Government Organizations

Back in October, the Schmidt Family Foundation announced its “Just Transit SF Challenge,” a contest to come up with good transit improvement ideas that can be implemented quickly. The three winners were announced this month.

On Monday at 1:30 p.m., the land use and transportation committee of the SF Board of Supervisors is going to discuss the Bike Yield Law at City Hall. This is an important opportunity to speak up for common-sense bike and traffic enforcement policies.

Reading the headlines over my morning coffee yesterday, I was flummoxed by the way the media approached an incident that happened over the Thanksgiving weekend. According to the reports, an off-duty San Francisco cop named Christopher Kohrs, 38, was driving a Dodge Charger westbound on Broadway around 2 a.m. on Sunday when he slammed into two pedestrians at the intersection with Montgomery. Both victims were taken to the hospital with serious injuries. Kohrs abandoned his truck and fled the scene.

Eric Jaffe, in CityLab, recently reported that Caltrans “admitted” that expanding highways increases traffic by posting a policy brief on the subject of induced demand to its website. He called it a rare admission from a state department of transportation.

A provision in the House GOP's new transportation bill threatens to upend how transit agencies fund major capital projects, delaying or killing efforts to expand and maintain rail and bus networks.

Governor Jerry Brown had a Sunday deadline to sign legislation or veto it. Late in the day on Friday he signed Assembly Bill 744, which allows affordable housing developers to build less parking than many local zoning regulations currently permit.

Applying highway design standards to city streets has been a disaster for urban neighborhoods. The same things that make highways safer for driving at 65 mph -- wide lanes, "clear zones" running alongside the road that have no trees or other "obstacles" -- make surface streets dangerous and dreadful for walking, killing street life.

At a heated community meeting last month, a bike commuter asked SFPD Park Station Captain John Sanford whether he could expect to continue safely treating stop signs as yield signs. Sanford had instituted a crackdown on that behavior, and some ticket recipients said they were told they had to put their foot down at stop signs. Sanford confirmed to the crowd that that requirement does not exist, and insisted that his officers didn't enforce it.

Even John Sanford is not immune to practicing the safe, common-sense ethic that most people on bikes use to negotiate stop signs. SFPD's Park Station captain is the latest officer to be filmed within the Park District executing the completely normal practice of slowing and yielding, and not necessarily coming to a full stop, during a ride with bike advocates last month.