Muni

The final plan for wider sidewalks and other pedestrian improvements on Castro Street between Market and 19th Streets was presented at an open house by the Planning Department this week. Overall, the pedestrian environment on Castro will be vastly improved after the skinny sidewalks are widened to as much as 22 feet, and the narrowed traffic lanes should also calm motor traffic.

On the Sunset District's 19th Avenue, a street transformed into an urban highway environment in the mid-20th century, Muni buses jostle for room on a car-clogged six-lane roadway, where residents put their lives in the hands of long-distance car commuters every time they cross. And all but the exceptionally adventurous can forget about bicycling on the motorway.

Seven weeks after the SF Municipal Transportation Agency painted red transit-only lanes on several blocks of Church Street, Muni reports that the J-Church and 22-Fillmore lines are moving faster and more reliably. On the stretch between Duboce Avenue and 16th Street, travel times on the two lines have dropped by 5 percent, and the buses and trains are 20 percent more reliable, arriving closer to their scheduled arrival times.

After a makeover, the bus loop that serves as a terminal for Muni's 8X and 49 lines at Phelan and Ocean Avenues, the site of City College's Ocean Campus, became operational yesterday. It's part of a larger city project, in the works for ten years, to create a more efficient and attractive transit hub while opening up the adjacent land for a mixed-use, affordable housing development with shops on the ground floor, complemented by a new plaza that will welcome students stepping off or waiting for the bus.

Supervisor Scott Wiener is sounding the alarm that Muni, already the slowest transit system in the country, will only get worse over the next ten years unless officials at City Hall take the initiative to devote more resources to the city's decrepit transit vehicles and infrastructure.

City planners presented detailed options for pedestrian upgrades on Castro Street at a community meeting last night. The improvements, set for construction next year, will include sidewalks as wide as 22 feet, new trees, and pedestrian-scaled lighting.

Muni's brand new buses are rolling in. The first of the 62 low-floor, 40-foot long hybrid New Flyer Buses purchased by the SFMTA are being prepped at a Muni maintenance shop, as captured by Dave Longa on Flickr.

If you visited northern Church Street this weekend, you may have been seeing red.

The first private automobile users on early 20th-century American streets were generally accorded no special privileges on the public right-of-way. "The center of the road was reserved for streetcars, and the new automobiles had to move out of the way," as Renee Montagne describes it in the 1996 documentary Taken for a Ride, which chronicles the decline of American public transit over the 20th century.