The pilot study for the intersections at 8th/Market and 6th/Market is only the first step in a long-term plan prepared by the SFCTA, which consists of a variety of changes — incremental ones like those that began today, along with more ambitious recommendations — that will eventually transform Market Street into a premiere urban space and improve its functionality as an important corridor for transit riders, pedestrians, and bicyclists. Although cars are not planned to be banned outright, a combination of forced southward turns and restricting turns onto Market at key through-traffic intersections will substantially reduce auto traffic, by making Market an even less desirable street for motorists than it is now.

I stopped by the intersection of 8th and Market today, at about 9:00 a.m. At that time, the new operation proceeded pretty smoothly. Only a couple drivers were confused and attempted to steer straight through the intersection; but traffic control officers were there to guide motorists to turn south on 8th, while keeping the crosswalk safe for pedestrians. The Chronicle noted that bicyclists outnumbered motorists on inbound Market. Judson True of the SFMTA and Leah Shahum of the SF Bicycle Coalition were on hand to do interviews, field questions, and generate interest and goodwill toward the Better Market Street project.

New signage has been posted in advance of the intersection, putting motorists on notice about the required southbound turn. Drivers lined up in the southernmost lane of Market Street to turn right, opening the adjacent lane for buses, bicyclists, and taxis:

Meanwhile, on eastbound Market Street immediately east of 8th Street, the street had occasional moments of peaceful emptiness during the morning rush hour:

We were reminded about the purpose and value of remaking Market Street in the first place — and even a small, low-cost, incremental measure like forcing motorists to execute a right turn was noticeably effective. The lack of cars cleared away space for the comfortable and unhindered movement of Muni vehicles and bicyclists:

“This Sunday’s event is the finale for 2009, but Sunday Streets will be back in 2010 with more routes, longer hours, more San Francisco neighborhoods and more programs at each event,” said Mayor Gavin Newsom. “We have created a new tradition in San Francisco that will improve our quality of life for years to come.”

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), co-sponsor of Sunday Streets 2009, will be the lead agency for the Sunday Streets program starting in 2010. The San Francisco Mayor’s Office will continue to provide leadership support for the program, and Livable City, a sustainable transportation advocacy non-profit, will continue as the fiscal sponsor.

“The SFMTA has been proud to join with our City partners and Livable City to promote healthy family outdoor activities this summer. Working together on programs like Sunday Streets, we can increase the use of sustainable transportation to protect the environment and to ensure the City’s sustainability for future generations,” said Nathaniel P. Ford Sr., SFMTA Executive Director/CEO.

Sunday Streets creates safe, fun car-free space on City streets that give San Francisco residents and visitors an opportunity to get out and get active. Temporarily closing some streets to automobile traffic opens them to people for walking, cycling, skating and playing. Sunday Streets events create a stronger sense of community in every neighborhood they touch and throughout the City.

By all accounts, Sunday Streets has been a resounding success. Particularly exemplary were the Mission District events, where the neighborhood setting was cozier than the waterfront — and the streets were sufficiently narrow that pedestrians were also able to walk safely in the open street, instead of being confined to the sidewalk, as often occurred when the events were held on the Embarcadero. Merchants, initially disbelieving, have come around to realize the business and visibility benefits that come with plentiful foot traffic. Perhaps most importantly, Sunday Streets have helped to reawaken a general excitement about reclaiming streets, and making them safer for all users of the street. How lucky for us that we’ll now be able to enjoy this new tradition every year from now on.

Throughout the 20th century, as the Bay Area changed fundamentally from a concentrated urban area to a region consisting predominantly of dispersed suburban development, once-innocent country roads became today’s roaring interstates, ever widened to accommodate (and induce additional) far-flung car trips. That, in a nutshell, is the story of the Benicia-Martinez Bridge, the stretch of Interstate 680 connecting Contra Costa and Solano counties across the Carquinez Strait. Before 1930, there were the ferries. By 1930, Southern Pacific completed its rail bridge — which, now Union Pacific’s rail bridge, carries Amtrak and freight traffic. Ferries for cars were maintained only until September 1962, when the $25 million, 1.2-mile automotive span was completed, built with four lanes to accommodate both traffic directions. In 1991, the car bridge was widened by ten feet to fit in six total lanes.

