I posted a link to a nice tear jerker by Bill Strickland about cancer victim families in Santa Clarita and the response was something like a quiet night with chirping crickets, except without the crickets.

But I post a link to this dramatic photo of Australian Michael Rogers punching a fan in the neck on Mount Palomar, and the crowd goes wild with retweets and responses!

That’s taking the High Road, Mick!

The photo was from the set of Tour of California Stage 8 photos that Ken Conley posted yesterday. There were a few freakos out there lending a uniquely California flair to the bike race. They couldn’t resist touching the cyclists and leaving their yellow chalk marks on the way up the mountain road.

Photo by Ken Conley

Photo by Ken Conley

Photo by Ken Conley

In case you didn’t notice: Those are not racers getting harassed in the above photos. Read and see more from Ken here.

The Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) decided last Wednesday how the $495 million in transportation funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) will be spent in the San Francisco Bay Area. The MTC is the transportation planning, coordinating and financing agency for the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area.

Almost all $5.1 million allocated for “bike/ped” projects are sidewalk and crosswalk improvements that benefit pedestrians but do little to benefit cyclists. $185,000 will go to the city of Woodside for “bike facility overlays” on Cañada Road, which I think means repaving the Class II bike lanes on Cañada.

There are many surface streets badly in need of repair throughout the Bay Area that will be rehabilitated from $122 million in ARRA funding. These street repairs will directly benefit cyclists. Let your cities know where the potholes are that need filling!

Bay Area transit agencies Here’s a breakdown on how much funding Bay Area transit agencies will receive from the ARRA stimulus package.

• BART will receive $65.4 million for maintenance, upgrades and station construction projects.
• Caltrain gets $10.4 million for maintenance, including a $200,000 line item specifically for more bike racks for the Bikes On Board program.
• Golden Gate Ferry will receive $9.4 million to refurbish ferry boats.
• San Francisco MTA gets $67.2 million for light rail vehicle repairs and upgrades, subway upgrades, bus refurbishment, equipment purchase, and facility maintenance.
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• SamTrans (San Mateo County Transportation) gets $7.8 million to purchase up to 137 new buses and perform preventative maintenance. Let’s hope they find the operating funding to pay drivers for those new buses!
• Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) will have $47.5 million to spend on 107 new hybrid buses and “bus stop enhancements.”
• ACE (the Altamont Commuter Express train service between Stockton and San Jose) will have $3 million to overhaul their locomotives.
• Central Contra Costa County Transit Authority (CCTA) will receive $4.3 million for preventive maintenance.
• $4 million is allocated to Tri Delta Transit in Eastern Contra Costa County for preventative maintenance, “support vehicle” replacement with hybrid cars, and $1 million for IT system upgrades (yay for my industry!)
• The city of Fairfield: $3.1 million for bus and equipment purchases.
• $3 million for Livermore Amador Valley Transit Authority for maintenance and rehab projects and a new bus wash facility.
• Napa County Transportation will spend $2.8 million on new buses and a park and ride parking lot.
• Santa Rosa CityBus: $4.3 million hybrid bus purchase, maintenance and enhancements.
• Sonoma County Transit will receive $2 million for maintenance and a new CNG bus.
• Union City will buy two buses with their $300,000.
• Vacaville: $2.2 million for a new bus and the “Vacaville Intermodal Station.”
• $7.7 million for the City of Vallejo on maintenance, ferry terminal ADA work, ferry engine overhauls, and facility upgrades and maintenance.
• Western Contra Costa County Area Transit (WestCAT) will receive $800,000 for maintenance.

The Bay Area regional Metropolitan Transportation Commission will distribute more than $90 million of Federal stimulus funds to Santa Clara County transportation projects, reports the Palo Alto Daily News. The biggest chunk of that is $47.5 million going to the Valley Transportation Authority for 107 new hybrid buses, with much of the rest going to highway and road projects. SamTrans will receive $7.9 million to fund operations and 137 new buses. Caltrain will receive $10.4 million for track and infrastructure repairs.

Read more.

Much more at MTC. I’ll take a look at this in detail myself.

A huge thank you to Chris Spagnuolo for mentioning @cyclelicious in his Mashable roundup of Cycling on Twitter. He did a great job describing each of the people on his list. People added more Twitter links in the comments section of that post.

Notable in his absence from Chris’s list is long time cycling journalist and social media maven @Carlton Reid. Carlton maintains the most exhaustive list of cycling tweeters.

Do you Tweet? Post your Twitter username and link in the comments.

NPR’s Marketplace talked with longtime journalist David Westphal earlier this week to talk about the challenges faced by newspapers.

A big challenge for the print media is that while online costs are substantially less than printing a dead tree edition, online advertising revenues are only 10% of what newspapers typically have gotten. Veteran news people are having a difficult time trying to find a business model that works for them.

Westphal has noticed the rise of hyperlocal political and issues blogging, though:

The start-ups that are online only, and that are very small — in some cases one-person operations, in some cases two or three — that are, however, more just focused on city government, city politics, development in kind of the core city. They don’t try to do everything. They try to do kind of the fundamental civic pieces that are important to a metropolitan area’s operation. And we’re seeing those develop rather quickly, actually.

Some of these metro, issues oriented blogs might be something like the local editions of Streetsblog, which started in New York and now has spinoffs in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Here’s my modest proposal for the people of the Rocky Mountain News: Hearst is selling the name, the website and the archives. Perhaps a core group of the laid off people can buy these assets and become a local-only and online-only publication.

There’s tremendous risk involved, and it’s important to get it “right” — many news agency attempts at social media I’ve seen don’t work too well. Many locally owned businesses are still reluctant to advertise online, preferring to spend thousands on a print ad over hundreds in online advertising. Most issues and metro blogs operate on a shoestring budget and depend on benefactors for most of their income.

We’re in the midst of major changes in the news industry. I’m hardly a news pundit or advertising expert, but I do believe strongly that the Fifth Estate of investigative and critical journalism is essential for democracy. Can a scaled back, online only Rocky Mountain News exist as a good resource to help Colorado citizens keep an eye on their government?

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