SFMTA

Seven weeks after the SF Municipal Transportation Agency painted red transit-only lanes on several blocks of Church Street, Muni reports that the J-Church and 22-Fillmore lines are moving faster and more reliably. On the stretch between Duboce Avenue and 16th Street, travel times on the two lines have dropped by 5 percent, and the buses and trains are 20 percent more reliable, arriving closer to their scheduled arrival times.

As has become painfully apparent on Polk Street, there is a deeply-held belief among certain merchants that car parking is indispensable to their business -- even if studies indicate that very few of their customers drive, and that removing parking spaces to implement safety improvements could actually draw more potential customers.

After a makeover, the bus loop that serves as a terminal for Muni's 8X and 49 lines at Phelan and Ocean Avenues, the site of City College's Ocean Campus, became operational yesterday. It's part of a larger city project, in the works for ten years, to create a more efficient and attractive transit hub while opening up the adjacent land for a mixed-use, affordable housing development with shops on the ground floor, complemented by a new plaza that will welcome students stepping off or waiting for the bus.

The SFMTA expects to have the protected bike lane on Oak Street and the Market Street bicycle counter ready on Bike to Work Day -- next Thursday, May 9 -- according to agency staff.

The protected bike lane on Oak Street may not be constructed until some time after May 19, when the permit for renovation work on the Kelly-Moore paint shop on the corner of Oak and Divisadero Street ends, according to planners from the SF Muncipal Transportation Agency. Because the permit allows the paint shop to occupy the parking lane where the bike lane will go, the bike lane can't be completed until after it's done, agency staff said.

The second open house on the Polk Street safety improvements is tonight. While the agency has said protected bike lanes are not on the table for most of Polk, don't be discouraged from showing up. This is your chance to tell the SFMTA you support protected bike lanes along the entire street. As we've seen, Supervisor David Chiu isn't going to stand up and make that case for you.

The SF Municipal Transportation Agency has taken protected bike lanes off the table for 14 of 20 blocks of Polk Street under its latest design options [PDF].

The SF Municipal Transportation Agency has released a map of 41 locations [PDF] being considered for the first 35 bike-share stations in downtown SF. Six of those stations will be installed, "pending additional funding," after the launch of the initial 350-bike pilot project, the agency's website says.

Supervisor Scott Wiener is sounding the alarm that Muni, already the slowest transit system in the country, will only get worse over the next ten years unless officials at City Hall take the initiative to devote more resources to the city's decrepit transit vehicles and infrastructure.