Then, in August 2007, an entirely new automotive span opened, complete with “FasTrak Express” open-road tolling lanes. The 2007 span was constructed at a cost significantly higher than in 1962: at about $1.26 billion for 1.7 miles, the bridge was delivered several years late, at quadruple the anticipated cost. (Delays and serious cost overruns are not, it turns out, limited to just the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge!) And just this month, the reconfiguration (PDF) of the southbound span was completed, so we now have a total of nine car lanes: five northbound on lanes on the 2007 span and four southbound lanes on the retrofitted 1962 span, including a comfortable shoulder and merging lanes from I-680 and I-780.

Why not go for the “gold” with ten car lanes, you ask? The saving grace of all this bridge-widening is the new bicycle/pedestrian path (PDF diagram) that will open August 29, 2009, on the western edge of the southbound span. The path will link Park Road in Benicia to Mococo Road in Martinez.

The primary sticking point is the abrupt southern terminus of the bike-ped path, which will force pedestrians and bicyclists to contend with potentially unsafe, narrow passage in an inhospitable industrial area. The goal here is to finish a complete path of substantial width across the tracks that separate Mococo Road from Marina Vista Avenue, to ensure that users of the bike-ped path can get on and off the bridge in a way that maximizes safety, despite the somewhat challenging terrain (to get your bearings, see this Google satellite map). BCDC granted Caltrans the permits to do just that, but Caltrans ran into delays in acquiring the necessary right-of-way. A completed path, however, will be beneficial, to allow a safe bike-ped connection from the bridge to Marina Vista Avenue — a street that has bicycle lanes and is the natural link to downtown Martinez and the Amtrak station.

The new lane across the Benicia-Martinez Bridge is included in our Regional Bicycle Plan, which envisions a 2,140-mile regional bike lane network at buildout. The single most expensive component of that plan — a bike-ped connection on the Bay Bridge’s west span, which would link to the path on the new east span to complete the transbay link — remains out of reach, as do similar connections envisioned for the San Mateo and Richmond-San Rafael spans. But the Benicia link is now all but complete, closing gaps in both the San Francisco Bay Trail and the Bay Area Ridge Trail.

After an initial unsuccessful attempt at stalling the decision, Ms. Miles offered the substance of her appeal. Unfortunately, the oral argument adopted a blanket bitter tone that failed to truly engage the EIR in an especially nuanced way. Dismissing the Bicycle Plan as a “fuzzy mishmash of so-called actions,” Ms. Miles then characterized the EIR as an “utterly incomprehensible morass of compounded, cut-and-paste, cross-referenced, encoded … somethings, that say nothing.” She also accused the environmental document of omitting the most critical elements, like cumulative analysis, alternatives analysis, and mitigation measures.

It does no so such thing. The FEIR — which, per Amit Ghosh, cost over $900,000 to prepare — is more than 2,000 pages long. It contains thorough Level of Service (LOS) analysis, which details the impacts to traffic and transit of the proposed improvements and alternative options, studied at intersections throughout San Francisco; and these impacts are also compared to the no-build scenario. (Of course, some of us like to think of impacts like “degraded LOS” instead as “calmer, safer streets.”) To the extent that the FEIR appears repetitive (or “cut-and-paste,” as Ms. Miles called it), that characteristic was essentially forced upon the document by Ms. Miles herself, because the City quite consciously aimed to produce a complete and adequate document that could survive future legal attack.

