GJEL

From Alamo Square, to Market Street, to the East Bay, the Bay Area's streets and other public spaces were the scene of large protests against white supremacists this weekend. Most were peaceful, but there were a few incidents of violence. And there was one arrest in San Francisco and fourteen in Berkeley on Sunday, according to the San Francisco Examiner's story on the protester groups:

To be a successful transportation planner, you've also got to be a persuasive salesman, said two consultants at a recent SPUR event.

Last week I took the train from Oakland to Bakersfield. In Bakersfield, I transferred to a bus to get to Los Angeles.

"There's a kind of cultural license to grow," explained Benjamin Grant, Urban Design Policy Director for the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR), at a presentation about planning lessons from Seattle. "Although they have 20 percent fewer residents, Seattle is consistently producing, decade over decade, two times as much housing as San Francisco." The discussion took place this afternoon at SPUR's Oakland location.

The San Mateo Transit District (SamTrans) released its report today on improving transportation links across the Dumbarton bridge and right of way. The agency will be soliciting public comment on the document--which runs 267 pages--over the next couple of months. The study proposes phased implementations of improved bus services and, somewhere down the line, rebuilding either a one-or-two track rail bridge that would eventually permit Caltrain to connect the job centers of the Peninsula with the East Bay. The full report is available for download here.

The Bay Area's bike share system, which expanded in San Francisco and launched less than a month ago in the East Bay, seems to be off to a rocky start, with many reports on social and traditional media of slashed tires, stolen bikes, and even one bike dumped into Lake Merritt.

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency announced the opening of a concrete-barrier-protected bike lane on the 'Bernal Cut' section of San Jose Ave. on Friday. As seen in the lead image, the bike lane, which was previously 'protected' only by paint and plastic bollards, now has a barrier assuring that cyclists can't be hit by cars. As the SFMTA puts it in the release: "The idea behind measures like these is to make bikeways more comfortable for anyone to use, whether you’re eight years old or 80."

Robert Bennett of Resource Development Associates, a consultant for public and nonprofit social justice advocates, was walking his dog in the crossing at Harrison Street and 23rd on Friday, June 2, when he was fatally struck by a motorist.

Here we are in week two of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA)'s month-plus of weekend and evening closures of the core of its system--the subway tunnel from Embarcadero to West Portal. Overcrowding on the replacement bus service, as the SF Examiner reports, has left customers further peeved. In response, SFMTA is adding longer buses to its substitute routes to alleviate some of it.