Cities, Counties, and Countries

Berkeley and East Bay bicycle commuters will have many more bicycle parking options with the opening of a new storefront bicycle station near Downtown Berkeley BART later this year. East Bay Bike Coalition Executive Director Robert Raburn and a spokesperson for BART confirmed that a lease was signed last week at the site of the former Shoe Pavilion store on Shattuck Avenue, just steps from the Allston Way entrance to the BART station. The new bike station will be operated by Alameda Bicycle, which runs the current station.

Editor's note: This piece was written for Shaping San Francisco and is now incorporated into the new wiki version, your best place to research San Francisco history, FoundSF.org.

I got an email forwarded to me over the weekend titled "BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA HATES URBAN GARDENS" which naturally sparked my interest. Turns out to be a lot more interesting than the title even suggested. Asa Dodsworth has lived in his place on Acton and Allston Way in Berkeley for about a decade, which he owns. He's a gentle, lanky fellow who decided some years ago to plant food in his front yard and on the six-foot wide median between the curb and the sidewalk running in front of his property. He's not officially associated with Transition Towns or any of the many new initiatives cropping up (pun intended!) that are trying to find local ways to address a world out of kilter. But clearly his dedicated effort to use his small area to grow food instead of keeping it strictly ornamental or recreational is part of a bigger agenda of urban redesign and transformation that benefits us all, and sets a standard that many more of us should be working towards.

In the past few weeks, Stanford University students have built support for a proposal to reduce parking, widen sidewalks, and eventually close eight blocks of University Avenue in Palo Alto to motor vehicles. The Palo Alto Pedestrian Mall (PAPM) started out as an assignment in a "Creating Infectious Action" class at the design school at Stanford and has since garnered support among transportation committee members of the city council and businesses along the avenue, many of them restaurants that want to take advantage of extra sidewalk seating. 

Down in balmy South Florida, D-Day is approaching for riders of the the popular Tri-Rail transit system. A looming $18 million shortfall has forced the Tri-Rail board to approve a budget that slices daily service and stops all trains by 2011 -- although ridership has doubled since 2005.

I've lived in New York City for just about twenty years now but yesterday was my first trip to Times Square.

We’ve been waiting for years now to see some physical changes to accommodate the huge increase in daily bicycling. We did get an odd set of painted bike lanes and green bike route signs, and a significant number of bike racks for parking, before it all came to a halt due to the injunction three years ago. After perusing the much-anticipated Draft Bicycle Plan and its dense bureaucratese, full of overlapping redundant promises, I’m afraid we’ll be waiting a good while longer to see the kinds of changes that we ought to be getting.