Month: December 2009

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I thought we would start with the good times of the year.  Tomorrow we'll look at "the worst of times" and award our stories and advocate of the year awards.  Happy reading!

(editor's note: If you're looking for Streetsie results, they're coming tomorrow...)

Amongst the most prestigious of the annual Streetsie awards is the Person of the Year, the award bestowed on the person not named Villaraigosa or Schwarzenegger who most dominated the discussion and debate during the last year.  The person doesn't have to be a hero, they could be a villain.  Nominees were submitted by the committee that volunteered to help with the Streetsies this year and by me.  However, the Person of the year will be selected by all of us.  The top ten figures that are near and dear to our Livable Streets' hearts can be found below.  Leave your top three choices for Livable Streets Person of the Year in the comments section.  I'll start.

Friends,

Some see it as a niche ride for activists.  Some see it as Stephen Box's attempt to get on television and continue his feud with Councilman Tom LaBonge.  Still others as a ride that engenders mire bad will with city agencies than it's worth.  After all, how many hard core cycling activists really want to ride through car choked streets to look at a bunch of holiday lights?

Ever since the opening of S.F. Streetsblog, we spend a lot of time looking North at what our brothers and sisters in Northern California are up to, that we miss stories happening just to our South.  Thanks to Biking In L.A., some were able to keep up with the case of Andrew Woolley, a cyclist wrongly ticketed, tried and convicted of passing car traffic on the left.  Why was he wrongly convicted?  Because, just as the LAPD's obsession for ticketing cyclists for using crosswalks is "extra-legal," there is no law saying that what Woolsey did was illegal.  However, this story has a happy ending as Woolsey successfully gets the city to admit it's own error.

(I figured some of you would enjoy this.  Originally posted as "A Lost Decade for San Francisco's Critical Mass?" at SF Streetsblog - DN)

So the snow that hit the Northeast over the weekend is gradually sublimating and melting away, and a couple of the blogs on the Streetsblog Network are looking at the difference in the way municipalities treated pedestrians and motorists during and after the first big storm of the winter.