People

Despite a blanket of fog, the last Sunday Streets of 2009 was, from all accounts, a smashing success, one of the most popular so far, with thousands of people enjoying four activity-filled hours of pristine car-free space through Golden Gate Park and the Great Highway.

If the recent parking battle in Oakland had you thinking of UCLA Professor Donald Shoup, you're not alone.

MTA Chief Nat Ford announced an encouraging reorganization (PDF) of his top brass this week, a move which may usher in a much needed change in the structure of the agency, and potentially give less power to the old school traffic engineers who continue to prioritize automobiles in the design and management of San Francisco's streets.

One of the ongoing dilemmas for landscape architects, city planners, and yes, even transit geeks, is the chicken-and-egg question regarding public space. If you build it, will they come? Is there a “public” demanding wider sidewalks, public squares and plazas, pocket parks, and depaving, and who, exactly, are they?

One thing the government's CARS program -- a.k.a. "cash for clunkers" -- has clearly stimulated is commentary. For a policy involving a shade under $3 billion in federal spending, it has enjoyed no shortage of media coverage.

After more than three frustrating years without any major bike improvements in San Francisco, it appears what bike activists hope will be the final court showdown for the bike injunction is just weeks away. This afternoon, City Attorney Dennis Herrera's office filed a motion (PDF) to lift the bike injunction, a filing that is 15 inches thick and argues the city has met all of its legal obligations.

Intrepid explorers of San Francisco regularly stumble upon the many ghost streets that still hide all over town, rewarding the patient pedestrian for their diligence. Mostly they are on hillsides where steep grades impeded road building at earlier moments in history, but they're still presented as if they were through-streets on the maps.

Muni announced an ambitious plan today to replace all of its fare gates with TransLink-only machines by fall 2010. In coordination with the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), which manages the TransLink program regionally, Muni will install a total of 98 new fare gate aisles at its nine Muni Metro stations, as well as up to 40 new TransLink-only ticket vending machines. Extra-wide, ADA-compliant fare gate lanes will also be installed. Muni showed off demonstration models of the new machines at a press conference at Van Ness Station today.

On Sunday BART workers might strike, throwing Bay Area transportation into chaos. It's a tiny echo of the kind of warfare that used to erupt regularly a century ago on the streetcar lines of San Francisco. 1,500 streetcar men voted to strike for an 8-hour day, leading to "Bloody Tuesday," May 7, 1907, when gunfights exploded between armed guards and men shooting from nearby vacant lots, while strikebreakers housed in United Railroads carbarns opened fire on protesting crowds, killing two and injuring 20. By the time the strike was lost in March 1908, six had been killed in the violence, 250 more hurt, and over two dozen had died in accidents on the system while it was run by scab labor.