Community, Advocacy and Labor

Leah Shahum announced today that she will step down as executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, after 12 years at the helm.

Streetsblog founding editor Aaron Naparstek will be in SF to serve as the keynote speaker at the SF Bicycle Coalition's Golden Wheel Awards on Tuesday evening. We thought it'd be a good opportunity to look back on how Streetsblog San Francisco came to be, and get Naparstek's take on what's changed in the city since we launched at the start of 2009.

Supervisor Eric Mar requested a city study last week about how lower speed limits could benefit San Francisco. Although lowering speed limits without implementing physical traffic calming measures isn't a panacea for safer streets, the measure does hold promise as a first step toward saving lives and implementing Vision Zero. San Francisco would follow in the footsteps of New York City, Paris, and the United Kingdom in looking at major speed limit reductions.

The "Protected Bikeways Act," A.B. 1193, passed the Senate Transportation and Housing Committee Thursday on a 10-0 vote, despite opposition from some quarters. The bill must still be approved by the full Senate and Governor Jerry Brown.

The Board of Supervisors voted 9-2 yesterday to reject an appeal, filed by sustainable transportation advocates, to require environmental review of the SFMTA's repeal of Sunday parking meters. Although the vote was not on the merits of Sunday parking metering, but rather whether the SFMTA violated the California Environmental Quality Act in repealing it, the hearing shed some more light on the political stances of some supervisors.

As a charter member of the Congress for New Urbanism, I’ve now attended twenty of the organization’s annual conferences. This month’s event may have been my favorite yet, mostly thanks to its location in downtown Buffalo, a place that reminds us so poignantly of both the successes and failures of city planning, as first lovingly practiced and later ruthlessly perpetrated across America.

An appeal claiming that the repeal of Sunday parking meters is an action that requires environmental review under the California Environmental Quality Act is baseless, according to responses issued by the SFMTA and Planning Department this week.

Tyler Frisbee is the SF Bicycle Coalition's new policy director, filling the shoes of Deputy Director Kit Hodge. Hodge left SFBC last month to start a company that will lease family-friendly cargo bikes.

SAP Center, the corporation that owns the 19,000-seat arena across Santa Clara Street from San Jose's downtown Caltrain station, doubts that the next 30 years of transit improvements will bring more visitors to events at the "Shark Tank." Instead, they insist that 20,000 new car parking spaces be built within its redeveloping neighborhood.