Posts Tagged ‘transportation’

It was a tough weekend. It was slow Monday and Tuesday in the City. I am learning, albeit slowly, to let go of the natural feelings of elated success or critical failure that come from a high or low earning day. This is important. While there are many factors over which I have control — [...]


NPR’s Morning Edition recently featured an excellent two part series on the aggregate effects of our living decisions on the environment. The stories hit hard from the angle that suburbia increases per capita carbon footprint while denser, urban living offers significantly lower per capita carbon footprint. Yes! Here’s the underlying important point: living in denser [...]


I point your temporary attention to a Flash website produced by UC Berkeley j-school grad students Eric Zassenhaus and Amy Jeffries. The video clips thumbnailed along the bottom are accurate and colorful paintings of a typical taxi shift. Well worth a view. But wait, there’s more. The site also features insightful interviews with Heidi Machen, [...]


I am so fond of ragging on San Francisco’s poorly managed Municipal Railway that I often overlook Muni’s remarkable, world-class achievements. (Yes, they really do have some remarkable, world-class achievements.) This post is a first attempt at fixing my glaring oversight. Muni’s extensive trolleybus system is a modern treasure. Muni claims to hold the largest [...]


The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) is a bureaucratic whale, containing, in separate stomachs, the Department of Parking and Traffic (DPT) and the San Francisco Municipal Railway (Muni) public transit system. Recently, the SFMTA crunched some numbers and said, “Uh oh, we won’t have enough money to cover our costs over the next two [...]


A week ago the Chronicle reported on some promising preliminary recommendations based on findings from the Transit Effectiveness Project (TEP). These recommendations are great. In many ways they are in line with common sense: improve highly used lines using BRT, ditch under-used lines. Aside from the frustrating fact that it took Muni 40 years to [...]


Wow, it looks like Nat Ford might actually know how to run a municipal transit agency. Let’s hope the Board of Supervisors gets off his back and lets him do it right. Link


On my ‘to write’ list is a manifesto of how to fix Muni. Lay out what’s wrong. Lay out what we need to do to fix it. Dave Snyder of SPUR beat me to the punch. I met Dave last spring when I served under his leadership with a group of volunteers to pitch for [...]


Dear Mayor Newsom You didn’t have to spend City taxpayer money on private consultants. Anyone could have told you: Just like any other shared and limited public resource, public transit needs user fees. Offering ‘free’ Muni is a destructive proposal. Muni rolling stock is not unlimited. Removing user fees distorts a natural and effective form [...]


(Photo Credit) On a recent episode of KQED’s Forum, Dave Iverson discusses the possibility of congestion pricing in the City with two main guests: Ken Cleaveland, director of government and public affairs with the Building Owners and Managers Association and Zabe Bent, senior transportation planner with the San Francisco Transportation Authority. To some degree, Ms. [...]