Bicycle Infrastructure

Tom Radulovich, as most Streetsblog readers probably know, is retiring from BART at the end of the year. He was first elected to the BART Board of Directors in November 1996, to represent the 9th District, which includes portions of San Francisco. He serves on the board's Personnel Review Special Committee and on the Capitol Corridor Joint Powers Board.

San Mateo County’s transportation agencies are forging ahead with environmental studies of new lanes, ramps, and overpasses to add to the already massive interchange at Highways 101 and 92 in the city of San Mateo. Building on four previous studies stretching back to 2001, a new $500,000 study completed in June analyzed 25 different traffic expansion projects to remedy the interchanges “deficiencies” in carrying huge traffic volumes.

Another cyclist was hit this morning on Market Street, between 7th and 8th, reported Streetsblog reader John Rogers. Details are still coming in. "Market is still a full-on traffic free-for-all, and the danger faced by the thousands of cyclists that ride the central street of our city everyday remains a travesty," he wrote to Streetsblog in an email this afternoon.

Advocate-volunteers with BikeWalk Alameda took shifts today counting cyclists and pedestrians passing through the Posey Tube on their way between western Alameda and Oakland. The count will be used to help push for a pedestrian and bicycle drawbridge between Alameda and Jack London Square, across the Alameda estuary.

On Monday, Streetsblog joined the SFMTrA, a guerrilla-safety group that glues down safe-hit posts in trouble spots throughout the city, for a pre-dawn installion on Valencia between 17th and 14th. This afternoon, the posts were gone--and everything was back to its dangerous and dysfunctional normal.

Last night, SFMTA held an open house at Lick Wilmerding High School to get community suggestions on what to do about the mess of tracks, ramps, road and pedestrian crossings on and around the intersection of Geneva and San Jose, adjacent to the Balboa Park BART and Muni stations.

Amid an avalanche of issues on the November ballot, San Francisco voters face one question with consequences for each of us every single day: Should our city invest in safe, affordable transportation? To answer yes, we must pass both Propositions J & K.

Streetsblog was up before dawn this morning, an invited guest of SFMTrA--the guerrilla group that's given up waiting for the city to make our streets safer--for a quick infrastructure upgrade to Valencia Street's bike lanes.

Huge projects, such as the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge, can define a region and transform the fabric of a city--but they are often delayed and come in massively over budget. Karen Frick, Co-Director of the University of California Transportation Center at Berkeley, attempted to deconstruct megaprojects and how to manage them more effectively in a presentation this afternoon at the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association's (SPUR) center in Oakland.