SFCTA

The Masonic Avenue Streetscape Project took another step forward today after the board of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority approved funding to conduct an environmental impact report (EIR). The board also gave the green light to funds to construct the city's first on-street two-way protected bike lane on Cargo Way in Hunter's Point.

The expected construction of a physically-separated bikeway along a stretch of John F. Kennedy (JFK) Drive in Golden Gate Park will now come no sooner than December, according to a report from the San Francisco County Transportation Authority (SFCTA).

Despite a growing political focus on pedestrian safety, a thick layer of city bureaucracy and lack of funding are stalling real change to prevent pedestrian injuries and fatalities on San Francisco streets, including three deaths in just the last week.

The study analyzing numerous options for congestion pricing in San Francisco touched off such a political furor in San Mateo County, you'd have thought San Francisco was about to moat up and charge a fee for admission. Politicians and planners from Daly City and San Mateo spoke about the plan today as though they were jilted lovers getting a mandate from the beautiful city to their north without being allowed to get a word in edgewise.

You'd think the Tea Party had descended on San Mateo County, what with the piqued rhetoric in the media over San Francisco's congestion pricing study. I don't like to invoke Sarah Palin's jargon, but I keep coming back to her horrible phrase "lamestream media" when I see yet another story that paints San Francisco transportation planners as greedy car-hating vampires and gets the facts on the pricing study so terribly wrong.

The Presidio Parkway/Doyle Drive project will move into the second phase of construction early next year, but planners are already touting a unique public-private partnership, or P3 in their shorthand, which they say forges a new model for delivering massive infrastructure projects for less money and greater financial oversight.

The Central Freeway sections damaged by the Loma Prieta Earthquake in 1989 have been replaced by such a distinctive Octavia Boulevard, for many San Franciscans the double-decked behemoth that used to dominate the neighborhood has become a distant memory. Most of the traffic the freeway carried, however, has not disappeared and now city planners are tracking its displacement on city streets and devising scenarios for reducing it to make surrounding neighborhoods more hospitable to transit, pedestrians and cyclists.

Transit advocates have joined a broad coalition of opponents mounting a fight against California Pacific Medical Center's (CPMC) long range development plan for its San Francisco facilities, decrying the significant increase in parking being proposed, and the attendant impact that will have on traffic, transit and pedestrian safety. They argue the increase in parking supply will induce more driving to already crowded streets and will deteriorate Muni service and cause conflicts with pedestrians and bicycle riders.

While the full results of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority's (SFCTA) congestion pricing plan, the SF Mobility, Access, and Pricing Study (SFMAPS), have not yet been released, the agency will hold a series of public meetings starting next week to discuss the general principles of congestion pricing and how it could work in San Francisco. At the public meetings, the SFCTA will detail several possible scenarios to charge drivers for driving into San Francisco's downtown during peak periods, a prospect that should spark significant public and media debate.