Bicycling

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.

San Francisco cyclists may have noticed a safety improvement at JFK and Kezar, where Golden Gate Park meets the Panhandle. That notorious intersection now has more than paint to segregate cars, pedestrians, and cyclists: plastic, safe-hit posts popped up late last week. And they seem to be working, effectively keeping motorists out of the bike lane.

On Tuesday, the Santa Clara City Council approved a proposal [PDF] to build new detours of the San Tomas Aquino Creek Trail, over two years after the construction of Levi's Stadium has resulted in ongoing closures of the trail "to limit security breaches" on days with stadium events over 20,000 attendees. Despite objections from both the public and council that the stadium should pay for the improvements, city staff intend to seek up to $4 million in public grant funds instead.