SF makes pitch to be home of transit of the future

Bay Area transportation leaders, academics and technology executives filled a City Hall conference room Wednesday to pitch U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx on a plan to transform — and reform — San Francisco’s transportation system.

San Francisco is one of seven cities competing for $50 million — $40 million from the U.S. Department of Transportation and $10 million from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Vulcan Inc. — in the federal agency’s Smart City Challenge.

Crowded around a long conference table, San Francisco officials outlined an ambitious plan that aims to eventually create “the world’s first shared, electric, connected and automated transportation system,” in which people share autonomous electric cars and ride self-driving shuttles to transit and in which businesses haul freight using automated vehicles.

To develop such a system, the city would create a Smart City Institute and work with UC Berkeley and dozens of Bay Area companies that have promised, if San Francisco wins, to contribute $99 million in software, hardware, training, research and testing and deploying autonomous vehicles.

While a transportation system relying on self-driving vehicles seems to be far off, the city’s plan includes short-term visions as well, focusing on 10 percent changes in each of the following areas: boosts in transit use, bicycling, walking and shared rides; a decline in the number of fatal collisions; a reduction in transportation-produced emissions; and a reduction in the amount of money lower-income families spend on transportation.