Transit

Last night the San Francisco Transit Riders (SFTR), the advocacy group that organized the 22-Day Muni Challenge and Transit Week, among other things, celebrated a year of accomplishment and laid out a list of goals for next year at a holiday party held at the Mariposa Hunters Point Yacht Club in Mission Bay.

Litter, excrement, and filth--anyone who uses the 16th and Mission BART station knows the platforms, stairs, elevators, mezzanine, and the plazas above it are just plain gross.

The week before last, a dear family friend and neighbor of my mother's died of a heart attack in San Diego. One can't plan ahead for a trip to a funeral; without an advanced purchase, air fares from Oakland to San Diego are around $200 each way. I don't own a car. And Amtrak is just too slow, thanks to California's circa 1860s rail infrastructure.

Seleta Reynolds, General Manager of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, was working at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency's Livable Streets section three years ago, when a friend called and asked if he could put her name in the hat for manager of LADOT.

"What if San Francisco becomes the next Detroit?" asked Jonathan Miranda, Director of Strategy at Salesforce.com, during a keynote speech this morning at the "Focus on the Future" conference in downtown San Francisco. Given the region's meteoric growth, that may seem far fetched--but no more so than Detroit's fall after the booming years of the auto industry. He said that given San Francisco's inability to build sufficient housing, that's a real possibility. "Companies are moving to Austin, Denver, Seattle--what happens if software and Silicon Valley start looking for a different place?"

Streetsblog tipster Chris Waddling brought this to our attention: apparently a new bike lane in the Bayview District may soon get removed. "Supervisor Cohen is seriously considering bowing to people demanding that new bike lanes on Paul Ave be removed a mere months after they went in," wrote Waddling, in an email to Streetsblog.

BART has been busy reshaping its wheels as part of a strategy to reduce the system's notorious howl. Initial results show it's working. "The new, reduced-contact wheel profile has shown as much as a 15 dB decrease in interior noise on the current fleet" wrote the transit operator in a release put out today. "By slightly tapering the wheel profile using the latest simulated modeling techniques, we hoped to reduce metal-on-metal contact and its consequences."

Tuesday morning at around 11, a cyclist collided with a motor vehicle that was heading north on Guerrero at the intersection with 24th.

Take Caltrain from San Francisco to San Jose, and it costs $9.75. But come back on the other side of the Bay, to Oakland's Jack London Square Amtrak station, and it will cost you between $17 and $37 on Amtrak. The tickets are completely different, purchased from different agencies, from different machines.