Now that Ed Lee has gotten a couple breakfasts with Willie Brown out of the way he had a moment to sit down with the bike/walk/train activists over at Streetsblog and discuss some hot button issues that he will definitely have time to handle in his remaining 10 months in office and won't get caught up in City Hall's bureaucracy at all: things like completing the SFBC's Connecting the City project and a trial run of a protected bike lane on that problematic section of Fell Street.
While the interview's lead-off question, "How did you get to work today?" gives Lee another chance to talk up his bold move of ditching the Mayoral SUV in favor of a much more sensible Ford Fusion hybrid, the Mayor also reveals his soft spot for alternative means of transportation. As he says, he occasionally takes Muni when he has downtown meetings and likes to ride his bicycle on the weekends.
As for those other programs: Lee sounds very adamant about executing Newsom's executive directive to increase pedestrian safety, which we think even the staunchest anti-Newsom holdouts can get behind. The Bike Coalition's ambitious project, on the other hand, is going to take a little more work to "get the whole city family together and see how we can make that work from the ground up." (Which: can you imagine that family gathering? That might actually be more ambitious than SFBC's mission of connecting the whole town with bikeways.) In the end, the easy win for Streetsblog was Lee's support on a trial run at a protected bike lane for Fell Street, which the mayor says he's keen on getting to quickly. And since he's such a personable guy, Lee has already invited Streetsbloggers back next month to check up on how he's doing.
