Community, Advocacy and Labor

Taking another page from the international movement spawned by Bogotá's wildly successful Ciclovia, and just two days after Seattle announced its Summer Streets initiative, the official word is out: San Francisco's Sunday Streets campaign is proposing expanding to six Sundays this year, or one a month for six months, beginning April 26th. 

Kirkham Street is one of the Big 56 bike lane projects that hasn't raised many eyebrows. Unlike the looming battle over 2nd Street or 5th Street, the Kirkham lane will be on a relatively quiet residential street that runs east-west from Ocean Beach to 6th Avenue, where it will connect with the remainder of bicycle Route 40.  

Cycling enthusiasts have long dreamed of reopening the rotting, 125-year-old Alto Tunnel as a key link in a greenway stretching from the Golden Gate Bridge to Cloverdale. Now they may get their chance, as the county's Non-motorized Transportation Pilot Program begins a $225,000 study of three routes between the two southern Marin towns.

Now that the Central Subway has received its Record Of Decision (ROD) from the Federal Transit Administration, advocates are pressing the MTA to start planning for the subway’s extension into North Beach and beyond.

Sustainable school transportation officials and advocates have celebrated the installation of the first new bike racks in the San Francisco Unified School District in many years.  

Transportation and social justice advocates packed the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) board meeting today to demand that the agency not spend a proposed $70 million of federal stimulus money on the Oakland Airport Connector (OAC) project.  MTC commissioners heard testimony for over two hours from some of the more than one hundred members of the public who were mostly opposed to the OAC, claiming it would take money from the operations of AC Transit and other transit operators. 

On Sunday, in a relentless rain that rarely stopped all day, several dozen die-hard enthusiasts rode their bicycles back and forth between the new Bike Kitchen at 650 Florida (back where it once was between Alabama and Florida, Mariposa and 19th Streets, across from Cellspace) and its recent digs just off Mission and 9th. They filled panniers and freight containers, pulled trailers and bungied impossible loads of wheels, tires, frames, and all sorts of tools and shelves, moving the entirety of the Bike Kitchen BY BIKE to its new home.

The debate over how to spend the federal transportation stimulus money at the regional level is heating up and may boil over tomorrow morning at the next Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) meeting. 

California transit advocates have begun organizing a strategy to move legislation through Sacramento that would dedicate a steady, long-term state revenue source for public transit and prevent future budget writers from raiding it.