Joining American cities including Portland, San Francisco, and New York in borrowing the temporarily car-free ciclovia concept pioneered in Bogota, Colombia, Oakland officials will clear the automobiles from the heart of the city this Sund Read more »

The fate of San Francisco's Bicycle Plan and the four-year-old court injunction against implementing its projects remains unclear following a nearly three-hour hearing today that delved deeply into the minutiae of traffic studies, mitigation requirements, and the dictates of the California Environmental Quality Act.Read more »

A day after bicyclists and pedestrians took over the streets of the Mission for the popular, incident-free Sunday Streets, and a day before the court hearing on whether to end the four-year-old injunction against bike-related projects in San Francisco, Judge Peter Busch today (6/21) issued a noncommital tentative ruling in the case, indicating he needs a hearing on myriad technical details to reach a decision.Read more »

Despite high-profile recent improvements to San Francisco's bicycle network – including a half-dozen new bike lanes since last fall, a green bike lane on Market Street separated from cars, and new on-street bike parking on Valencia and Divisidero streets – the city is still prevented by a court injunction from creating bike lanes that have been sought for a decade. But that could change as early as next week. Read more »

Bicyclists and motorists often clash in San Francisco, over space on the roadways and in conversations about each others' behaviors, often in the most acrimonious fashion imaginable. My recent writing on bike issues has prompted lots of feedback and controversy – including lovely comments such as “Steve, keep riding your bike without a helmet, with any luck you'll get in an accident and what little brains you have will spill out onto the street and we won't have to read your smug condescending bullshit about bikes anymore.” – but I'm not the only one interested in trying to figure out how this gulf got so wide or how to bridge it. Read more »

By Adam Lesser

City Hall needed an overflow room to accommodate all the disenchanted Muni riders who showed up to protest the two-year San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency budget plan yesterday (4/20). The budget locks in a 10 percent service cut through July 1^st, 2011, at which point the MTA board is hopeful that the service cut will be lowered to 5 percent. The controversial budget was adopted on a 4-3 vote, and now goes to the Board of Supervisors, where progressive supervisors have already signaled opposition to the service cuts. Read more »

With the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency Board of Directors poised to approve a truly terrible two-year budget today (4/20) – one that locks in Muni service cuts, subsidizes the police and other city departments, and fails to seek new revenue sources – there is talk about reforming an agency run exclusively by appointees of Mayor Gavin Newsom. Read more »

Serious doubt was cast over the future of Caltrain today, with this vital commuter rail link threatened by the same funding cutbacks that are hobbling other regional transit agencies. The joint-powers agency might be forced to cut its service in half this summer – probably by eliminating night and weekend service -- or perhaps even shutting the system down.Read more »

Efforts to encourage car-sharing and ways of getting around that don’t involve owning a car would be undermined by Proposition 17, a June ballot measure that I wrote about in this week’s cover story. While I didn’t mention that impact in the story, it is of real concern to people like me who don’t own cars and encourage others to try the car-free lifestyle on for size.Read more »

By Adam Lesser

If Friday’s San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency decision to cut Muni service by 10 percent was met with a backlash, it didn’t get much better this afternoon as MTA Chief Financial Officer Sonali Bose laid out further options for closing next fiscal year’s $56.4 million projected budget deficit.Read more »