The FEIR’s approach of documenting project alternatives is indeed atypical; but this atypical structure reflects the somewhat atypical nature of the Bicycle Plan — which is not a single, unified project, but rather, is a collection of conceptually related, yet divisible, bicycle improvement projects. The FEIR clarifies significant impacts, along with appropriate mitigation measures where possible; indeed, it takes no chances, in order to ensure that the court injunction is lifted.  Ms. Miles will certainly continue to challenge the Bicycle Plan, by asserting that the City’s latest certified environmental document is inadequate. But we hope that the court will declare the FEIR to be in compliance with CEQA, so that we can finally end the court-imposed moratorium on all bicycle infrastructure improvements that was mandated by the injunction secured in 2006.

Still, Ms. Miles’s appeal was correct about one thing. This FEIR is indeed more complicated than it should have to be. The EIR for a handful of bicycle lanes should not require the preparation of literally hundreds of pages analyzing traffic impacts. The fact that the City has basically wasted an immense amount of time and money performing torturous analytical somersaults, just so that it may legally implement an environmentally-beneficial transportation policy, is unfortunate. It clarifies a failing of the underlying law, and it demonstrates that we are overdue in replacing the outdated, auto-centric LOS analysis with a more sensible Auto Trips Generated (ATG) measure — or a similar standard that more accurately reflects the City’s transit-first policy, by acknowledging that there are more important impacts to document than motorist speeds. This and other reform of CEQA will play an important role in achieving AB 32′s mandate to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in California, by streamlining environmental review for desirable transportation projects and good urban infill development. A world in which the EIR for a bicycle lane network is more difficult to prepare than the EIR for a suburban strip mall is a world that has not truly committed itself to reducing driving and emissions.

There’s much more that could be said here about the Bicycle Plan EIR and appeal, so my apologies for the somewhat thin post today. I was live-tweeting fast and furious for a few hours straight while watching the Board meeting, and was just too tired at the end of it to write a more detailed post. You can check out my Twitter feed for a reverse chronological transcript of the meeting. (The Twitter feed also includes tweets from two other appeals heard earlier in the Board meeting, discussing the Drew School expansion, a project that proposes to demolish a historic structure containing three rent controlled units located on the cusp of the former Western Addition redevelopment area, and replacing it with a new school assembly building.) Or, you can check out entries filed under the hashtag #sfmtg, which, for now anyway, has the bike plan tweets starting near the top of the page. (For more bike plan-related tweets, see also @ThePublicPress, @sfbc, and @StreetsblogSF.)

In any event, we should at least celebrate this latest milestone in the prolonged struggle to get San Francisco’s bicycle infrastructure caught up to the 20th century.

A transit boarding island on Market Street.

The current design of Market Street is suboptimal for all modes. Throngs of buses and F-Market historic streetcars crawl at a snail’s pace, delayed by motorist queues that block bus and streetcar access to boarding islands. Surface transit riders exiting Muni vehicles fight their way onto the crowded, narrow boarding islands. The unfortunately-named “safety zones,” located between the sidewalk and the islands, commonly see collisions; legitimately “calming” the safety zones is critical to improving safety on Market Street, but previous attempts to do so have fallen flat. Meanwhile, there is no space marked for transit or bicycles for the full length of the street, even though bicycles and transit riders together comprise 55-70% of east-west trips. Market Street, particularly below Van Ness, is primarily a transit and pedestrian street. But the street’s diagonal sweep through central San Francisco, and its high concentration of destination points, has made it an increasingly attractive bicycle corridor. Automobiles contribute about 20% (or less) of east-west trips — but there are enough of them to contribute more than 20% of the problem.

What’s clear is that there is significant room for improvement. Perhaps less clear is what the best solution is. Too often the Market Street problem has been phrased as an “all or nothing” ultimatum: either automobiles are entirely eliminated from the full length of the street, or no movement at all is made toward progress. Should we insist that cars be banned entirely, so that other modes would enjoy dedicated lanes in which to move freely, and then redesign the streetscape to accomplish that goal? Or might imposing that level of orderly efficiency sanitize what one expects to be an inherently messy, chaotic urban space? Should all modes instead just take a chill pill, share the space, and acknowledge the need to coexist with others? Can’t we just all get along?

