Muni

The deaths of Heather Miller and Kate Slattery, two more people killed riding on San Francisco's dangerous streets, has left the entire safe-streets community rattled and heart broken. Cycling advocates took San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and SFMTA head Ed Reiskin to task for a tone-deaf press conference held Thursday about the carnage. The mayor said he was "outraged" at the deaths. Reiskin said to the Examiner that “the best bike infrastructure in the world would not have prevented these collisions.”

Editor's note: it's positively numbing that I can't finish writing a piece about two cycling deaths in 24 hours, when a third cyclist is killed, this morning, this time in Pleasanton. 

Earlier this week, the SF Bike Coalition announced it is tapping its development director, Brian Wiedenmeier, as its new executive director. Wiedenmeier takes the reigns from Margaret McCarthy, who had served as the organization's interim director during a search to replace Noah Budnick, who resigned last year.

Roberto Hernandez, the "Monarch of the Mission," didn't put down the microphone when his two minutes were up. Heavy set, with his trademark fedora, he had already gone several minutes past the cut-off alarm, shouting about how someone with seven children can't possibly ride the bus, reminiscing about riding a bike before there were bike lanes in San Francisco, and generally cursing SFMTA and the Mission Street transit-only "red lanes" that he connected with the ills of gentrification. At least, that seemed to be what he was saying, in addition to something about lowriders. It was difficult to understand, thanks to all the boos, hisses, and cheers, with roughly half the crowd shouting, "your two minutes are up!" or "cut off his mic" and the other half shouting, "Let him speak!"

This morning from 7 to 10 am BART officials, consultants, and even a legislative aide for Supervisor John Avalos's office answered questions and heard comments from the public about plans to modernize Balboa Park Station, one of the busiest in both BART and Muni's networks.

Last April, businesses on Mission Street started to gain some traction in pushing against SFMTA's "red carpet" bus-only lanes, which they claim—contrary to the available evidence, it should be noted—are hurting their bottom line. The result: Supervisor David Campos asked the SFMTA to "make a radical shift in the program," as he put it in a Facebook post.

As Facebook prepares to expand its West Campus in San Mateo County, it is presenting environmental reports to groups such as the Menlo Park Transportation Commission. Commissioner Adina Levin brought this to Streetsblog's attention from the report: apparently more Facebook employees started driving in the past couple of months to the social media giant's headquarters in Menlo Park. From a post by Levin in the Friends of Caltrain Blog entitled "San Francisco shuttle changes increase car traffic:"

Election day is a good time for a discussion about a recent Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) study that seems to show that Bay Area residents are using their transit choices to, in effect, vote for rail, ferry, and ride-hailing, but not for more buses. From an East Bay Times look at the study:

Thursday, SFMTA joined several agencies at the Bay Area 2040 open house in Oakland. One of the projects presented was the M-Ocean View improvement plan. As the Examiner reported today, SFMTA is now leaning towards an all-underground option, with a tunnel stretching from West Portal to Parkmerced. This project, at around $3 billion, would re-align the M-Ocean View to the west of 19th Ave. and put it in a tunnel. Ostensibly, the project's objective is to increase capacity and the speed of the trains to better serve SF State and the burgeoning community of Parkmerced.