Aaron Bialick

Bay Area Bike Share will expand to a 7,000-bike system over the next two years and venture into Oakland, Berkeley, and Emeryville. San Francisco's system will dramatically increase to 4,500 bikes, and San Jose's will expand to 1,000.

New Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf showed promise as an executive with a smart vision for her city's streets at the annual kick-off party for Young Professionals in Transportation's SF Bay chapter last week.

Transportation Alternatives Policy Director Noah Budnick has been named the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition's new executive director, the SFBC announced today. Budnick will succeed Leah Shahum, who will step down after 12 years leading the organization.

Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook and a major contributor to San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, has spent $49,000 of his personal fortune to propel a ballot initiative that seeks to enshrine free parking as city policy, according to the SF Chronicle. Parker gave $100,000 to Lee's mayoral campaign in 2011.

When Sarah Harling was hospitalized by a minivan driver who made a left turn into her at a stop sign intersection, she says the SFPD officer who filed the police report included a fabricated statement from her claiming that she "approached the stop sign without stopping."

Donald Shoup may be known as a guru of smart parking policy, but even he has found a few surprises in the data collected so far from SFpark.

On the morning of March 29 last year, Chris Bucchere biked through a crowded crosswalk in San Francisco's Mission District, striking 71-year-old Sutchi Hui, who died of his injuries four days later. As should be the case for any traffic fatality, SF District Attorney George Gascón spent considerable time building a case -- collecting GPS data and surveillance footage and tracking down witnesses. While footage of the crash did not conclusively show that Bucchere had entered the intersection on a red light, he had been seen disobeying other traffic signals leading up the crash. In June, Gascón announced he would charge Bucchere with felony vehicular manslaughter.

The idea of removing the northern section of Highway 280 near Mission Bay in San Francisco is gaining more traction as planners look for ideal ways to usher in high-speed rail and transit-oriented development in the city's core.

Editor's note: As the prosecution of cyclist Chris Bucchere, accused of manslaughter for fatally striking pedestrian Sutchi Hui, has drawn national attention, we thought this story would be of interest to our New York readers.