Community, Advocacy and Labor

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has announced the dates and locations for nine Sunday Streets events for 2010, starting on March 14th along the Embarcadero and finishing October 24th around Civic Center.  Building off the tremendous success of the events in 2009, Mayor Newsom announced the events will expand to new communities and run for an extra hour, eventually becoming a permanent San Francisco tradition.

In another rebuff to California's practice of moving spillover funding from the State Transit Assistance (STA) fund to fill the hole in the state's General Fund, a Superior Court ruled on Monday that the state had to pay back the approximately $1.2 billion it diverted from transit operators in the 2007-2008 budget cycle. The state has until April 1st to present the courts with its plan to restore the STA and replenish its reserves, though transit operators and their lobbying association hope negotiations and the blueprint for repayment come much sooner.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's office this weekend experimented with the temporary removal of a handful of parking spaces on Powell Street between Ellis and Geary Streets to give  holiday shoppers in and around Union Square more space to navigate the crowded sidewalks.

As the Bay Area Toll Authority (BATA) continues its regional public hearings, including one tonight in San Francisco, the various options the agency is proposing for increasing bridge tolls are generating a number of debates and proposals, including the funding of the long-discussed pedestrian/bicycle/maintenance paths over the west span of the Bay Bridge.

In Stockholm, Sweden, a fascinating political intervention has been taking place during the past few years. Starting originally around 2000-2001 in an anarcho-syndicalist youth organization, Planka.nu is a surprisingly innovative and effective transit activist group. Today it is still an entirely volunteer organization without paid staff, but they have a comfy office tucked on the western end of the Stockholm island of Sodermalm, just a hundred steps or so from the target of their activism, the Tunnelbana, or local subway system. 

With the gradual thawing underway in the three-year freeze of bicycle infrastructure in San Francisco, this year's SFBC Winterfest celebration, one of the best bicycle parties in any year, is sure to warm this Sunday night up right.

At California State Assembly Committee on Transportation meetings this morning and Tuesday, the California Transit Association (CTA) and public transit agency representatives will discuss the challenges that state funding cuts have imposed on transit providers. Today's hearing is at the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority Board Room. The Tuesday hearing takes place in the Sacramento Regional Transit District Board Room.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, three members of the Board of Supervisors, MTA officials, SFBC staff and bicyclists -- standing in the glaring fall sun amidst the roar of cars on Oak Street -- celebrated the city's first new bike lane in three years today, and then grabbed the paint rolls and applied buckets of shiny green paint to the Scott Street bike box.