• BART had another significant service meltdown on Thursday morning, which stemmed from an equipment problem near San Bruno. The issue caused trouble for anyone using the trains to get to SFO, but ultimately caused significant delays throughout the system for several hours. [Chronicle]
• San Francisco police have released a photo of a man who was possibly a bouncer at a nightclub on Fourth Street — The Grand, or Thriller Social Club — who allegedly punched a woman repeatedly on the morning of February 9 following a verbal altercation. [KRON4]
• Waymo and Waze are partnering on a pothole-mapping project in San Francisco... your move Public Works. [NBC Bay Area]

National:

• The First Lady doth protest too much, having just given a press conference no one was expecting Thursday about her connections, or lack thereof, to Jeffrey Epstein. Apparently responding to online rumor — or maybe an upcoming bombshell report!? — and the logical assumption many have made that Epstein might have introduced Melania and Donald in the late 1990s, the First Lady told reporters Thursday, "The individuals lying about me are devoid of ethical standards, humility, and respect." [YouTube / NY Times]
• NATO is hoping not to become a casualty of the Iran War, and Trump still wants Greenlands, so... [New York Times]
• Colombian singer Karol G, who is headlining at Coachella this weekend, says she wants to speak out about ICE and the injustices happening in this country, but she's been advised not to because her visa could be revoked. [KRON4]

Video:

• In case you missed it, 60 Minutes had a piece on Sunday about California's high-speed rail project and where it stands. It's a fairly bleak take, with a slight glimmer of hope, and the answer to the question of why other countries have succeeded in building high-speed rail and we haven't is that they've chosen to pay for it, and we have not.

Photo by Caleb Wright

The city of Oakland (and its insurance carrier) has agreed to payout $3.25 million to a woman who was seriously injured after she slammed into a pothole while riding her bike on Mountain Boulevard in the Oakland Hills in 2011.

According to her lawsuit filed in Alameda County, 35-year-old crash victim Dulcey Bower was wearing a helmet at the time, but the pitfall sent her head-first over the handlebars, sailing 21 feet before crashing into the pavement. The impact left her in a medically-induced coma for four days and she had to have seven operations to repair the damage to her head, face, teeth and jaw. She now sports titanium plates in her mouth.

The lawsuit also stated that the city of Oakland had failed to repair potholes along the stretch of Mountain Boulevard even though other cyclists had been complaining for years. The pothole was repaired four months after Bower's crash.

The same little corner of Oakland's upscale Montclair neighborhood saw another tragic event around a year later: in 2012, a woman in her 20s was found suffering from gunshot wounds and lying on the shoulder of the onramp to Highway 13.

[Chron]
[ABC7]

Yesterday, the Board of Supervisors agreed to pay out a nearly quarter-million-dollar settlement to the victim of some shoddy street surfacing. The 68-year-old victim of the city's boobytrap was leaving the San Francisco Ballet's season opener two years ago when she stepped in a flooded pothole on Franklin Street and broke both her feet in the process.

The woman, who was a ballet employee (but not a ballerina), was forced to wear a bilateral cast and sued the city for neglecting to warn pedestrians about the hazard to their safety. According to the Examiner, the City Attorney tried to argue that the woman "voluntarily placed herself in a position of peril" by walking on the street, but that argument didn't stick. The $245,000 settlement is compensation for lost wages, medical bills, loss of earning capacity and emotional distress caused by the incident that left her "really fragile".

While we wish this woman a complete and speedy recovery, if you would like your own handsome payout from the City and County of San Francisco (and aren't afraid to hurt yourself in the process) we have embedded a handy map below showing recently reported potholes for you to fall in*. (Disclaimer: Please do not fall in potholes on purpose. Thanks.)

Data via: SeeClickFix.com
[SFEx]

Potholes have became our big pet peeve lately-- you can’t get anywhere without being jostled in every which way. Every time we drive down Franklin we're afraid we're going to hit a hole and not come up. And trying to avoid them gets dangerous because swerving to avoid them usually involves swerving into other lanes, never a good thing. Seriously, we think everyone in the city could agree that the Streets of San Francisco look like Edward James Olmos' face in HD. And hating on potholes isn’t just for drivers, but bikers too (it, however, appears to be a good thing for lawyers). Anyways, there’s a statistical measuring stick for the condition of the roads here in the city (we believe the formula is miles of road divided by number of potholes times amount of coffee accidentally spilled on people’s laps). In 1998, the city received a score of 78 out of 100. In 2005, the rating dropped to 64 out of 100. The DPW estimates that there’s the equivalent of 2,262 city blocks that need fixing, at an estimated cost of $427 million bucks to fix.

The city's plan is to work on eleven major streets and some smaller, neighborhood streets over the next few years. Those streets planned to be de-holed include Seventh Ave to Lincoln Way, Folsom Street in SOMA, Bush Street, Cesar Chavez, and a bunch of other roads. As any driver knows, that’s only the tip of the iceberg and even the Powers that Be admit that the amount of money being spent won't even be close to fixing what needs. The money will come out of the gasoline tax and not the city budget.

And while they're at it, can somebody please start working on 101? You could build a condo in some of the holes that line that highway.

Photo by geekstinkbreath/Flickr