A $7 million initiative to outfit San Francisco with an electric vehicle network and add 61 new clean-energy taxis has collapsed, forcing The City’s transportation agency to reconsider whether to pursue the ambitious plan.
But for the company set to receive the 61 new cabs, the development comes as no surprise.
“We were never really overhyped about this, we just wanted to show our public support for the plan,” said Jim Gillespie, a manager at Yellow Cab.
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A deal has been reached to bring up Muni’s Central Subway machinery at an abandoned theater in North Beach.
The transit agency, along with Board of Supervisors President David Chiu and the Mayor’s Office, had been locked in talks to lease out the Pagoda Palace as a way to store equipment and extract tunnel-boring machines needed for the 1.7-mile transit extension project.
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BART officials will discuss a plan today to increase fares regularly through 2020 and make parking more expensive at station lots.
Since 2003, the regional rail operator has used an inflation-based formula to increase its transit fares every two years. The last scheduled fare increase was in 2012, but the agency wants to extend the program, with rate hikes proposed for 2014, 2016, 2018 and 2020.
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Repeated construction delays, shifting visions and the departure of the plan’s manager have many advocates wary about the future of San Francisco’s Better Market Street project.
The undertaking, a multiagency project headed by the Department of Public Works, was established in 2009 to reinvent San Francisco’s central artery, with construction initially scheduled to begin this year.
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Painted transit-only lanes, more travel-prediction signs and changes to traffic signals to prioritize trains are part of a series of improvements planned for Muni’s N-Judah line.
With 12.8 million passengers annually, the N-Judah is the transit agency’s busiest light-rail line, but it frequently gets bogged down in automobile traffic while making the long journey between downtown and Ocean Beach in the Sunset district.
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Approval of Muni’s plans to bring up its Central Subway boring equipment at an abandoned theater in North Beach was pushed back at least a week.
The transit agency is in talks with the owner of the Pagoda Palace to lease out the site of the theater for two years. The two sides have been involved in talks for months, but so far they have yet to agree on terms.
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San Francisco’s powerful cycling lobby is not pleased with a new proposal to shift biking off Market Street and onto Mission Street.
Since 2010, a group of city agencies has been involved in crafting the Better Market Street project — a comprehensive set of improvement plans for San Francisco’s central artery. This week, the consortium announced plans to study an alternative in which cyclists would be steered onto nearby Mission Street instead of riding on Market Street. Buses would subsequently be removed from Mission Street.
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A confluence of events — including bad weather and tricky utility relocation plans — has increased the costs and pushed back the completion date of Caltrain’s grade-separation project in San Bruno.
The project was originally scheduled to be finished by last summer, but Caltrain is now revising the completion date to the end of this year. Today, the agency also will ask its board of directors to approve a change-order contract to increase the construction costs of the plan from $77 million to $91 million.
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With a crucial vote on the project scheduled for Thursday, Muni has yet to reach a deal with a North Beach property owner about bringing up its Central Subway boring equipment at an abandoned
theater.
The agency wants to purchase a two-year lease of the Pagoda Palace on Powell Street so it can remove equipment for the $1.6 billion subway project. Originally, Muni planned on using Columbus Avenue, but changed course to
alleviate neighborhood concerns.
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Once again, San Francisco ranks as one of the most congested metropolitan areas in the nation, with local commuters losing 61 hours each year stuck in traffic.
At 67 hours of lost productivity, commuters in the Washington, D.C., metro area were the only motorists in the country who suffered more than San Francisco drivers last year, according to the Texas Transportation Institute, which produces annual congestion reports.
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The passengers keep arriving and the records keep falling at San Francisco International Airport.
Last year was the busiest in SFO’s history, with 44.5 million fliers passing through the hub. That marked an 8.5 percent increase from 2011, which had a then-record of 41 million passengers.
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Muni could increase the number of trains it can run on the future Central Subway line by adding turnaround loops in the Dogpatch neighborhood that would also benefit passengers in The City’s southeastern neighborhoods, according to the agency.
Muni’s Central Subway project is a $1.6 billion extension of the T-Third Street line that will eventually connect passengers from Hunters Point to Chinatown.
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Drivers in San Francisco soon may not need a cache of coins in their cars to feed the meters as a part of a proposal to replace The City’s entire network of parking meters — some 30,000 devices — with newer technology by this fall.
San Francisco has about 23,000 older parking meters that accept only coins and payment cards issued by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, which is in charge of parking in The City. There are an additional 6,000 or so meters that feature the agency’s new SFpark technology, which accept multiple payment forms and offer differing hourly rates. Another 1,000 meters are located on property the Port of San Francisco manages.
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Would-be rioters setting their sites on buses to burn after the Super Bowl on Sunday won’t have much luck pursuing their incendiary ways on Market Street.
Following the unrest that broke out after the Giants won the World Series in October — which included a Muni bus being set ablaze downtown on Market Street — city officials have elected to detour all transit vehicles off San Francisco’s main artery Sunday night.
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A new loading zone set to be carved out for private shuttles on Van Ness Avenue could be a sign of things to come, as The City prepares to deal with the ever-growing number of unregulated buses.
Van Ness Avenue has become the center of conflicts between Muni vehicles and private shuttles, which scoop up workers in San Francisco and carry them to jobs on the Peninsula and in Silicon Valley. The shuttles often pick up workers at stops designated for Muni vehicles, leading to public transit delays.
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URL: http://www.sfexaminer.com/people/will-reisman?page=7
