Yum! Did you smell something nasty in downtown SF yesterday? Some people described it like raw sewage, and others like rotting meat. Turns out it was from the sewage holding system, which was ripening in the sun faster than it was getting flushed into the system. Apparently we have a system where waste gets shunted into holding boxes located throughout the city, which periodically get flushed out with water -- but not periodically enough......

So the Chronicle says not that many people took advantage of free public transportation today for the first Spare The Air day of the season, but the BART train we were on was certainly pretty crowded. We love Spare The Air days, where all of a sudden the kids that everyone always says they never see in San Francisco materialize out of nowhere and ride the rails all day. (Or for today, until 1 p.m.,......

A warm spell is rolling into the Bay Area -- so it's time for our perennial post complaining about how much we haaaaaaate it when it's hot. Bring back the fog! Bring back the fog! So it's going to be stiflingly hot for the next few days (yes, we know, it's not as bad as it is in every other part of the country, but that's why we don't live in those other parts of......

Last week's winner, the East Bay Express: The Spare The Air advocates don't take BART. Book section: Their book reviewer thinks that Special Topics in Calamity Physics is pretentious. Cover article: the new hip downtown Oakland scene, and backlash. Korean food in Oakland. Amoeba's plans to counteract the downloading revolution -- among other things, they let you "rent" CDs by buying them at full price and then returning them for 75% back after you've ripped......

You know who doesn't want to Spare The Air anymore? BART. Disturbed by the uptick in crime as a result of the all-day free rides (on that last Friday of Sparing The Air, the BART police went on twice as many calls as usual), the BART police chief has proposed that they go back to just making BART free during commute hours on extra hot and smoggy days. Matier and Ross had some lurid crimes......

....by which we refer of course to the weather. Phew! While we didn't break any records yesterday, it was sweltery enough that they declared it a Spare The Air day. BART ridership was up 26%, while the Oakland-Alameda ferries didn't remember to tell people until after the ship set sail that they weren't participating in the free fare program (too expensive for them). While temperatures in San Francisco were around the 80s, it got into......

We're a couple of bucks richer today, as today's Spare The Air day means free rides all day on Bay Area public transit. Fare boxes and gates will be deactivated, so just get on and take your free rides any time today. Sure, Muni will be hot and crowded as hell itself, but at least today we won't be paying for it. Even SFist Jon's refraining from his usual earth-killing self-absorption and staying off the......

We're never all that psyched to go to work, but it's a tiny bit more palatable when we don't have to pay to get there. That's why we'll be getting out of bed with an unusual spring in our step, as tomorrow marks 2005's first Spare The Air Day. According to this Chron piece, this means that almost all local transit providers (including BART and Muni) will offer free service from 4-9 a.m. Tuesday......