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Support appears to be growing at City Hall for Supervisor David Chiu's motion to reject the MTA's budget passed last Thursday. Very little has changed to satisfy Chiu, who remains deeply concerned about fare hikes, service cuts and work orders that are draining the MTA's budget.

Ever since the much-promoted alliance between “teamsters and turtles” at the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999, there’s been a renewed hope that the decades-long opposition between organized labor and environmentalists might be resolvable. The original Teamsters and turtles weren’t really in much of an alliance in 1999, what with AFL-CIO leaders trying their best to keep the labor march away from occupied downtown Seattle on November 30, 1999. But we don’t have to rehash that old story because we have a new, local angle on this here in 2009 San Francisco.

I'm in New York this week meeting the who's who of the city's Livable Streets movement and learning about a lovable, purple, near-extinct creature that is apparently making a comeback. I'll let Clarence Eckerson explain:

In Glasgow, Scotland a few weeks ago I had the opportunity to reacquaint myself with a lovely feature of many European cities: broad central city streets converted to pedestrian only. In Glasgow it's on Sauchiehall Street and makes a grand turn onto Buchanan, covering over 20 city blocks. Mostly lined with stores and offices, the landscape created can be "read" as an extended shopping mall, but outdoors, with storefronts opening onto a real street, now converted into a pedestrian and bicycling oasis. The zone is crowded with walkers and shoppers at any given time. (Similar zones that I've visited are the Strøget in Copenhagen, Denmark and Istiklal Caddesi in Beyoglu in Istanbul, Turkey.)

As the MTA Board considers solutions to reduce its enormous $129 million deficit, bus stop consolidation should be at the top of its agenda.

So whether or not this is a result of Supervisor Bevan Dufty's oversight hearing or a very auspicious coincidence, Streetsblog San Francisco reader Megan Allison (who runs several good blogs, including goodurb.com) sends us this photo of a cop and his K-9 companion on Muni.  Unlike jackalope and Sasquatch sightings, we're pretty sure this is an authentic member of the SFPD and his trusty German Shepherd. 

When Barack Obama was elected, urbanists were, in some cases literally, dancing in the streets. For once, America had elected a president who understood the importance of cities -- and who promised to create an "Office for Urban Policy" that would help those cities to take their rightful place in the federal policy debate.

While President Barack Obama promoted wind power and cap-and-trade legislation, VP Joe Biden spent Earth Day talking up transit. Public radio's "The Takeaway" reports that Biden held a presser at a bus maintenance facility in Landover, Maryland, to tout a $300 million investment in hybrid buses and other municipal vehicles as part of the federal stimulus package. Said Biden: