Local, Regional & National Efforts to Make Transit Better

Lots of interesting transit and transportation news in the headlines recently. Today, we bring you a sampling of local, regional and national stories that shed light on current and coming changes to how we use and plan for transportation.

The local news is the most immediate news — The Examiner’s Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez reported on the First splash of transit-only ‘red carpet’ lanes hit Mission Street.  The Muni Forward 14 Mission project’s red lanes are only a piece of the comprehensive undertaking to make this crucial corridor work better from Daly City to the Ferry Building.  

A large regional conversation will kick off this evening at the Planning Department’s meeting on a multi-agency study of “transportation and land use alternatives in the most rapidly growing areas of the city.” In his Chronicle piece, Transit plan to raze I-280 in SF to be unveiled , J.K. Dineen laid out some of  the large planning questions at hand for the region — whether to turn I-280 (north of Mariposa) into a boulevard, altering the 4th and King railyard, and looking at how the high-speed rail trains and Caltrain reach the future Transbay Terminal. The project is only in the first of five phases, so we’re sure to talk about this again.

An even larger effort to improve transportation comes to us from the federal Department of Transportation’s Fast Lane blog. In today’s post, Housing, Transportation, and Opportunity, Secretary Foxx relayed his presentation with Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro to discuss the use of data to help state and local officials improve mobility and to better understand the connection between physical mobility and social mobility.

Each Tuesday we bring you a tidbit of transit news or trivia, either from our own backyard or from around the globe.