Transit

As the SFMTA braces for the nine-day shutdown of Muni's N-Judah line and other detours starting tomorrow, the agency has been encouraging the tens of thousands of riders whose commutes will be disrupted to bike and walk to work as a way to avoid the anticipated Muni havoc.

A crucial step in advancing the Van Ness Bus Rapid Transit project was delayed for a month today after Supervisor Mark Farrell, a member of the SF County Transportation Authority (SFCTA) Plans and Programs Committee, complained that he wasn't comfortable voting on the latest design proposal which he said he "hasn't been briefed on."

Bus rapid transit (BRT) between Oakland and San Leandro in the East Bay cleared a major hurdle this week after AC Transit unanimously approved the project's environmental impact report. Agreements with the cities of Oakland and San Leandro must still be finalized in June before the project can officially break ground.

Members of a broad coalition hailing from throughout California are headed to Sacramento next week to push policymakers to save transit funding and enact sustainable transportation planning reforms.

Today, Walk Score -- developers of the popular method for evaluating neighborhood walkability (and filling out NCAA tournament brackets) -- announced its first ranking of cities by Transit Score, a measure of the "usefulness" of a city's transit system. On a 100-point scale, New York and San Francisco took the top two spots with scores of 81 and 80 respectively, while Boston (74), Washington D.C. (69), and Philadelphia (68) round out the top five (see the full rankings).

Before you head off to one of the SFMTA's ten public workshops on how to make your Muni route faster and more reliable, first you can take a peek at the proposed plans on the agency's website.

Imagine the freedom of being able to hop on a nearby train or bus to reach virtually any place in the Bay Area (and beyond) on an integrated network of reliable transit.

This is the second in a series of reports about sustainable transportation policies in Mexico City. Last week, Streetsblog participated in a tour of the city led by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. A previous installment covered pedestrian improvements in the city and a third will discuss its bicycle planning.

Two years from now, Muni buses will have traffic signal priority at 600 intersections throughout the city, SFMTA Transit Effectiveness Project (TEP) Manager Julie Kirschbaum told the agency's board of directors today.