Bicycling

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.

Oakland voters, as with voters throughout the Bay Area and the nation, will have quite a slew of decisions to make on November 8.

Yesterday afternoon, some 1,600 people braved the rain to check out BART's new rolling stock at an open-house at MacArthur Station in Oakland. BART is doing a total of four open houses. The first one was Saturday, in Pleasant Hill/Contra Costa Centre Station. From the BART web page:

Yesterday evening, over 220 people squeezed into the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association's (SPUR) downtown S.F. location to hear the organization's policy experts explain which ballot measures they are endorsing. With 25 measures on the San Francisco ballot this November 8, each of the six SPUR experts spent just a few minutes on each decision--and it still took nearly two hours to get through them all.

Some 1,200 planners, engineers, managers and transit journalists crowded into the San Francisco Hyatt Regency this week for the Rail~Volution conference. From the conference press release:

Yesterday some 13,000 San Francisco children at 95 schools walked--and in some cases rolled in wheelchairs--to school as part of the 20th annual Walk-to-School Day (now called "Walk-and-Roll-to-School Day," at least locally). The event is intended to encourage kids to walk to school and spend more time walking and playing outside. This is part of a global event, held in early October, that encourages children, parents, and school staff to make their communities safer and more pleasant for walking. In San Francisco, the event is co-sponsored by several Bay Area groups, including  the San Francisco Safe Routes to School Partnership, the Vision Zero Coalition, Kaiser Permanente, and, of course, Walk San Francisco.