The experience of moving through San Francisco in a car has gone from slow to crawl.

Congestion in the Bay Area flagship city has grown increasingly worse, and a new report by the San Francisco County Transportation Authority placed a sizable portion of that blame on ride-hailing services like Lyft or Uber.

“It appears that TNCs (transportation network companies) contributed approximately 50 percent of the overall increases in congestion in San Francisco between 2010 and 2016,” the report reads.

A Northern California utility received 146 demands for reimbursement from customers who say Pacific Gas & Electric Company’s controversial decision to cut power to prevent wildfires hurt them economically.

The utility said Wednesday in a report to California regulators that it won’t pay any claims. PG&E shut power to 60,000 Northern California customers from Oct. 14 to Oct. 16 after it determined that forecast sustained winds of 25 mph gusting to 45 mph threatened to bring down power lines and start wildfires. It was the first time PG&E cut power to prevent wildfires.

Cyberattacks increasingly target and succeed inside energy and utility companies’ IT networks, rather than their critical infrastructure, according to a new report from cybersecurity firm Vectra.

In the past, the energy and utility industry’s cyber efforts have focused on preventing disruption of power availability via industrial control networks.

But the Department of Homeland Security issued a technical alert in March warning the industry of a “multi-stage intrusion campaign” originating in Russia targeting IT networks in the U.S. energy sector.

The growing pains of shared electric scooter businesses have led one Southern California city to take a wait-and-see approach.

The Ventura City Council voted 5-0 this week night to ban scooters after a company called Bird filed an application to bring them to the city.

For Iowa City, Dubuque Street is an important corridor, providing an artery for roughly 25,000 vehicles to travel each day between the city and Interstate 80, which runs along the northern edge of town.

But historically the road has been prone to flooding from the nearby Iowa River, which snakes alongside it to the west, as well as flash floods caused by heavy rains. In 1993, floodwaters swamped the street for 54 days. Flooding in 2008 caused a month-long closure.

Authorities say a man apparently set a California home on fire while using a blowtorch to kill spiders.

KFSN-TV reported 29 firefighters were called to a Fresno housing development Tuesday night to put out a two-alarm blaze.

Mass casualty incidents and the ensuing chaos are complicated to manage. There needs to be a definite correlation between what resources are available and the seriousness of the injuries.

Policies and management systems like the Incident Command System certainly help to facilitate the overall coordination of a mass casualty incident. After every incident, there is usually an investigation and an after-action report that details the lessons learned. Emergency managers use this vital information to strengthen their emergency plans. As a result, many plans have improved greatly over the years.

(TNS) - Brent Larson awoke at 4 a.m. to the shake and rumble of what felt like a freight train rolling down the hill toward his Santa Barbara County home.

He leaped from his bed and woke his two sons. In seconds, a wall of water, mud and rock slammed into his house, smashing through one window, then the next, then a third, pouring in as the trio sprinted to the safety of the chimney at the home’s far corner.

“It was like out of ‘Indiana Jones,’” he said, nine months later, still shaken.

The world is on the cusp of dramatic changes in the ways people own, operate and power their means of transportation.

Known as the “three revolutions,” a term coined by UC Davis transportation professor Daniel Sperling, the new trends are: electric vehicles, autonomous vehicles and sharing-oriented business models (think Uber and Lyft). Optimistically, these revolutions could make our cities a dreamscape of walkable urbanism that will reduce accidents to near zero and make more space for bikes, trees, pedestrians and small businesses while emitting no carbon emissions.