Cities, Counties, and Countries

She's back! Veronica Moss, D.C. lobbyist for the Automobile User Trade Organization (A.U.T.O.), recently returned to New York to get her first look at the new, pedestrian-friendly Times Square. Her views may rankle some in the livable streets camp, but we think it's important to note that some influential people out there just abhor walking, socializing, and the freedom to safely enjoy public spaces.

I'll be leaving in ten days for Scandinavia, and will be sending reports to sf.streetsblog on the upcoming Climate Change conference (known as COP15) and the massive demonstrations that are expected to surround it. I've been to Copenhagen (my mother was born there) so I'm excited to return to a place where bicycles reign and the political culture is surprisingly reasonable compared to anything here in the U.S. COP15 will be joined by most of the world's nations, while outside its perimeter, a range of political organizations and ad-hoc political cultures will also converge, bringing memories of Seattle a decade ago, and the half dozen other dramatic confrontations between protesters and police at G8 or IMF summits since then.

When Streetsblog San Francisco took part in the Congress for the New Urbanism's Project for Transportation Reform in Portland last week, city planners and transportation engineers treated participants to numerous tours of innovative network solutions that city has embraced, including its greenstreets program for stormwater treatment on street rights-of-way. With nearly five hundred greenstreet facilities already in the ground, Portland has plans to add another five hundred in the next five years, greatly reducing the burden stormwater can place on its sanitation system.

The San Francisco County Transportation Authority (TA), the city's congestion management agency responsible for modeling transportation and development patterns, has released its new bicycle route data application, Cycle Tracks, for iPhones and GPS-enabled iTunes players at the iTunes store. Like similar applications that give information such as speed and distance traveled, users of the TA app can map their bicycle ride, but the data they collect will be aggregated anonymously in the TA's server so that it can be applied to their SF-CHAMP modeling and travel forecasting tool.

When it comes to building new developments in the Bay Area, especially in San Francisco, the battle over limiting the construction of new parking spaces is pitched. Parking reform advocacy organizations like Livable City, which maintains a listserv populated by car-free and livable-city advocates keeping a keen watch on planning commission parking exemptions, have long encouraged city leaders to tighten the parking-to-unit ratios in dense neighborhoods flush with transit and bicycling options.

Despite the much ballyhooed talk by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom that his city will implement a public bike share pilot (two years of talk that has garnered numerous press hits), the first bike share program in the Bay Area will likely be implemented by the middle of 2010 in Santa Clara County by the Valley Transportation Authority (VTA).  While small size may still be a liability to its success and long term funding sources must be determined, the VTA is miles ahead of other transit operators in completing the process necessary to deliver a pilot.

San Jose is on the verge of adopting its new bicycle plan at the next City Council meeting on November 17th, which, as anyone who has cycled in San Jose knows, would be a welcome change from decades of traffic engineering focused almost solely on automobility.

City planners have been on the hook for some of the last century's greatest metropolitan mishaps: urban freeways and "slum clearance," arbitrary minimum parking requirements, and land use laws that have left little room for the mingling of uses. Understandably, today's planners are a bit humbled. But when planning directors from some of North America's most progressive cities spoke at City Hall this week about the political challenges that face urban planners, several of them said the field needs to move beyond worrying about past mistakes.