Transit

This week has brought news of a brewing compromise on the Senate climate change bill, introduced last month amid signals that the upper chamber would give only a bit more to clean transportation than the House's meager 1 percent set-aside of revenue from cap-and-trade carbon regulations.

It's a familiar scene for many Muni riders: standing in a huge crowd on a Muni Metro station platform, scrutinizing the archaic-looking map on the mounted LCD, hoping for a two-car LL or a one-car J. Since those displays first went up at Embarcadero station in the late 1990s, and the other eight stations in 2007, they've given waiting customers something to ponder while waiting for a particularly tardy train, but have been far too cryptic to reach their full potential in keeping riders informed. Within the next few months, however, displays in all nine Muni Metro stations will switch over to a much more legible map.

The Obama administration has brought both good news and bad news to transit riders. But here's a positive sign you haven't heard before, straight from Federal Transit Administration (FTA) chief Peter Rogoff: In the nine months of the new presidency, the FTA has fielded more requests for information "directly from the White House" than in the entire eight years of the Bush administration.

The Board of Supervisors today approved a five-year, $30 million umbrella purchasing agreement between the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency and Thales Transport & Security, Inc. for Advanced Train Control System (ATCS) "improvement services and upgrades." The ATCS system controls the speed, location, and routing of Muni's light rail vehicles when they're underground between Embarcadero and West Portal stations. The MTA says the upgrades are necessary to keep the ATCS in working order for the coming decades.

It has become one of the most enduring anecdotes surrounding the Obama administration’s $787 billion economic stimulus law: Democrats’ contention that White House adviser Larry Summers sliced transit aid by more than half, to $8.4 billion, out of concerns that projects were not “shovel-ready” enough. (Photo: DMI Blog) Has Summers been vindicated by the data? … Continued

Yesterday, Freakonomics linked to a new piece of research [PDF] on congestion that I'd been musing over for a few days. Let me quote the abstract here (paragraph break and emphasis mine):

In what the California Transit Association called a resounding victory for transit providers and riders, the California Supreme Court has rejected Governor Schwarzenegger's appeal of a lower court ruling declaring raids on transit funds illegal.

Mayor Gavin Newsom has been quietly pressuring MTA Chief Nat Ford to delay or prevent proposals to extend parking meter hours on weeknights and Sundays, despite a looming mid-year MTA budget deficit and studies that show it's good policy, Streetsblog has learned.

Last December, Muni invited riders to begin using TransLink universal fare cards on its trains and buses as part of a soft-launch trial period. By August, there were 6,775 average weekday TransLink boardings, making up 1.04 percent of Muni rides. The MTA hopes that by next year, the daily average will be 120,000, once TransLink-only fare gates are in place at its underground Muni Metro stations.