The San Francisco County Transportation Authority is hoping that we can — provided that we implement some traffic restrictions that even merchants are supporting.  The TA previously released a Strategic Analysis Report (SAR), the latest in the series of reports that investigate “Transportation Options for a Better Market Street.” The TA Board has now just adopted the final SAR (link to 5 MB externally-hosted PDF), approving the SAR’s recommendations for how to fix Market Street. Those recommendations, in a nutshell? Incremental improvements that do not strictly divide street space into modes, but rather, aim to manage shared space.

The overall flavor of the plan is not to ban automobiles completely, but to engineer traffic flow in a way that reduces motorists’ ability to use Market Street as a long-distance corridor. The plan would remove cars off of Market; but notably, it would not divert much new traffic to Mission Street, which is itself an important transit street served by regional bus routes and the suite of 14-Mission services. Instead, the TA’s preliminary studies suggest that traffic restrictions on Market would emphasize that Howard and Folsom are more appropriate as long-distance driving routes, and traffic on those streets might increase 6-10%.  Traffic restrictions forcing cars off of Market Street would be coupled with traffic calming, and improved transit and bicycle facilities. The changes would be phased in over the course of the next decade.

In the near future, within 9-18 months, the SAR recommends that a few relatively inexpensive changes (costing less than $1 million) be piloted at the intersection of 8th Street, Hyde, Grove, and Market. In addition to a potential pedestrian bulbout, drivers headed inbound on Market would be forced to turn right onto 8th, and southbound drivers on Hyde would be restricted from turning left onto Market. This would reduce traffic volumes near Union Square by about 20%-30%. It would also create an auto-free zone immediately east of 8th Street, permitting an extension of the bicycle lane.

Additional improvements would be timed with the resurfacing of Market Street planned for the year 2013, and further long-term changes could be implemented between 2013 and 2018. The long-term changes include additional traffic restrictions on lower Market, which would solidify Battery/1st, Montgomery/New Montgomery, and Kearny/3rd as straight cross-through points. The SAR also identifies a handful of more construction-intensive recommendations that carry a rough cost estimate of $150-200 million, including: painted bike lanes at intersection approaches that would allow bicyclists to move safely to the front of the intersection; midblock boarding islands, widened by at least two feet to be ADA-compliant; and improved transit and bicycle facilities extending at least as far east as 4th Street.

So many freeways and expressways crisscross the auto-oriented sprawl of Silicon Valley, and they contribute to a physical environment that is inhospitable, forming actual and pyschological barriers to those who attempt to get around on foot or a bicycle. But pedestrians and bicyclists alike will be able to enjoy bridges that will provide additional routes of access over otherwise-impenetrable walls of freeway. Two new bridges at Borregas Avenue in Sunnyvale, crossing over both Highway 237 and Highway 101, have finally opened, and they will allow an anticipated 2,000 daily bicyclists and pedestrians to cross over the freeway instead of traveling a couple miles out of their way to the nearest through street. The spans will also ease access to Sunnyvale Baylands Park and the nearby Borregas VTA light rail station. Then, on April 30, a more visually impressive bike-ped crossing over Interstate 280 will also open, connecting the two separated halves of Mary Avenue, between Sunnyvale and Cupertino near the Highway 85 interchange. The Mary Avenue bridge will be the first example in California of a cable stayed bridge crossing over a freeway. Still further bike-ped improvements are due later this summer in Mountain View, Santa Clara, and San Jose. The Borregas corridor and Mary Avenue bridges are just two components of VTA’s rather extensive 25-year Bicycle Expenditure Plan, which represents a considerable investment in livable streets improvements scattered throughout Santa Clara County. Yours truly may prefer walking and transit over bicycling, but we nonetheless look forward to the day when San Francisco’s Bicycle Plan will have completed its wandering journey through environmental review — so that new bicycle infrastructure in San Francisco can catch up to these improvements in the South Bay.

