Matthew Roth
Recent Posts
17th Street Plaza Trial Extended Four Months
| | 29 Comments
Photo: geekstinkbreath At yesterday’s Interdepartmental Staff Committee on Traffic and Transportation (ISCOTT) meeting, where decisions about temporary street closures are decided by all the agencies that have anything to do with streets and events on streets, the trial pedestrian plaza at 17th Street and Market Street received easy approval for a four month extension. Heads […]
Woman Hits Caltrans Worker, Claims He Didn’t Jump Fast Enough
| | 5 Comments
This just in from the "you’ve got to be sh*tting me" files: an Oregon woman, Catherine Stotts, 62, who was driving illegally in the construction lane of Route 20 in Mendocino County Tuesday afternoon, hit a Caltrans worker and then had the nerve to suggest he should have jumped out of the way faster to […]
SFO Commission Calls BART Surcharge for SFO Workers “Unconscionable”
| | 7 Comments
Flickr photo: carpathiar The San Francisco Airport (SFO) Commission asked BART today to waive the new SFO surcharge for workers at the airport, whom they assert cannot afford to ride BART to work now. The new surcharge increased from $1.50 to $4.00 on July 1st with the 6 percent overall fare increase approved by BART’s […]
Enrique Peñalosa Urges SF to Embrace Pedestrians and Public Space
| | 14 Comments
Photo: Matthew Roth Celebrated Colombian urbanist and former mayor of Bogotá Enrique Peñalosa told a standing room audience of more than one hundred people at the San Francisco Public Library last night that San Francisco can be friendly to cars or to people, but not both. Further, he argued that there is no fundamental technical […]
CA Transit Operators Win in Court, But Face Challenge by Governor
| | 3 Comments
Photo: rhondawinter A state appellate court in Sacramento ruled two days ago that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger can’t continue taking money out of the Public Transportation Account (PTA) to help balance the budget, something the governor has done repeatedly while in office, costing state transit operators $1.19 billion in 2007-2008 alone. Many Bay Area transit operators […]
When Old Parking Meter Poles Go, So Often Does Bike Parking
| | 5 Comments
Toronto’s Post and Ring solution for bicycle parking on old parking meter poles. Photo: David Baker When Oakland installed its first pay-and-display parking kiosks in early 2007, parking managers ordered employees to remove the heads of the approximately 5,000 single-space meters they were replacing. Just like other cities transitioning from using single-space parking meters to […]
“A Lot of This is Just Theater” Says Source Close to BART Contract Flap
| | 2 Comments
Photo: PixelHoundSF With BART and its unions agreeing on a nine-day extension to contract negotiations, the fear of a strike that would incapacitate the Bay Area’s transit networks and gridlock its roads has been temporarily alleviated, though ten days from now the entire region could be in the same predicament if the gap between management […]
Streetfilms: SF Carves a Park from the Midst of Its Pavement
| | 9 Comments
The entire family of San Francisco city agencies responsible for maintaining its streets made an unconventional decision to close a portion of a street to cars and convert the new space into a simple, yet elegant, public plaza. The project combines all the important elements of plaza creation that have been successful in New York […]
Mayor Newsom, City Agencies and Advocates Celebrate Bike Plan
| | 24 Comments
Mayor Newsom said bike lanes were part of a sustainable, 21st Century city. Photo: Matthew Roth At a press conference this afternoon characterized by relief and jubilation, Mayor Gavin Newsom, representatives from the city agencies responsible for San Francisco’s streets, and bicycle advocates celebrated the MTA’s adoption of the Bike Plan and the legislation of […]
MTA Hearing on Bike Plan Packed, Mayor to Hold Presser at 3 pm
| | 6 Comments
Bicyclists waiting to testify outside MTAB meeting. The MTA Board is just hours away from finally approving the Bike Plan, and is currently hearing testimony from 200 supporters — a cross section of cyclists including business and home owners, mothers with children, families, and people with disabilities — who were organized by the San Francisco […]
Does NextBus Own Real-Time Muni Data?
| | 12 Comments
Courtesy: SF Appeal Last week I tried to download the real-time transit data application Routesy from the Apple Store, only to find that the Store didn’t carry it. Some friends had recommended the application as an improvement over iBART and iMuni, which only provide the static schedules published by the transit operators, not real-time data. […]
Planning Commission Votes Unanimously to Certify Bike Plan EIR
| | 6 Comments
After three years of waiting, three years without a single bicycle infrastructure improvement in San Francisco, the Planning Commission tonight unanimously certified the Bike Plan EIR, the first step necessary to lift the bicycle injunction. "We are so thrilled and relieved. This was a big step forward to getting the bike plan back on track," […]