In 2023, an estimated 4,000 people died on California’s roadways. More than 30% of these traffic deaths happened on state-owned roads. It doesn’t have to be this way. SPUR — together with CalBike, WalkSF, StreetsforAll, KidSafeSF, and AARP California — is sponsoring Senate Bill 960 to make state roads that function as local streets safer by design. In this article, we share testimony from a California mom who lost her husband to a collision that safer street design could have prevented.
Among the many state housing bills SPUR is advocating for this year, we are sponsoring five in particular that would facilitate housing production through transit-oriented, mixed-income, and affordable residential development. The bills tackle issues from lack of transparency about the total costs of a project’s development impact fees to attempts by jurisdictions to thwart the so-called Builder’s Remedy.
Over time, San Francisco’s governance structure has evolved to distribute authority and maximize oversight. As a consequence, policies don’t always meet the needs of the people they were intended to serve. The lack of clear, coordinated action to address big challenges has led to a growing perception that city government isn’t working. SPUR’s latest report outlines how San Francisco can choose to design a better system that supports leadership and empowerment with clear lines of accountability.
A bill that would have authorized the Metropolitan Transportation Commission to place a regional transportation revenue measure on the ballot in 2026 has been paused, bringing the prospect of severe transit cuts ever closer. SPUR supports a recently announced effort by MTC to identify a path to a new bill that would be introduced in the 2025 legislative session.
Bay Area residents are keenly aware of the threat of sea level rise as the planet warms — but most of us know far less about the impacts of groundwater rise. In the Bay Area, those impacts will be felt long before sea level rise causes overland flooding. That’s one of the takeaways of a new SPUR case study that examines how one Bay Area community, East Palo Alto, would likely be affected in the absence of adaptation efforts. We spoke with author Sarah Atkinson about her findings.