Muni

Yesterday evening, Andrew Nash and Ulrich Leister, transit consultants from Europe, explained to an audience at SPUR's Oakland location what California needs to do to make its transit and intercity rail as user-friendly as it is in Switzerland and Denmark. "The most important thing is the service," said Leister a railroad consultant and CEO for the North American operations of SMA, who is also working to help California develop its statewide rail projects. "And that the product is something to be used by the public."

Streetsblog editors from New York, Washington and Los Angeles have tried to make sense of what happened on Tuesday, and what it means to the livable-streets movement.

This afternoon, the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR), hosted a post-election analysis of local races and measures with political consultants David Latterman of Fall Line Analytics and Alex Clemens of Lighthouse Public Affairs.

At a recent SPUR meeting, an audience member asked why cities continue to invest billions in long-term projects, such as the Central Subway, when ride-hail services such as Juno, Lyft, and Uber Pool have rendered urban rail more or less obsolete. This sentiment is reflected in a recent piece in the Atlantic by former Los Angeles Times writer Alana Semuels, entitled: "The End of Public Transit?" She wrote about her experience riding Chariot instead of Muni:

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.

Yesterday afternoon the Land Use and Transportation Committee of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors heard a presentation from transportation officials on efforts to design a "Subway Master Plan," a long-range blueprint for a subway network for San Francisco.

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.