Muni

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.

Who says you can’t have everything?

San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee released his 455-page budget proposal on Tuesday. It includes $9.6 billion in fiscal year 2016-17  for transportation, police officers, and street cleaning, a $700 million increase in funds. The fiscal year runs from July 1 of this year until June 30 of next year.

A few weeks ago, I found an apartment in the Outer Mission. It had a view of Twin Peaks, plenty of room, and it was in my price range. It is a short bike ride to the great transportation links at Balboa Park Station. It also was a half-block from a stop on the 14-Mission bus. There's a nice cafe down the street, a couple of small markets within a few blocks, and pretty much everything a Livable Streets advocate could ask for, except for bike lanes, but hopefully those will come.

Wednesday evening some 130 local residents and other interested parties dropped in at the San Francisco Day School to learn about the construction phase of SFMTAs Masonic Avenue Streetscape Project. To quote SFMTA's own release about the project:

Professor Jason Henderson's "Bicycle Geographies" class wants the ride from Daily City BART to San Francisco State University's campus to be comfortable and fun.

Tomorrow, Thursday, the San Francisco Transit Riders (SFTR) group wraps up its "Make Transit Awesome" Indiegogo campaign.

Last week, Streetsblog brought you an editorial from Katy Tang about the issue of installing concrete boarding islands on Taraval as part of SFMTA's Muni Forward project. This was in response to a headline in the SF Examiner, that declared "Supervisor Slams Brakes on L-Taraval Changes."

San Francisco has come a long way. That was the theme of a rousing speech delivered by Margaret McCarthy, Interim Executive Director of the SF Bicycle Coalition, at a ceremony this morning in front of San Francisco City Hall. "We've seen a 184 percent increase in cycling in the past decade," she said with her trademark ebullience. "San Francisco is a biking city!"