Transit

The Central Subway is coming, like it or not, and that means Fourth Street will get Muni Metro service starting in 2019. With that in mind, the SF Planning Department recently released the draft Central SoMa Plan (formerly known as the Central SoMa Plan), which sets the stage for upzoned transit-oriented development near new stations and street improvements to accommodate a growing population in a rapidly changing section of SoMa.

The runaway success of Maker Faire, the annual San Mateo festival that celebrates do-it-yourself technology and crafts, has led organizers to get creative in encouraging attendees to come without a car and avert a traffic mess.

Muni will test out a method to improve metro operations this July, letting two trains load passengers on the same platform simultaneously, according to SFMTA spokesperson Paul Rose.

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.

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.

After months of apparent weather delays, the SF Muncipal Transportation Agency said today that it will implement red-colored transit-only lanes on Church Street between Duboce Avenue and 16th Street this Saturday and Sunday.

By the end of the month, Muni plans to roll out the first of 62 new low-floor hybrid buses, SF Municipal Transportation Agency Director Ed Reiskin said at a board of directors meeting last week.