Bus Rapid Transit

As the environmental review process moves forward for the Geary Boulevard Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) project, Supervisor Eric Mar is holding a community meeting to discuss the many issues at stake along the city's busiest bus route. As we've written, the Geary BRT will be complementary to the proposed Van Ness corridor project, which would hopefully be online by Muni's centennial in 2012.

If all goes as planned for San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development and one of the nation’s largest home builders, the Lennar Corporation, a causeway over the Yosemite Slough wetlands restoration project between Hunters Point and Candlestick Point will be built sometime in the next few years. This fact is not making environmentalists happy.

In a rally held at the Oakland Coliseum BART station yesterday, transportation and social justice advocates joined with transit and public health unions to call on the BART Board of Directors to study a full-BRT line connecting BART to Oakland Airport, instead of the proposed elevated people-mover that BART staff seems so intent on building. Advocates claim the BRT model could be built at such a cost savings that BART could provide free airport connector service in perpetuity.

Curitiba, Brazil first adopted its Master Plan in 1968. Since then, it has become a city well known for inventive urban planning and affordable (to the user and the city) public transportation.

Who would have thought that one of the best Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems in the U.S. would be in its most crowded, congested, sprawling city? Well check this out. It's really fabulous.

Transportation and social justice advocates packed the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) board meeting today to demand that the agency not spend a proposed $70 million of federal stimulus money on the Oakland Airport Connector (OAC) project.  MTC commissioners heard testimony for over two hours from some of the more than one hundred members of the public who were mostly opposed to the OAC, claiming it would take money from the operations of AC Transit and other transit operators. 

The debate over how to spend the federal transportation stimulus money at the regional level is heating up and may boil over tomorrow morning at the next Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) meeting. 

With overwhelming approval for the Proposition K half-cent transportation sales tax in 2003, San Franciscans  signaled they not only wanted to maintain a state of good repair and operational solvency for their transit system, they were willing to dedicate more than 25 percent of the tax to expansion, including a network of transit preferential streets and Bus Rapid Transit (BRT).  The first two BRT corridors will be on Geary Boulevard and Van Ness Avenue, the latter with a target opening date by Muni's centennial at the end of 2012.

The Metropolitan Transportation Commission's (MTC) main auditorium in Oakland was standing-room-only  Wednesday for an Allocations Committee meeting where the MTC board debated proposals by staff on how to spend the expected stimulus money when President Obama signs the bill into law.  MTC Executive Director Steve Heminger explained the need to get the discussion started even before Washington made anything final because the deadlines for spending the stimulus money are so tight and the MTC doesn't want to return unspent funds.