Community, Advocacy and Labor

A mayoral debate scheduled for Monday night promises to be the best yet on issues near and dear to Streetsblog readers.

On most recent mornings, 59-year-old William Cox walked several blocks from his Mission District apartment to the bustling Peet's store on Market Street in the Castro for his daily dose of coffee, crossword puzzles and conversation. He had given up his Jeep Cherokee shortly after moving to San Francisco from San Rafael two-and-half years ago and got around mostly on foot and transit. On Tuesday morning, he paid a visit to his best friend, David Douma, who lives across the street from Peet's.

Tomorrow night, President Obama will unveil his jobs plan before a skeptical Congress. It’s unclear how much of the $300 billion proposal will go to infrastructure, but the president has said that will be a centerpiece of the proposal. An infrastructure bank and a new version of the expired Build America Bonds program could also be on the agenda.

John Billovits is all too familiar with the perils of one of the city's most hazardous intersections for bicyclists. For the past decade, he has traveled through the Market and Octavia intersection on his daily bicycle commute. As a senior planner at the San Francisco Planning Department, Billovits was also the project manager for the Market and Octavia Neighborhood Plan, and fought against building the Central Freeway touchdown on Market Street.

The Planning Department, working with the Chinatown Community Development Center (CCDC), the SFMTA and SFDPW, recently released three options for dramatically improving the pedestrian environment on a two-and-a-half block stretch of Broadway, a high-volume two-way arterial that cuts through North Beach and Chinatown, a neighborhood that is "the most densely populated urban area west of Manhattan."

The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition has posted the responses from its questionnaires submitted to the mayoral candidates, as the organization's 12,000 members begin voting on who to endorse in the November 8th election. Almost all of the sixteen candidates responded, with the exception of Michela Alioto-Pier and Jeff Adachi.

Despite the department's insistence that officers are not targeting bicyclists on Market Street, new numbers from the San Francisco Police Department confirm that cops are going after people on bikes following two high-profile crashes.

It was one year ago last Thursday that a San Francisco judge freed the city from its four-year-old bicycle injunction, and allowed the SFMTA to finally begin building out the long stalled Bike Plan. Since the chains were unlocked, the number of bicyclists on the streets has dramatically risen, thanks in no small part to the new infrastructure that has made cycling more inviting to people of all ages.