Bryan Goebel

Dear friends and colleagues:

I'm very happy and honored to announce I have been named the editor for
Streetsblog San Francisco. I will now transition from mainstream media to media advocacy and establish my roots as a transportation policy activist.

I am a journalist at heart, but I also have to be an activist. I'm angry! I'm on my bike every day. I walk around the city. I ride muni and BART and I don't see the kind of real progress we deserve.

299 Valencia Street

By Bryan Goebel

The San Francisco Planning Commission has unanimously approved a developer’s conditional use request to build new underground parking above the ratio set in the Market & Octavia Neighborhood Plan, betraying the spirit of a sustainable blueprint that took nearly a decade to craft, and inviting more vehicle congestion to the transit-rich Mission District, where a majority of residents do not own cars.

“For the planning commission to just give away something that should be earned…is quite offensive, actually, after eight years of a democratic planning process,” said Jason Henderson, a Hayes Valley neighborhood activist and assistant professor of geography at San Francisco State University.

The parking lot would sit below a proposed five-story building at 299 Valencia Street -- now a car share lot -- that would house 32 condos likely to be priced around a million dollars each.

Anti-racist activist and writer Tim Wisehas written 175 essays on racism and white privilege but most have not become as viral on the Internet as his recent essay, “This Is Your Nation on White Privilege.”

In this interview, he talks about how Barack Obama’s success has reinforced racism, how race is playing out between the candidates and why he thinks the “Bradley effect” won’t play a big role in this election.

"Regardless of where you stand in this campaign… we have a lot of work to do in this country to deal with the ongoing racial divide that exists not only on a personal level but on an institutional level.”

For any supporter of Barack Obama worried about his chances in the South the Nation's Bob Moser has written a book that offers some hope.

In "Blue Dixie: Awakening the South's Democratic Majority," one of the best books of the political season, Moser writes "the South's heady half century of rising education levels and unprecedented in-migration, as well as manufacturing job losses since the early 1990s, have made the region fertile territory for a reborn Democratic populism."

In this interview, he talks about how Obama is embracing the South, what the Democrats must do to win the South, the Democrats' non-Southern strategy, Howard Dean's fifty state strategy, the racial politics of the South, what's happening on the ground and how the South's population is changing with the rise of more Latino and African American voters.

The Big Squeeze
Stagnate wages, worsening health benefits, the erosion of unions and pension benefits and the fact that American workers are being forced to work harder and harder have created what New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse calls, "The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker."

His book is an exposé about how companies are squeezing the American worker, in some cases illegally, and being allowed to get away with it.

In this interview, Greenhouse also sizes up where Barack Obama and John McCain stand on labor issues.

David Foster WallaceI first discovered David Foster Wallace in the pages of the Atlantic and the New Yorker. His essay on KFI's John Ziegler is, for me, the best piece ever written on talk radio.

But the work that established Wallace as a major American literary figure was his giant novel, "Infinite Jest".

Wallace died Friday at the age of 46.

In this interview, Marshall Boswell, a novelist and associate professor of English at Rhodes College in Memphis, talks about Wallace's literary legacy.

A student supporter of Evo Morales: Photo by ReutersBolivia's president and the governors of two opposition states, Santa Cruz and Tarija, have agreed to sit down for talks aimed at diffusing a political crisis that has lead to a wave of violence resulting in the deaths of at least a dozen people.

Jim Schultz of the Democracy Center, a global justice organization based in San Francisco and Cochabamba, talks about what lead up to the crisis and how the divisions in the country are based on class, ethnicity and region.

Adam BockPlaywright Adam Bock grew up with a family of environmental activists in Canada.

"My mom, I think, believes a little stronger that you can work in the system. My aunt didn't. So my aunt would take us and we'd do sort of these terrible things, which were for a good cause."

They sound a lot like characters in Bock's play, "The Shaker Chair."

In this wide-ranging conversation, he talks about his process as a writer, language, his identity as a gay playwright, growing up in Canada and many other issues.

Tony KushnerTony Kushner is one of the greatest contemporary playwrights.

His masterpiece, "Angels in America," won the Pulitzer prize.

In this interview recorded at his Manhattan office, he touches on the current struggle for LGBT rights, gay marriage, divisions in the LGBT community and the state of American theatre.