Opinion/Editorial

Self-driving cars won't happen over night, but it's time to plan for them in a way that makes sense.

We risk a replay of the mistakes made in changing our cities for the automobile age. In adapting to an autonomous future, we must not sideline people, the public realm, and the built environment in favor of the needs of one transportation mode as we did a century ago.

Tomorrow, the South Coast Air Quality Management District will vote on a long-term regional clean air plan for the four counties under its jurisdiction. The plan as currently written contains few new mandatory measures to reduce pollution, instead focusing on voluntary measures and an ineffective, easily-gamed market-based pollution control mechanism.

California is in the midst discussions about how to raise money to "fix our roads." Ananth Prasad, senior vice president for HNTB corporation, has some suggestions about how best to spend any revenue raised.

In response to our recent story about legislative efforts to find a compromise on transportation funding, Streetsblog received the following post from Art Hadnett, president of HNTB’s West Division.

Some members of the mainstream media seem to be enjoying a good rip on California's climate change policies, especially its cap-and-trade program, heralding its imminent collapse and describing Governor Jerry Brown as desperate and “nervous” about whether he can save it.

The new Transbay Transit Center (TTC) is scheduled for completion in 2017. The foundation of the TTC, and the thing that makes it such an improvement over the old Transbay bus terminal it's replacing, is its underground train station for Caltrain and High Speed Rail. It will bring Caltrain, the connection between San Francisco and Silicon Valley, into close proximity with five Muni and four BART lines and over 40 bus connections, not to mention San Francisco's huge downtown employment center. The TTC should one day be the most important transit hub outside of New York City—a Grand Central Station of the West.