Skip to main content

The Spine of San Francisco Is Now Car-Free

The plan to ban private cars from Market Street -- one of the city's busiest and most dangerous downtown thoroughfares -- enjoys a remarkable level of local support. From a report: In a city known for stunning vistas, San Francisco's Market Street offers a notoriously ugly tangle of traffic. Cars and delivery trucks vie with bikes and pedestrians along this downtown corridor, as buses and a historic streetcar clatter through the mix. Dedicated lanes for transit and bikes end abruptly several blocks from the street's terminus at the edge of the San Francisco Bay. But the vehicular frenzy is ending, in part: Starting Wednesday, private vehicles -- meaning both passenger automobiles and for-hire ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft -- may no longer drive down Market, east of 10th Street. Only buses, streetcars, traditional taxis, ambulances, and freight drop-offs are still allowed. The closure to private vehicle traffic heralds the start of a new era for the city's central spine, and perhaps for San Francisco at large, as it joins cities around the world that are restricting cars from downtown centers.

"We need to do better than use Market as a queuing place for the Bay Bridge," said Jeffrey Tumlin, the newly arrived executive director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. "Today represents the way the world is finally changing how it thinks about the role of transportation in cities." After decades of debate, the vision for a car-free Market Street has arrived at a remarkable level of support among activists, politicians, planners, and businesses. (Especially compared to the rancor and legal challenges that greeted New York City's long-delayed effort to create a car-free busway along 14th Street in Manhattan.) In October, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency's board of directors voted unanimously in support of a $600 million "Better Market Street" capital construction plan. Ground is set to break on construction for a protected bikeway, repaved sidewalk, fresh streetscaping, and updated streetcar infrastructure by the start of 2021.


from Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters https://ift.tt/38NlGqM
via IFTTT
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dark Mode vs. Light Mode: Which Is Better?

Recently a well-respected UI consulting firm (the Nielsen Norman Group) published their analysis of academic studies on the question of whether Dark Mode or Light Mode was better for reading? Cosima Piepenbrock and her colleagues at the Institut für Experimentelle Psychologie in Düsseldorf, Germany studied two groups of adults with normal (or corrected-to-normal) vision: young adults (18 to 33 years old) and older adults (60 to 85 years old). None of the participants suffered from any eye diseases (e.g., cataract)... Their results showed that light mode won across all dimensions : irrespective of age, the positive contrast polarity was better for both visual-acuity tasks and for proofreading tasks... Another study, published in the journal Human Factors by the same research group, looked at how text size interacts with contrast polarity in a proofreading task. It found that the positive-polarity advantage increased linearly as the font size was decreased: namely, the smaller the fon...
Post a Comment
Read more

An AI Epidemiologist Sent the First Warnings of the Wuhan Virus

An anonymous reader shares a report: On January 9, the World Health Organization notified the public of a flu-like outbreak in China: a cluster of pneumonia cases had been reported in Wuhan, possibly from vendors' exposure to live animals at the Huanan Seafood Market. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had gotten the word out a few days earlier, on January 6. But a Canadian health monitoring platform had beaten them both to the punch, sending word of the outbreak to its customers on December 31 . BlueDot uses an AI-driven algorithm that scours foreign-language news reports, animal and plant disease networks, and official proclamations to give its clients advance warning to avoid danger zones like Wuhan. Speed matters during an outbreak, and tight-lipped Chinese officials do not have a good track record of sharing information about diseases, air pollution, or natural disasters. But public health officials at WHO and the CDC have to rely on these very same health of...
Post a Comment
Read more

New Web Service Can Notify Companies When Their Employees Get Phished

Starting today, companies across the world have a new free web service at their disposal that will automatically send out email notifications if one of their employees gets phished . From a report: The service is named " I Got Phished " and is managed by Abuse.ch, a non-profit organization known for its malware and cyber-crime tracking operations. Just like all other Abuse.ch services, I Got Phished will be free to use. Any company can sign-up via the I Got Phished website. Signing up only takes a few seconds. Subscribing for email notifications is done on a domain name basis, and companies don't have to expose a list of their employee email addresses to a third-party service. Once a company's security staff has subscribed to the service, I Got Phished will check its internal database for email addresses for the company's email domain. This database contains logs from phishing operations, with emails for phished victims. from Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff tha...
Post a Comment
Read more