Reset San Francisco | Phil Ting for Assembly 2012

Reset Caltrain! Join Friends of Caltrain October 21 at 8:30 am at SPUR

By: Yoriko Kishimoto, Former Mayor of Palo Alto

What’s the top performing San Francisco transit that desperately needs your support?

That’s right, it’s Caltrain. Reset San Francisco has a great transportation fact sheet that says some 10,000 vehicles go in and out of the city from the Peninsula by 280 and 101 every work day. This can be compared to more than 11,000 daily boardings onto Caltrain within San Francisco. Can you imagine what would happen if Caltrain went under or, as it threatened to do last year, cut its service by half? Read More

Don’t Forget to Look Up

Check out today’s photo!

This beautiful, twelve-story high rise, located on a very popular street in of San Francisco, was completed in 1904. It is also one of the only buildings to survive the 1906 earthquake. Today, you'll probably know it more for the eclectic entertainers that perform in front of it.
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Community Health Investments Trending Down

In the last two decades, San Francisco’s government per capita spending on community health as a percentage of the general fund has remained relatively constant (even adjusting for inflation). This is evident in the screenshot from the California Common Sense San Francisco data transparency portal, a series of interactive data visualizations that help San Franciscans understand the city government's finances. Read More

Reset San Francisco FAQs

We at Reset San Francisco have pulled together our own FAQ page all about San Francisco and San Francisco city services and government. We think these FAQs will make it easier to access and navigate city services and to answer some questions about San Francisco.

Our Reset SF FAQ page will continue to grow as we, and you, come up with new questions and answers to those questions. And we’ve added some new FAQs. When you have questions about navigating SFGov.org and the different departmental websites, turn to our FAQ. If we haven’t addressed your question yet, shoot us an email, and we’ll try to find the answer and post it. Read More

For Young People, Getting Involved Means Staying Involved

By: Ben Shore

It seems that every election cycle brings with it a new discussion of how to rectify one of the most unfortunate facts about voting in America: Young people just don’t vote very often.

And when it comes to low-income youth, well, they really don’t vote at all.

For a long time, it was conventional wisdom that youth, especially low-income youth, either involved themselves in political activities such as rallies or protests, or they voted – but generally they didn’t do both. That was the explanation for why we see a lot of young people at rallies and protests but not a whole lot at the voting booth on Election Day. Read More

Getting Around San Francisco – Your Phone Will Tell You How

San Franciscans have a lot of choices for getting around our beautiful city – we can walk, bike, take the Muni or drive. But what’s the fastest choice? The cheapest? The healthiest? The most environmentally aware?

Now there’s an app to find out.

With the use of a new Smartphone web application called Reroute.it, we can (almost instantly) calculate travel times, costs, calories burned and carbon emissions created for travel choices. Read More

SF Spending on Police Yielding Improvements in City’s Safety

According to research by California Common Sense, over the last 10 years San Francisco city government spending on the police department has increased by nearly a fifth, and the results are showing.

The California Common Sense graph shows that the percentage of San Francisco residents who reported feeling safe has increased by nearly 50 percent.

Additionally, the homicide rate has been cut in half. Thus, it seems San Francisco is getting a great outcome for its small increase in spending on police. Perhaps other departments should examine these trends as a model for better spending. What do you think about the SF police and positive implications of the data presented? Read More

Etiquette Signs Tell It Like It Is in NYC

Graphic Artist Jay Shells takes the initiative to post etiquette signs throughout the city

At Reset we believe in better living through better information. Great signs can do a lot to help make our cities faster, smarter and better, which is why we created our Muni “Step Down” signs.

That’s why New York graphic designer Jay Shells is a Reset inspiration. Shells got tired of the rude manners of his fellow New Yorkers and decided to take matters into his own hands. Under the name Metropolitan Etiquette Authority, he created official-looking DIY etiquette signs around Manhattan that would make Emily Post proud. Read More

San Francisco Has the Second Worst Drivers In the State

Here’s one from the file marked, “You Already Knew This, but Now You Have a Study to Prove It.”

According to the seventh annual Allstate America's Best Drivers Report, San Francisco has the second worst drivers in California. Los Angeles, the home of non-stop traffic and crazy freeway interchanges, ranked safer than us! The Allstate report ranked the 200 largest cities in the United States in terms of frequency of car collisions to determine which cities have the safest drivers. For the second year in a row, Fort Collins, CO took top honors as America’s Safest Driving City. Drivers in Fort Collins are 28.6 percent less likely to be in a car accident than the national average. Read More

San Francisco Transit Spending Up Without Any Service Improvements

New research by California Common Sense found that over the last 10 years, San Francisco city government spending on public transportation has increased by nearly 50 percent, yet the number of scheduled service hours has remained fairly constant while on-time performance has decreased slightly. This is no surprise to regular Muni riders. Read More