Editors note: In this week's paper, we offered a series of proposals for discussion at the community congress Aug. 14th and 15th. Here's one that we couldn't fit:

By Jerry Cauthen

San Francisco is a transit-first city, yet its bus system is perennially in crisis. Everyone knows Muni needs fixing—but how do we do it in a way that honors the needs of both drivers and riders, while deepening San Francisco’s commitment to sustainability and transit innovation? How do we maintain and improve service when Muni and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency face deep budget deficits and service cuts on a regular basis?

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San Francisco is now one step closer to becoming the first American city to implement a congestion pricing plan as the San Francisco County Transportation Authority staff prepares to present their final study findings to the Board of Supervisors this fall.Read more »

Covering Mayor Gavin Newsom's devious exploits for this story last week, watching as the ever-ambitious Newsom sacrificed the city's fiscal future on the altar of political expediency and his increasingly rigid anti-tax ideology, it seemed as if there was nothing remotely redeeming about this callow, self-serving man. Read more »

Joining American cities including Portland, San Francisco, and New York in borrowing the temporarily car-free ciclovia concept pioneered in Bogota, Colombia, Oakland officials will clear the automobiles from the heart of the city this Sund Read more »

The fate of San Francisco's Bicycle Plan and the four-year-old court injunction against implementing its projects remains unclear following a nearly three-hour hearing today that delved deeply into the minutiae of traffic studies, mitigation requirements, and the dictates of the California Environmental Quality Act.Read more »

A day after bicyclists and pedestrians took over the streets of the Mission for the popular, incident-free Sunday Streets, and a day before the court hearing on whether to end the four-year-old injunction against bike-related projects in San Francisco, Judge Peter Busch today (6/21) issued a noncommital tentative ruling in the case, indicating he needs a hearing on myriad technical details to reach a decision.Read more »

Despite high-profile recent improvements to San Francisco's bicycle network – including a half-dozen new bike lanes since last fall, a green bike lane on Market Street separated from cars, and new on-street bike parking on Valencia and Divisidero streets – the city is still prevented by a court injunction from creating bike lanes that have been sought for a decade. But that could change as early as next week. Read more »

Bicyclists and motorists often clash in San Francisco, over space on the roadways and in conversations about each others' behaviors, often in the most acrimonious fashion imaginable. My recent writing on bike issues has prompted lots of feedback and controversy – including lovely comments such as “Steve, keep riding your bike without a helmet, with any luck you'll get in an accident and what little brains you have will spill out onto the street and we won't have to read your smug condescending bullshit about bikes anymore.” – but I'm not the only one interested in trying to figure out how this gulf got so wide or how to bridge it. Read more »

By Adam Lesser

City Hall needed an overflow room to accommodate all the disenchanted Muni riders who showed up to protest the two-year San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency budget plan yesterday (4/20). The budget locks in a 10 percent service cut through July 1^st, 2011, at which point the MTA board is hopeful that the service cut will be lowered to 5 percent. The controversial budget was adopted on a 4-3 vote, and now goes to the Board of Supervisors, where progressive supervisors have already signaled opposition to the service cuts. Read more »

With the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency Board of Directors poised to approve a truly terrible two-year budget today (4/20) – one that locks in Muni service cuts, subsidizes the police and other city departments, and fails to seek new revenue sources – there is talk about reforming an agency run exclusively by appointees of Mayor Gavin Newsom. Read more »