Cities, Counties, and Countries

Ever since we broke the news that New York City's Tom Maguire would be hired as the new director of the SFMTA's Sustainable Streets Division, we've heard only positive reactions. If nothing else, there's a lot of hype building for this promising veteran of the livable streets renaissance seen under Janette Sadik-Khan's NYC Department of Transportation. On the other hand, Sadik-Khan and her executive staff had the full support of former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

A crowded field of nine candidates campaigning for three available seats on Mountain View's City Council aired their disagreements at a community forum on Tuesday evening about whether new housing within the sprawling North Bayshore office park would be a practical solution to traffic congestion and rapidly rising rents.

In sync with Bicycling Magazine naming New York America's best biking city, the NYC Department of Transportation released a report this week full of stats on the safety impact of protected bike lanes. It's the most robust data the city has released about this type of street design, and the results prove that protected bike lanes make streets safer not just for cyclists, but pedestrians and drivers as well.

About 150 residents attended a community meeting last Wednesday hosted by the San Jose Department of Transportation in the Willow Glen neighborhood to introduce plans for new bike lanes and sharrows on six streets west of downtown. The projects would complement four less extensive bikeway projects on streets east of downtown which were presented on August 6.

East Palo Alto's decades-long dream to reconnect its east and west sides via a pedestrian/bicycle bridge has taken a huge leap forward. The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) approved the city's $8.6 million application to construct a 12-foot wide bridge over Highway 101 between Newell Road and Clarke Avenue, following East Palo Alto's City Council's June allocation of $600,000 for environmental review and design.

On some streets, getting drivers to stop speeding might be as easy as eliminating a few stripes. That's the finding from a new study from Transport for London [PDF].

Hey, so it turns out the all-powerful @BicycleLobby didn't actually scale the Brooklyn Bridge and plant white American flags at the top. That was two all-powerful German artists.

Like many cities in America, Cleveland grew into its own as a streetcar city. In the early part of the last century, hundreds of miles of streetcars connected all corners of the city as well as its inner suburbs. The streets where tracks carried passengers -- Lorain, Superior, Euclid -- were the circulatory system of the city, around which neighborhood life was organized.

About two dozen residents attended a San Jose Department of Transportation (SJDOT) community meeting last Wednesday, where staff gathered public input on four upcoming bike lane and sharrow projects planned for east San Jose streets. Five other projects, which will add bike lanes and sharrows to streets west of downtown -- and, to the chagrin of some, replace some parking along Park and Lincoln avenues with continuous bike lanes -- will be presented at a community meeting this Wednesday at Gardner Community Center, 520 West Virginia Street, at 6 pm.