Matthew Roth
Recent Posts
Come Out to SF’s Street Food Festival Tomorrow
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If you’re looking for a good way to enjoy the streets tomorrow in the Mission, head over to the Street Food Festival on Folsom Street between 25th and 26th. The street will be closed all day for a block party to "bring together micro-entrepreneurs, informal food vendors and renowned chefs to celebrate great street food, […]
Police Seek Information in Case of Cloverdale Teen Hit-And-Run
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A tragic hit-and-run killing earlier this year in Cloverdale still has police baffled. Recent entreaties to the public and the media have escalated and a $15,000 reward has been posted in an effort to bring the driver to justice 19-year-old Kody Williams was working for his stepfather’s construction company in Cloverdale, saving up money and […]
Cyclists and Runners Trace Images on Maps by “GPS Drawing”
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A GPS drawing of a character from the Atari 2600 “Pitfall!” game. Image: NY Times When we profiled bicycle related mobile phone applications last month, we clearly thinking creatively enough. The New York Times had a very interesting article yesterday on "GPS Drawing," which entails using your GPS-enabled phone to trace your running or cycling […]
Eyes on the Street: Re-Striping Mission Street
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DPT workers striping lane markings on Mission Street. Photos: Matthew Roth Work crews from the Department of Parking and Traffic (DPT) at the MTA have been re-striping portions of Mission Street recently, the old lane markings having all but disappeared as the street crumbles with age. When I snapped the photo above, the air along […]
National Transit Funding Report Highlights Local Transit Woes
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ATU Local 192 representative Anthony Rogers, who has been an AC Transit bus driver for nearly 20 years. Photo: Matthew Roth Genesis, a local affiliate of the Gamaliel Foundation, joined with representatives from the national Transportation Equity Network (TEN), AC Transit, and Amalgamated Transit Union Local 192 today to call on Congress to act to […]
Specter of a BART Strike Raises Important Questions for Bay Area
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Flickr photo: b3nda Thank goodness the BART strike seems to be averted. I’d wager that you thought a little harder about your commute today, no matter which mode you used. One of the positives to come of the high drama around the BART strike was the public dialogue it engendered among riders, the media, transit […]
Central Subway Debate on KALW Radio Tonight
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City Visions Radio will be debating the merits of the Central Subway project on their show tonight, asking whether the project is an innovation or a boondoggle. The Central Subway project, which links Chinatown with the Third Street light rail and the Caltrain terminal at 4th and King, has its detractors, though most of the […]
Vote for the Finalists in Dwell Magazine’s Reburbia Design Contest
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Airbia: The PRT of the future? I mean, of the future future? The good people at Dwell Magazine and Inhabitat.com have narrowed submissions in their Reburbia: A Suburban Design Competition to the top twenty proposals for re-envisioning the sprawl that blights the American landscape and keeps us locked in our foreign-oil dependent, ever-expanding commute patterns. […]
Heavy Traffic Expected As Riders Scramble for BART Alternatives
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Flickr photo: schlick33 With BART’s operators’ union declaring an imminent strike that will shut down the entire system starting this Monday, Bay Area commuters are scrambling to find other options for getting to work, particularly from the East Bay, where BART and the Bay Bridge are the two primary transportation links across the water. Despite […]
BART Transit Operators Announce Strike by End of Day Sunday
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ATU 1555 President Jesse Hunt announcing strike. Photo: Matthew Roth Standing in front of union headquarters in downtown Oakland this afternoon, leadership for BART’s Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 1555 announced that their rank and file would walk off the job after the last trains finish their run this Sunday night, effectively shutting down BART […]
511 Transit Called “Heroic Act of Interagency Cooperation”
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Image: transit.511.org The Government Computer News magazine, part of the U.S. General Services Administration, called the 511 Transit website maintained by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) "a heroic act of interagency coordination" when naming it to it’s list of the "10 great government websites nationwide for 2009." I’m not trying to downplay the utility and […]
Would Personal Rapid Transit Benefit Anyone but Its Manufacturer?
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Image: SkyTran Some of you saw the Examiner piece yesterday about SkyTran’s personal rapid transit (PRT) project and were probably looking for a response from us (one of you even asked in comments why we didn’t touch it), but I’ve been very leery of the topic since I saw the "Pod People" post over on […]