Board of Supervisors

As San Francisco's Better Streets Plan (BSP) street design manual nears environmental certification, many questions remain about financing street maintenance and how all of the agencies responsible for the city's streets will work together to improve conditions for transit, walking, and bicycling, one of the primary goals of the three year BSP planning process.

Amid growing concerns that Muni hasn't gotten safer along with the rest of the city, and widespread reports that police officers rarely ride Muni though they're required to do so, the SFPD and MTA will update the public on Muni security efforts at a Board of Supervisors committee meeting on Monday. Muni riders are being encouraged to show up and tell their stories about crime on Muni as well.

Supervisor Bevan Dufty has called for the MTA and the SFPD to provide an update to the public on SFPD's Bus Inspection Program, and the agencies have agreed to do so at a November 9 Board of Supervisors committee meeting. The presentation will include an update on the trial program to track officers' Muni ridership by requiring them to tag their TransLink cards as they enter and exit transit vehicles.

It shouldn't be too surprising to those who have followed the debate on extending parking meter hours that Supervisor Carmen Chu is not a big fan. A tipster forwarded us an email from Chu's office sent out last night to constituents encouraging them to show up at today's MTA Board meeting and give their opinion about the MTA extended meter hours study.

MTA Chief Nat Ford, at a reporters' round table today, released the long-anticipated parking study conducted by his agency to measure the traffic impacts of increasing parking meter hours on weekday evenings and on Sundays [Summary PDF] [Full Study PDF].

Former Talking Heads frontman and current bicycling icon David Byrne used his celebrity and the publication of his new book, Bicycle Diaries, to instruct a capacity audience of more than 900 people at San Francisco's Herbst Theater on the many ways that the bicycle has become a more acceptable and mainstream form of locomotion. Rather than read a single line from his book, he took the opportunity to assemble a panel, including Board of Supervisors President David Chiu, San Francisco Bicycle Coalition (SFBC) Executive Director Leah Shahum, and Berkeley City and Regional Planning Professor Emeritus Michael Teitz, and show a largely older audience of City Arts devotees a number of photos from his travels, photos contrasting cities around the world where bicycle infrastructure is more than a-nod-and-a-wink, to American cities, where the car is king and any other form of transportation has suffered from neglect or marginalization.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors, in their role as commissioners of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority (TA), voted unanimously to approve the TA's enormous on-street parking management study and authorized revisions to pilot Market Street pedestrian and bicycle safety zones.

Somewhere amid the budget drama of the last several weeks, a peak oil and natural gas report (PDF) Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi called "a really big deal" got lost in the shuffle. So, when the Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force showed up before the Board of Supervisors Government Audit and Oversight Committee today, neither the committee's members nor the public were quite ready.

In a vote that signaled both San Francisco's new direction on parking policy and the severity of current budget shortfalls, the Board of Supervisors yesterday approved an ordinance giving the MTA authority to study installing parking meters in the eastern portion of Golden Gate Park.