Holy s***! San Francisco names sustainable mobility consultant Jeff Tumlin as director of the SF Municipal Transportation Agency

He's a great speaker, author of Sustainable Transportation Planning: Tools for Creating Vibrant, Healthy, and Resilient Communities, a principal at the Nelson/Nygaard transportation consulting firm. The first time I heard him talk was at the Virginia Transit Association annual meeting in Arlington County, Virginia, maybe in 2005?

-- Jeff Tumlin will join the SFMTA as Director of Transportation, SFMTA press release
-- "‘We in transportation have to clean up the mess of bad housing policy,’ says new SFMTA director," Curbed SF

Interestingly, a few years ago, he served as the transportation director for the City of Oakland for a brief time, to get their house in order and in a conversation with him he said it was one of his most interesting jobs ever.

SF MTA is an innovator:

• including the heritage streetcar program
• integrating parking enforcement within the agency
• innovative pass products
• public space enhancement/urban design programs
• recently announcing moving Market Street to a transit prioritized street
• etc.

Although it has problems too.

For me the rail transit system there is a particularly important example in how it is "monocentric" vis a vis the polycentric form of the BART system as discussed by Steve Belmont in Cities in Full.