Matthew Roth
Recent Posts
A Very Astute Critique of Highways by an Editor of The Weekly Standard
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Eisenhower signing the 1956 Highway Act Far be it from us to take political sides on Livable Streets issues–you don’t have to be a donkey or an elephant to appreciate pedestrian safety, traffic calming, and quality public space–but why is it that two of the best columns connecting transportation policy reform, land use, and energy […]
Using Software to Find Walkable Neighborhoods and Live Car Free
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The Bay Area’s public transportation circulatory system. Click for larger view Though David Brooks might argue in his New York Times column that Americans want to live in small towns and suburban dreamscapes, the fact is more and more of us live in metropolitan areas, and discussions about what we want should have to do […]
San Francisco Should Take Cues from New York and Just Try It!
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The vision for closing Broadway in Times Square, which will happen by May Urban space advocates the world over use best practice examples from other cities to raise the bar on policy and praxis in their own cities. For years in New York, Transportation Alternatives and the NYC Streets Renaissance Campaign invoked the phrase "Lessons […]
Despite Outcry, MTC Board Approves OAK Connector Funds
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Advocates packed the MTC hearing room Transportation and social justice advocates packed the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) board meeting today to demand that the agency not spend a proposed $70 million of federal stimulus money on the Oakland Airport Connector (OAC) project. MTC commissioners heard testimony for over two hours from some of the more […]
Advocates Upset Stim Money Could Still Fund Oakland Airport Connector
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How will you get to the Oakland Airport in 5 years? The debate over how to spend the federal transportation stimulus money at the regional level is heating up and may boil over tomorrow morning at the next Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) meeting. As we reported here two weeks ago, the nine-county Bay Area will […]
The Myth of the Urban Driving Shoppers
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A valuable sidewalk, but parking should be removed and the sidewalk widened to accommodate pedestrians and meet ADA requirements. As we wrote a couple days ago about Jefferson Street, merchants on the commercial street there and throughout the city often assume parking spaces in front of their stores are vital to business, that their customers […]
A Decidedly Dim View of Electric Vehicles
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Electric Vehicles (EVs) are all the rage these days and the press seems to treat them as a palliative for all that ails our fossil-fuel-driven, automobile-dependent transportation network. The New York Times has fallen in love with Better Place, an electric-car battery maker that seeks to replace much of the U.S. fleet of vehicles with […]
Planning Department Unveils San Francisco’s First Pedestrian Priority Street
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The proposed design for a single-surface pedestrian priority Jefferson Street The City Design Group at the Planning Department has released its proposal for transforming Jefferson Street at Fisherman’s Wharf into a single-surface pedestrian priority street, the first of its size in San Francisco. Based on shared space or woonerfs, the plan calls for removing traditional […]
Obama Calls For Better Regional Planning Measures in TEA Reauthorization
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The vision of an unsustainable land use and transportation future File the following in the "Can’t Believe My President Gets It" category. In an interview with columnists last week on Air Force One, President Obama drew a clear link between regional planning, land use, transportation, and energy policy, implying that bad planning has led to […]
Today’s Headlines
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Automakers Come Back to Public Feed Trough for $14 Billion (SF Gate) (NYT) Obama Signs Stimulus Bill Into Law (NYT) The Politics Behind Obama’s Funding of High Speed Rail in Stim Package (Politico) Reaction to Politico Article at HSR Blog (CHSRB) Transpo Sec LaHood on How Stim Money Will Be Spent (Transportation for America) Good […]
The Future of Van Ness Avenue is a Full-Feature BRT Route
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Van Ness BRT at City Hall, Alternative 5: center-center median option. With overwhelming approval for the Proposition K half-cent transportation sales tax in 2003, San Franciscans signaled they not only wanted to maintain a state of good repair and operational solvency for their transit system, they were willing to dedicate more than 25 percent of […]
How Many Bikes Would Make a Proper Bike Share Program in San Francisco?
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Velib Google-Map mashup tells you how many bikes and how many vacant spaces are at each station 5328 bikes, to be exact. After excoriating Mayor Gavin Newsom a few weeks ago for his bike share media stunt, a lot of commenters weighed in with advice for making bike share work well in San Francisco. There […]