San Fran Mayor Sets Ambitious Transportation Targets

1:28 PM EST on November 1, 2006

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom (pictured right) emphasized quality of life issues in his annual State of the City address last week. Most significant, Newsom put forward an ambitious transportation agenda and laid out specific targets for increasing bicycling and reducing automobile use:

We will continue our long term planning to create a citywide bicycle network, uniting the current patchwork of bike lanes into a unified, comprehensive system. It is also time to take steps to reach our goal of making 10% of all commute trips in the City bicycle trips within the next 3 and a half years. While making MUNI faster and bike riding safer we aim to get people out of their cars and get them healthier so we must commit to reducing emissions from our public transportation fleet. With new hybrid buses coming on line, we can now say by this time next year, we will have the greenest public transportation fleet in the nation.
I think we can all agree that the more people who get out of their cars and use alternative transit the better this city is going to be for everyone.

Can I vote for this guy next Tuesday?

I suppose not. But at least we have Councilmember Gale Brewer. Working with Transportation Alternatives Brewer has put forward a piece of legislation called Introduction 199, "The Traffic Relief Bill" (PDF file), that would compel DOT to set specific modal targets like Newsom's 10 percent bicycling goal. In other words, rather than measuring the health and functionality of New York City's surface streets by "Level of Service," and other meaningless (and sometimes even destructive) yardsticks, the City would say, "We aim to shift X percent of daily trips out of cars and on to buses, bikes and foot." Then DOT would measure its success based on these far more meaningful goals.

Aaron Naparstek

AARON NAPARSTEK is the founder and former editor-in-chief of Streetsblog. Based in Brooklyn, New York, Naparsteks journalism, advocacy and community organizing work has been instrumental in growing the bicycle network, removing motor vehicles from parks, and developing new public plazas, car-free streets and life-saving traffic-calming measures across all five boroughs. Naparstek is the author of "Honku: The Zen Antidote for Road Rage" (Villard, 2003), a book of humorous haiku poetry inspired by the endless motorist sociopathy observed from his apartment window. Prior to launching Streetsblog, Naparstek worked as an interactive media producer, pioneering some of the Web's first music web sites, online communities, live webcasts and social networking services. Naparstek is currently in Cambridge with his wife and two young sons where he is enjoying a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. He has a master's degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and a bachelor's degree from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Naparstek is a co-founder of the Park Slope Neighbors community group and the Grand Army Plaza Coalition. You can find more of his work here: http://www.naparstek.com.

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