Blog
Search the SPUR Blog
-
October 11, 2011SPUR's 2011 Voter Guide Now Online By Corey Marshall, Good Government Director Absentee ballots will start to arrive this week, which means it's time for the annual SPUR Voter Guide, our in-depth analysis of all local San Francisco ballot propositions.With only eight measures on the docket, this is a short ballot for our fine city — but it's certainly not short on substance. Voters will weigh in on dueling pension reform plans, bonds for schools and roads, and even a sales tax increase. These measures place billions of dollars at stake, making it more...
-
September 27, 2011Why the MTC's Toll Lane Plan Won't Meet the Goals of Road Pricing By Aaron BialickThe Bay Area has a lot to gain from pricing its freeways. Two of the major benefits are money for transit and less highway congestion. High-Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes are a miniature form of road pricing, offering solo drivers the option to buy their way into High-Occupancy Vehicle lanes and bypass the congested, more heavily-subsidized highway lanes.In 2008, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) proposed a plan to expand the region’s network of HOT lanes to 800 miles by 2035....
-
September 14, 2011A Vision for New Greenspace in Southeastern SF by Gretchen HilyardWhat are unaccepted streets and paper streets, and how can they help make San Francisco a greener place?SPUR’s 2011 Piero N. Patri Fellow, Sarah Moos, spent this summer studying the city's unmaintained and underused rights-of-way. The resulting project, Unaccepted Streets: From Paper to Reality, proposes to transform some of the city's overlooked areas into a publicly accesible network that would link communities to open spaces such as the Blue Greenway, as well as to each other....
-
September 14, 2011Is City Soil Really More Toxic Than Rural Soil? by Eli Zigas, Food Systems and Urban Agriculture Program Manager As someone who works on urban agricultural policy, I'm often asked, "Is city-grown food safe?" The question comes from aspiring urban gardeners and concerned eaters alike. And it seems to stem from both a fear of the known and a fear of the unknown. First, the fear of the known: Common urban contaminants include lead, arsenic and other heavy metals leaked into soil from old paint, leaded gasoline, modern car exhaust and industrial land-use. These metals are responsible for a...
-
September 8, 2011Why a Gas Tax Extension Is No Longer Enough to Save Our Roads, Jobs — or Economy By Jennifer WarburgOn Tuesday, Congress returned to Washington with only 11 days to pass essential legislation: the reauthorization of all major national transit and highway projects and the gas tax that funds them. Stalemate or delay will cost billions of dollars and millions of jobs, shutting down highway and transit construction projects nationwide and putting hundreds of thousands of Americans out of work in the midst of an unstable, jobless recovery.Passage of regular infrastructure spending packages used to...
-
September 8, 2011How to Solve San Francisco’s Parks Funding Crisis By Corey Marshall, SPUR Good Government Director Walking or biking through the trails of Golden Gate Park, it can be easy to wonder what all the fuss is about. Budget battles and controversies over park concessions are a foreign concept when meandering past the botanical gardens, running in Kezar Stadium or picking up your children at an afterschool program. Honestly? Parks in San Francisco look pretty good.While much of life within our parks remains serene, the politics of parks funding is unfortunately anything but. Public funding has been...
-
September 1, 2011How Can We Reclaim Market Street? Gretchen HilyardSan Francisco’s Market Street has a long and fascinating history: from its ambitious beginnings as an over-scaled boulevard, laid out by Jasper O’Farrell in 1847, to its heyday as the city’s vibrant theater district in the early twentieth century. Market Street rose to prominence after the 1906 Earthquake, survived a series of urban planning experiments in the mid-twentieth century, and absorbed the important yet disruptive insertion of BART beneath its surface in 1972. Today...
-
August 31, 2011BART of the Future By Jennifer WarburgForget what your mother told you about "it's what’s on the inside that counts.” In the case of BART trains, it’s all about what’s on the outside.BART’s new fleet of cars is on track to begin service in 2016. This month, BART provided a first look at the concepts for the new train cars, holding a series of forums for the public to weigh in on the design of the interiors of the future.The most important change in the new fleet, however, is one made to the...
-
August 30, 2011Food Desert No More: New Grocery Store Opens in the Bayview by Eli Zigas, Food Systems and Urban Agriculture Program ManagerIn many neighborhoods in San Francisco, the opening of a new grocery store is notable. But in the Bayview, a new Fresh & Easy store that opened on August 24 filled a full-scale grocery store gap that had persisted for more than 15 years. “It’s all about health, about neighborhood vitality, about jobs, and about fulfilling old promises,” explained Mayor Ed Lee at the opening. “That is what this store represents.”The store opening, planned since late 2007, marked...
-
August 26, 2011Election 2011: How Did SF’s Pension Problem Get This Bad? By Corey Marshall, Good Government Policy DirectorWith two different pension-reform measures on the upcoming ballot, it’s no secret that pension reform will have a significant impact on the November election. But how did the city get to the point of having a problem of this magnitude? Clearly the recession has played a big part, but what about the many negotiated increases in benefits over the course of the last decade?While there has been much discussion here at SPUR about the magnitude of the pension crisis in San Francisco, scant...
Blog RSS Feed