Plan to screw up Fell and Oak Streets

Photo by Bike Nopa

Thea Selby and the Lower Haight Street folks give us a chance to provide the MTA with some negative feedback on the plan to screw up traffic on Fell and Oak Streets next to the Panhandle, which will mean either taking away scarce neighborhood street parking or eliminating traffic lanes on these busy east/west streets that carry 67,000 cars a day. (The feedback form) The city's bike people---with help from their collaborators in City Hall, including the new Muni boss---want to create gridlock in the area in combination with the plan to screw up traffic on nearby Masonic Avenue:

To improve bicycle access between the Panhandle bike path and the “Wiggle” by providing separated bikeways on Fell Street and/or Oak Street between Scott and Baker streets. The bikeway(s) would have a buffer space and/or physical separation between cyclists and traveling vehicles.

Of course there's no problem now for cyclists to get to the wiggle from either Hayes Street on the north side of the Panhandle or Page Street on the south side. It's really about "taking space from cars."

A recent Bay Citizen story on the issue aroused the ire of the bike people.

Willie Brown and right-wing women

Associated Press photo

Is Willie Brown falling for another right-wing woman? A few years ago he had an inexplicable passion for Sarah Palin. Sunday he threw a bouquet to Michelle Bachmann, who may be a bigger crackpot than Palin, if that's possible.

Like their parents, young people will leave cities

America’s Young Will Abandon Cities For Suburbs       

by Joel Kotkin

New Geography 

7/20/2011

For well over a decade urban boosters have heralded the shift among young Americans from suburban living and toward dense cities. As one Wall Street Journal report suggests, young people will abandon their parents’ McMansions for urban settings, bringing about the high-density city revival so fervently prayed for by urban developers, architects and planners.

Some demographers claim that “white flight” from the city is declining, replaced by a “bright flight” to the urban core from the suburbs. “Suburbs lose young whites to cities,” crowed one Associated Press headline last year.

Yet evidence from the last Census show the opposite: a marked acceleration of movement not into cities but toward suburban and exurban locations. The simple, usually inexorable effects of maturation may be one reason for this surprising result. Simply put, when 20-somethings get older, they do things like marry, start businesses, settle down and maybe start having kids...

The rest of the article at New Geography