A.M. Splash: Human Waste Jams BART Escalators; Muni Free Rider Plan Stalls; SJ Mulls Sales Tax Hike; 101 Carpool Lane Opens

Once the stations close, the bottom of BART station stairwells in downtown San Francisco are often a prime location for homeless people to camp for the night or find a private place to relieve themselves. All those biological excretions can gum up the wheels and gears of BART's escalators, shutting them down for long periods of extended repairs, increasing station cleaning costs and creating an unpleasant aroma for morning commuters.

The much-debated plan to let low-income kids in San Francisco hop aboard Muni for free apparently died Wednesday as the Metropolitan Transportation Commission narrowly voted against giving the plan $4 million in regional transportation funds.

A major portion of Oakland's troubled police radio system failed shortly after President Obama's visit on Monday, leaving many of the 100 officers assigned to handle presidential security unable to communicate as protesters roamed the streets, police said Wednesday.

City officials Wednesday recommended a 15-year half-cent sales tax measure for the November ballot that would raise up to $64 million annually while saddling residents, businesses and shoppers with the highest sales tax rate in the county and among the highest in the state's largest cities.

Tech boom lifting property tax haulThe resurgence of San Francisco’s technology industry and the related property boom helped to add $6 billion to city tax rolls over the past year, Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting announced Wednesday. The total property-tax roll now amounts to nearly $170 billion in gross value, up 4.2 percent since the past fiscal year.

Caltrans this week opened a new southbound carpool lane on Highway 101 in Novato and in a couple of weeks plans to open a northbound carpool lane there. Both are signs that the widening of 101 from northern Marin County to northern Petaluma is inching along, although closing the carpool gap will take years to finish.

Google Talk, the popular instant message service connected with the Mountain View search giant's webmail offering, crashed for several hours Thursday morning for a 'majority of users,' but service was restored by 8:30 a.m. Pacific time, the company said.

The Oakland Zoo removed a monument enscribed with the Ten Commandments from its property Wednesday. days before a planned weekend protest by a local atheist groups.

Federal officials are asking large ships to slow down near San Francisco Bay to avoid killing the droves of whales feeding near the Northern California coast.

People across much of the planet were having problems accessing Twitter on Thursday, a day before the 2012 Olympic Games are expected to cause a spike in use of the micro-blogging site.

The much-debated plan to let low-income kids in San Francisco hop aboard Muni for free apparently died Wednesday as the Metropolitan Transportation Commission narrowly voted against giving the plan $4 million in regional transportation funds.