Between surging gas prices and ransom-level parking fees, the cost of the daily grind adds up.

But AbdAllah Abou-Ismail has found a way to make the city foot the bill.

“I was like, you know what? This my reason for biking every day,” he said.

Every morning, he hops on his bike and pedals his way toward a free lunch. Call it a bit of roadside economics: The city of Palo Alto pays him to stay out of traffic. And instead of low-grade road rage, he starts his day on the right foot.

“Actually, my energy levels got a lot better once I started biking. Before I would get to work a lot more sleepy, but with the bike, I come into work 100% I can hit the floor. No downtime, no nothing,” he said.

It’s all thanks to a program called “Bike Love,” which tracks his commute and pays him $5 a day — up to $600 a year — to spend at local businesses. It’s one of several efforts the city has rolled out to get drivers to shift gears. The initiative runs through an app called Motion, which tracks trips automatically on your phone, whether you’re on a bike, e-bike or scooter. 

Pat Burt, a Palo Alto city council member who serves on the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, said the goal is simple.

“We want this to be a means where they get addicted to biking and as a result, they’re healthier, mentally and physically, and happier,” he said.

According to the Palo Alto Transportation Management Association, the program kept nearly three million car miles off local roads last year and cut more than a thousand tons of greenhouse gas emissions.

Not everyone thinks it goes far enough. Billy Riggs, a professor at the University of San Francisco who studies transportation innovation, says these programs tend to target people who are already biking.

“This is cute, it just can’t be about cute solutions,” he said.

As for Abou-Ismail, the payoff is simple — and daily.

“By the time I reach work, I’ve already had a small little adventure, and five bucks into my account,” he said.

In this episode of Plateworthy, host Nyesha Arrington makes her way through some of the best bites in San Francisco. First stop on the eating tour: Breakfast Little, owned by Andrew Perez and known for its Mission-style burritos. The tater tot-filled OG breakfast burrito has balanced bites of bacon, creamy avocado, and plenty of spice.

Next, Arrington stops at Sōhn for a galbi patty melt. Chef and owner Deuki Hong preps every aspect of the sandwich, including a square-shaped beef patty, kimchi-style slaw, melted cheddar, and a sweet and salty galbi sauce, all between a sesame-crusted croissant bun. Arrington pairs it with a banana oat milk latte and popcorn chicken skewered with tteokboki, before enjoying in Sōhn’s art-covered dining room. “This is one of those quintessential mashups that actually works,” she announces after her first bit of the patty melt.

Arrington then heads to Sons & Daughters, a cozy fine dining spot with two Michelin stars. Chef Harrison Cheney preps trout for one of the restaurant’s most popular courses. The huge fish from Mount Lassen are cut into filets and each bone is carefully removed with a technique Cheney learned while working at Gastrologik, a famously boundary-pushing restaurant in Stockholm that closed in 2022. The fish is cured overnight before being cut into extremely thin slices that are layered on a sheet pan and left in the freezer overnight. Then they cook down the sauce for the fish dish, layered with shallots, garlic, and lacto-fermented root vegetables along with their two-week-old brine. Arrington helps to smash up currant branches that sit in a neutral oil for about a week, creating a flavorful herb oil for the dish. Egg whites slowly soak into another mixture of herbs, also for the sauce. The leftover trout is mixed with egg yolks, lemon juice, and salt in a food processor to make a mouse that the fish will sit on top of. Finally, Cheney makes the layered dish: the rounds of trout and the mousse at the bottom of a small bowl then topped with the fermented root-vegetable sauce and currant wood oil. Arrington is emotional eating the light dish which showcases Californian produce.

Watch the latest episode of Plateworthy to see Arrington taste a few most-try dishes across San Francisco, from a casual breakfast burrito to a high-end trout dish that take days to prepare.

Spotting a gray whale in San Francisco Bay can be thrilling, but researchers now know it can be bad news for the marine mammals.

Nearly 1 in 5 gray whales that enter the bay die there, researchers report April 13 in Frontiers in Marine Science. For a population that has lost hundreds of individuals in recent years, the toll is another reminder of trouble along the whales’ 16,000-kilometer migration route.

Most gray whales (Eschrichtius robustus) migrate from the freezing Arctic waters, where they eat, all the way to Mexico, where they stop for some time to mate and give birth, before returning to the Arctic to eat again. The trip is usually nonstop. But in 2018, researchers noticed that some possibly hungry whales began making pit stops in San Francisco Bay to find food. The behavior coincided with the onset of a large die-off among whales, which experts attributed to decreased food availability in the Arctic. A similar trend happened in the late 1990s.

Josephine Slaathaug, a whale biologist at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, Calif., and her colleagues used 100,000 photos of gray whales taken from 2018 to 2025 to identify 114 individuals that visited the bay during that period. In the same region, 70 gray whale carcasses were documented. The team matched 21 photo-identified whales, roughly 18 percent, to the carcasses and concluded they died after entering the bay.

And that’s probably an underestimate, the scientists say.

Many of the carcasses were too decomposed to be identified from photos. But most of the remaining 49 carcasses were found in or near the bay, suggesting they too died after entering, possibly because of being hit by boats. Examination of the carcasses showed that nine of 21 identified individuals and 30 of the 70 for which a cause of death could be determined were caused by vessel strikes.

“If you’re desperate, and you go into San Francisco Bay, it looks like you’ve got a really, really high chance of not making it back out,” says Joshua Stewart, a marine ecologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, who wasn’t involved in the study.

While the San Francisco Bay pit stops may be deadly, they may also signal a broader trend. Gray whales have been spotted possibly feeding in other unusual areas, such as off Florida, New England and Hawaii.

The whales’ exploration of new places in search of food could make the populations more resilient to warming seas, but only if we do our best to protect them in the bay and other areas where they go to find food, Slaathaug says. Even so, climate change is altering how whales have historically migrated, and feeding in different areas might not be so beneficial, Stewart say. “I kind of take the view that it’s more of a desperation option, and it’s really only necessary because they’re not getting what they need in the Arctic.”