San Francisco

As the MTA capital plan funding gap has come into focus, there's been a lot of discussion about how new development can help pay for the transit service it requires. It turns out the city already has a tool that links real estate with transit improvements, but it's so limited that it's been used to fund transit upgrades only 10 times in more than three decades. For a more robust model, planners should look to San Francisco.

In case you need a little pick-me-up this morning, here's some good news out of San Francisco. Voters resoundingly rejected Proposition L, a local ballot measure designed to halt the city's progress on improving streets for walking, biking, and transit. As of the most recent available count, with nearly all precincts reporting, 62 percent of San Francisco voters had said "No" to Prop L.

Ding, dong... LOS is dead. At least as far as the state of California is concerned.

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.

Less than a week after Queens Community Board 3 signed off on DOT's PARK Smart pilot for Jackson Heights, New York's neighborhood-level parking policy changes were given some national context on Wednesday at the National Association of City Transportation Officials' "Designing Cities" conference.