had to take my bike onto BART instead of cycling home from work today. it was pouring. i didn’t have my ass saver in my backpack. i thought it was going to rain on wednesday, not today.

was having a peaceful bart ride, until the stop before mine, 19th street oakland, HELLA people crowded onto the train. i had to struggle to get out at my stop, where more people were ready to board. 

((/(€&%(#€”)#\¶\‰”

wtf the bay lights’ grand lighting started at 8:30pm!

ughh it just makes me feel like crap—i’m going home after work and people are off to the city. oh well, i’ll be going thursday night. 

bart really needs to add more cars to their evening and night trains. 20 minute intervals! I’d expect more than 5 cars going to SF! 

jamisonwieser:

When San Francisco released three Market Street corridor design options it was bound to piss off a lot of cyclists.

An SF Weekly story has a good rundown of the outrage with some perspective in Hey Cyclists, What Kind of City Do You Want? (22.02.13):

Immediately after the release of the proposal, the Bicycle Coalition launched a letter writing campaign to the mayor and called upon the city not to “throw its hands up and give up on finding the best possible solution for biking on Market Street.”

I don’t exactly see how the city releasing the three best options (PDF) for public feedback constitutes “throw its hands up” and further studies wouldn’t change the fact that BART planners in the 1960s failed to provide enough room between the out traffic lane and the edges of the subway entrances for a continuous bike lane.

Echoing that same frustration, Aaron Bialick at Streetsblog (05.02.13) lambasted the Mission proposal for “go[ing] against a primary principle of bike planning: Improving the most direct routes, which people are naturally drawn to use.”

Giving the physical limitations the options for Market Street are an intermittent dedicated bike lane which end and make cyclists merge into traffic at some of the busiest intersections.

That merging comes with it the hazard of bikes being sideswiped by inattentive drivers, so the other option is to do away with the merging hazard and make the traffic lane shared between bikes and cars.

So for just a moment, consider that maybe there is no great option for Market Street and this is the best we can do. What could we do with Mission Street?

The SF Weekly’s Ben Christopher sums it up pretty well.

[T]he pluses of a bike-prioritized Mission Street are substantial. Consider this: On Mission, there are no oddly angled intersections, no BART grates, and no streetcar tracks. And without the need to expedite Muni traffic, green waves could be timed to bike-speed, à la Valencia.

But if the choice between a bike thoroughfare on Market or Mission is presented as an either/or (which it certainly shouldn’t be), I probably count myself among the pro-Market contingent.

But it isn’t an either/or choice between Market and Mission. The Mission bikeway includes the shared bike lane on Market Street. There will continue being points were cars are forced to turn right while bikes can continue through and bike racks along Market Street still make the statements bikes are first class citizens.

So do we want a half-assed cycletrack on Market? Or do we want an improved Market Street and a kick-ass bikeway on Mission Street as well?

yes, both! it’s not like no one ever turns up to streets north of market. market as the city’s “main street” definitely needs to keep and improve its cycle infrastructure.

lunchtime forum
weds. 20.02.13. 12:30pm
Free to members
$10 for non-members

SPUR Urban Center
654 Mission Street, San Francisco

Hurricane Sandy and other recent extreme weather events underscore the importance of preparing for climate variability and change. But understanding the on-the-ground implications of climate change can be challenging, especially since we can’t precisely predict the future of our climate.

Join Beth Rodehorst of ICF International Joe LaClair of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission and Peter Brown of the SF Municipal Transportation Agency as they share lessons learned and best practices from recent adaptation planning projects. We’ll look at examples from the Bay Area and beyond that focus on transportation assets, climate vulnerability assessments and adaptation efforts.

The famed “War on Cars” — who among us hasn’t heard this tired hyperbole tossed around with wild abandon? Want to install a bike lane? Gasp! “War on cars!” Speeding cameras in school zones? “War on cars!!” Raise tolls to cover the huge cost of roads? “WAR ON CARS!!!”

You know how it goes. Paul Barter at Reinventing Parking was reflecting on this rhetoric recently after a proposal to ease parking minimums in Santa Monica elicited the predictable response. Barter says calling policies like these a “war on cars” is akin to saying women’s early struggles for voting rights were “anti-men” because “it involves ignoring a huge edifice of policies that are actually skewed in the other direction.”

thank you, streetsblog! (05.02.13.)

 If there was a “war” involving cars in Santa Monica, it looks like the cars already won. 

some reader comments from the post:

Parking minimums need to be replaced with parking maximums.

yes, yes, yes. but who is a land use zoning or housing planner person and can rework this policy?? and I think this would be local city level? (maaang should I have picked land use planning instead of transportation planning on my grad school apps?)

I am in the minority on this one but as a non-driving urbanist, my view is that we do need a war on cars. It’s impolitic of course but cars are dangerous to bikers/pedestrians, pollutant-spewing and take up lane space for my buses. 

hmm… more like this:

None of these are a war on cars. It’s a war on traffic, a war on congestion. A war on pedestrian fatalities. A war on time wasted stuck in gridlock. A fight to be able to get places as we please rather than being forced into a metal cage crawling stop-and-go at 3mph.

“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rethink and improve San Francisco’s premier street,” said Mindy Linetzky, a spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Public Works, the lead agency for the project. “Market Street is San Francisco’s main street. It should look and work like one.”

…eliminating buses from Mission Street and moving them to Market would make the changes much easier. Permanent cycletracks, separated from vehicles and pedestrians by a physical barrier, would be placed on Mission Street, allowing for a straight, flat, and uninterrupted bike ride that would be far safer between Van Ness Avenue and the Embarcadero..

“The key to the city center is people,” he said. “You don’t go downtown to watch cars go by. If you design that area for cars, you undermine that feeling in what … is the most democratic space in the city, with something for everyone.”

The project, which isn’t expected to break ground until 2017, will be the first major upgrade of Market Street since the underground BART and Muni Metro systems opened in the early 1970s. The two-year construction effort will include repaving Market Street from Octavia Street to the Embarcadero and is intended to transform the surrounding area into spaces where people want to linger.

sfgate, 05.02.13.

better market st. citizen advisory committee meeting on mon. 11.feb, 6pm.