicycle Coalition. It's not too late to register for the biannual event, which will take place on October 25-28 in San Diego.

Governor Jerry Brown had a Sunday deadline to sign legislation or veto it. Late in the day on Friday he signed Assembly Bill 744, which allows affordable housing developers to build less parking than many local zoning regulations currently permit.

After several years of work, the Governor's Office of Planning and Research (OPR) is almost ready to release draft guidelines on replacing vehicle Level of Service measures under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The shift was called for by Senate Bill 743, which passed late in the 2013 legislative session.