Transit

The SFMTA Board passed a partial rollback this afternoon of the “Powell Street Safety & Improvement Pilot,” an 18-month test project to evaluate banning private vehicles on the particularly busy stretch of Powell Street between Ellis and Geary.

I was waiting for an inbound BART train Saturday evening at eight in Rockridge when there was an announcement: “severe disruptions due to police activity at West Oakland.”

Last March Facebook completed its new open-plan headquarters building on its campus in Menlo Park. CNBC put together a video tour. Buildings are nice. But of Mark Zuckerberg's 12,000 employees, roughly half work in Menlo Park, with growth expected. How do they get to and from work?

The new Transbay Transit Center (TTC) is scheduled for completion in 2017. The foundation of the TTC, and the thing that makes it such an improvement over the old Transbay bus terminal it's replacing, is its underground train station for Caltrain and High Speed Rail. It will bring Caltrain, the connection between San Francisco and Silicon Valley, into close proximity with five Muni and four BART lines and over 40 bus connections, not to mention San Francisco's huge downtown employment center. The TTC should one day be the most important transit hub outside of New York City—a Grand Central Station of the West.

Back in October, the Schmidt Family Foundation announced its “Just Transit SF Challenge,” a contest to come up with good transit improvement ideas that can be implemented quickly. The three winners were announced this month.

A provision in the House GOP's new transportation bill threatens to upend how transit agencies fund major capital projects, delaying or killing efforts to expand and maintain rail and bus networks.

Six years ago there was no such thing as Uber. And a short time before that, bike-share and car-share were just ideas. Today, there's an array of new ways to get from A to B. None required new bridges, trains, roads or other expensive infrastructure.

Commuters in the Bay Area ditched cars faster than in any other major metropolitan area between 2006 and 2013, according to a new U.S. Census report. With studies showing that car traffic in San Francisco is declining, the report is one more sign that efforts in SF and the region to attract commuters to transit, walking, and biking may be working.

Remember when the Great Recession decimated transit agency budgets, but the White House and Congress refused to step in and fund bus service while spending billions of dollars to subsidize car purchases? Well, the hangover continues to this day, leaving bus riders in the lurch.