People

After weeks of uncertainty and tension, the congressional impasse over long-term transportation funding is headed for resolution this week -- but the reprieve may be temporary.

Two weeks ago, Ray LaHood candidly addressed the need to reduce the nation's vehicle miles traveled in order to halt the devastating effects of climate change. But the Transportation Secretary had a decidedly different message today.

Somewhere amid the budget drama of the last several weeks, a peak oil and natural gas report (PDF) Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi called "a really big deal" got lost in the shuffle. So, when the Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force showed up before the Board of Supervisors Government Audit and Oversight Committee today, neither the committee's members nor the public were quite ready.

Having entertained legislators' own ideas about how best to fund future transportation spending, the House Ways and Means committee turned to representatives from the administration and key interest groups today to hear their thoughts on the matter.

Though it occurred for just four hours on two miles of streets in the Mission, this week’s Sunday Streets event has transformed the livable streets movement in some of the same ways that Critical Mass transformed San Francisco’s bicycle rights movement in the early 1990s.

In a vote that signaled both San Francisco's new direction on parking policy and the severity of current budget shortfalls, the Board of Supervisors yesterday approved an ordinance giving the MTA authority to study installing parking meters in the eastern portion of Golden Gate Park.

Streetsblog Capitol Hill reported this week that the Obama administration -- which often talks about reducing transportation-based emissions -- is staying mum on a bill that would devote a guaranteed share of revenues from carbon regulation to transit, bike paths, and other green modes of transport.

When Mayor Gavin Newsom dedicated the first of three Pavement to Parks plazas at 17th and Market streets, he promised to push forward with the next two trial plazas in short order, including one at the intersection of Guerrero Street and San Jose Avenue, one of the more precarious corners in the city, where traffic speeds down Guerrero after exiting I-280, the footprint of the now-abandoned Mission Freeway. For community residents like Gillian Gillett, who has been fighting to make the neighborhood more pedestrian friendly and less sick with dangerous traffic for years, the news was thrilling.

Delivering his climate-change message to Congress yesterday, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood warned that fuel-efficiency advances secured by the Obama administration would not be enough to reduce emissions from transportation -- not without encouraging Americans to drive less.