Community, Advocacy and Labor

When most San Franciscans turn on a faucet, they'll see water that's traveled as far as two hundred miles from Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park. But that's not the case for some locally-minded gardeners, for whom careful water stewardship is as important as selecting their crops.

Cheryl Brinkman, one of the original organizers of Sunday Streets who has a strong history of livable streets advocacy, will be nominated today by Mayor Gavin Newsom to serve a four-year term on the SFMTA Board, filling one of two vacancies that have been left empty since May 1, Streetsblog has learned.

At the corner of Fell Street at Divisadero it's frightening to witness the minute-by-minute close calls between drivers and cyclists on a one-way arterial that resembles the freeway it was once proposed to be. Some drivers, on a speeding high from their descent down the hill to the problematic stretch that precedes the intersection, jostle for space, lean on their horns, yell expletives and generally have no regard for the right of way of bicyclists, let alone each other, as they queue up to turn left onto Divisadero or get gas at the ARCO BP station, which has now become the scene of weekly protests.

Pedaling up Sutter Street toward Leavenworth from his dentist's office during the height of the Wednesday evening commute, Dan Nunes is riding in the transit-only lane for his bike trip home, despite the new sharrows recently painted in the center lane to his left. There, drivers often zoom by at alarming speeds, breaking the 25 mile an hour speed limit, narrowly avoiding crashes, and treating the three-lane arterial like a highway, especially as they make the descent down the hill on Sutter just past Leavenworth.

Editor's note: This is the first in a series of dispatches from Copenhagen and Amsterdam from Leah Shahum, the executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition who is on sabbatical in Europe. 

Without playing his hand, a San Francisco Superior Court judge today gave the attorneys involved in Rob Anderson's lawsuit against San Francisco's Bike Plan three weeks to draft orders for how he should proceed in the case, and any objections to those orders that might arise.

On the eve of what bicyclists, advocates and SFMTA officials hope will be the final hearing to consider fully lifting the city's bike injunction, a San Francisco judge issued a list of questions for the attorneys involved in the four-year-old case without giving any indication of how soon he'll rule.

While municipal planning organizations around California try to develop the metrics and models required to meet the goals of SB 375, a law mandating smarter growth, a local voter initiative in Contra Costa County is being held up as a bellwether of the public's support for strategic and sustainable development.