Looking for a little engaged interactive theater in your life? Check out two "PARKing day" events being organized in Sacramento. The idea is to (temporarily) convert parking spaces into, well, park spaces to illustrate the potential for increasing usable, green space in urban areas by reducing our reliance on automobiles and the space they demand.
Sous les pavés, la plage!
Today's Sacramento Bee has some encouraging news in this era of baffling transit cutbacks. The City of Sacramento and RT are teaming up to provide shuttle service to connect neighborhoods south of Highway 50 with the Zinfandel light rail stop! The story appears here.
Kudos to both the City and RT for implementing this program. I hope we'll see more of the same in coming years.
In a testament to the power of neighborhood groups to affect transportation policy, at least at the municipal level, the Bee reports that the Sacramento City Council will consider alternative locations for a new Sacramento River Crossing. And in what appears to be a developing rhetorical theme, at least one council member contends that transit access should be a central consideration in the location of the bridge. The Bee article implies that CalTrans disagrees:
I'm not sure there's any real contradiction between the desire to keep local traffic off the freeways and the desires to facilitate transit access and protect neighborhood livability. That is, there's no contradiction unless you assume that automobiles should continue to be the dominant mode of transportation in the region.[Council Member Rob Fong's] goal for a river crossing, he said, is to connect commuters quickly to major transit stops, such as light rail, not to put an undue burden on residential neighborhoods.
Caltrans officials contend the Highway 50/Capital City Freeway crossing of the Sacramento River -- also called the Pioneer Bridge -- is becoming crowded with local traffic forced onto the freeway.
