Today in Transportation

First up, bicycles!

Matier & Ross are reporting that Muni is actually going to start up a program where people can rent bikes to get around. What they're thinking of is making it so any company that wants to be in the business of building our bus shelters would have to have bikes at the shelter people could rent. There's not much in the way of details or information or even plans so far, but it's something they're beginning to work on and have asked the six companies now bidding on building our bus shelter s to come up with a plan.

Next up, Octavia Street where there was a meeting last night about that particular intersection. City officials say they have a plan to cut down on all the dangers to bikers by widening the biking lane, taller warning signs, and installing a three-foot island to block cars. Chief traffic engineer, Jack Fleck (no relation to Gerry Fleck) said he's already put up some new signs. Also proposed is painting the bike lane line a nice green color and putting up cameras.

Now let's all hop off our bikes and get onto BART, which, as we all know, allows bikes.

In attempt to alleviate the massive problems, both financial and otherwise, that have beset the Peninsula portion of the line, BART is negotiating to take over the entire operation themselves. Currently, it's being run in conjunction with SamTrans and the regional Metropolitan Transportation Commission. What this means to you is that SamTrans had sort of forced BART to cut costs and so BART ran their trains more and more infrequently. Now, freed from the tethers of SamTrans, BART wants to do something totally crazy-- run more trains. Yep, the thinking is that if they run more trains, more people would ride it and so they'd make more money and, well, somebody took the crazy pills. There's a bunch of other stuff, mainly monetary breakdowns, but all of this sounds pretty cool to us.