San Francisco

This is the fourth part in Streetsblog’s series profiling 11 officials who are bringing American cities and towns into the 21st century when it comes to transportation and planning policy. Read the earlier profiles in part one, part two, and part three.

The Bikes Belong Foundation has chosen six cities to fast track physically protected bikeway designs that make cycling safer and more accessible to a wide range of people.

Streetsblog San Francisco reported earlier this week that the Metropolitan Transportation Commission has made a $10 million funding commitment to a mixed-use affordable housing project in the Tenderloin neighborhood, a convenient two-block walk from the nearest Muni stop:

How long do you have to wait for a bus in your city? How much does it cost? Does every family on your block have two cars? And tell us about your bikeshare program…

Members of Congress worked all day Friday, until 4:42 Saturday morning, to finish voting on hundreds of amendments and, finally, the final HR 1 bill to set spending levels for the rest of 2011.

In Pittsburgh, elderly para-transit riders get automated phone calls with the precise arrival time of their vehicle. Bus priority lanes and preferential traffic signals in the Twin Cities are improving on-time service. Here in Washington, DC, stored value on SmartTrip cards pays for Metro parking, train and bus, and it can sync with pre-tax employee transit benefits. In San Francisco, dynamic pricing varies parking rates based on supply and demand, reducing traffic and helping people find available parking spaces.

The long-term impacts to transportation funding as a result of the Federal Transit Administration's (FTA) civil rights compliance probe of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) won't be clear for some time, but the action by the federal administration has transportation policy circles buzzing. Experts in civil rights and regional planning policy couldn't point to another instance of a metropolitan planning organization (MPO) like the MTC being required to submit to similar scrutiny from the FTA, while social justice advocates felt vindicated for their longstanding contention of discrimination in transportation funding.

Ed Glaeser is a very good economist, and his papers are indispensable reading for those interested in the workings of urban areas. But he is also a strident conservative, whose popular writings frequently challenge conventional progressive wisdom (and my own views).

The nation's largest metropolitan areas -- which account for 63 percent of the U.S. population and 73 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) -- have received less than half of the surface transportation money allocated so far underthe Obama administration's economic stimulus plan, according to a new report compiled for the U.S. Conference of Mayors.