An idyllic complete street; courtesy AARP.

If you live in California, contact your State Senator to express support for this bill, and pass the word onto others so that they can do the same. Mailed or faxed messages are preferred instead of telephone or email if possible, but communicate the message however you can before next week. Let’s get this bill through the Senate, onto the Governor’s desk, and signed into law. You can write a personalized message, or you could just adapt this template, conveniently provided by the California Bicycle Coalition:

Honorable [your State Senator's full name]
State Capitol, Room [your State Senator's room number]
Sacramento, CA 95814
Fax: [your State Senator's fax number, if sent via fax]

Senate Floor Alert
Re: Support AB 1358 (Leno)

I join the California Bicycle Coalition in urging you to vote YES for AB 1358, the Complete Streets Act, because it will require cities and counties to design roadways that make bicycling and walking safer, more feasible modes of transportation. As non-motorized transportation modes, bicycling and walking can help solve a variety of the problems California faces: traffic congestion, poor air quality, the threats from climate change, and worsening public health. It is imperative that roadway design enables motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians to travel safely. AB 1358 will result in roads that serve all users, not just motorists, as is now too often the case.

Thank you for supporting this landmark legislation to help make California cities more livable.

Sincerely,
[signature, followed by your printed full name and address]

Market Street, as it once was: car-free.

The Bay Area gets no more transit-rich than Market Street. Besides frequent local and regional underground rail service, the surface of San Francisco’s main boulevard features a lively and hectic mix of historic streetcars, bus lines converging from neighborhoods all across the City, and bus stops both on the curbs and island platforms — complete with constant pedestrian flow and people jumping across the so-called “safety zone,” which is the lane that separates bus boarding islands from the sidewalk. In some sense, Market Street has not changed all that much from what it must have been like in the early 20th century. The automobile has replaced horse and carriage, and there is only one pair of surface streetcar tracks used by the F-Market & Wharves line, instead of the two pairs we once had (the other pair was rebuilt below ground). Rather than being inundated by streetcars, as in the image at right, the Market Street of today is inundated largely by buses, punctuated by the occasional splash of color from an F-Market historic streetcar. But what has not changed is that fundamentally, Market Street is still best suited to pedestrians and transit riders; dense transit and pedestrian traffic, combined with highly restricted automobile turns, make Market Street a taxing experience for drivers. But really, San Francisco’s main boulevard could be made a more successful place for everyone, no matter what their mode of transportation is. Current conditions are not especially friendly for cyclists, though that would certainly improve if only we could free up pavement now used by automobiles. Market Street is transit-rich, but congestion prevents transit from being truly functional, at least at peak travel times. And although pedestrians enjoy generously wide sidewalks, auto-pedestrian collisions, most of which occur in the unaptly-named “safety zone,” suggest that we must go further to maximize pedestrian safety.

In the image directly at left, the backed up lane to the right of the streetcar boarding island (the “safety zone”) is also the bicycle lane between 4th and 5th Streets — a lane that cyclists happen to share with cars and buses. Space is at a premium, so the trade-off for wide sidewalks and boarding islands (which are needed to allow for two lanes with transit activity) is a narrower bicycle lane. The space freed by banning cars could be used for a permanent, well-marked bicycle lane. And how about transit? A primary pillar of the SFMTA’s Transit Effectiveness Project, which is currently preparing for the environmental review phase, is that key corridors should be given transit preferential treatment. But what corridor in San Francisco is more key than Market Street? It is hard to envision a greater commitment to transit preferential treatment than banning private vehicles. Over a dozen Muni routes travel along the surface of Market Street — some for only a few blocks, but many for much longer than that — and it is precisely these routes that begin their runs on or very close to Market. Traffic delays get buses off their schedule right from the get-go (yes, we’re told that Muni actually does keep a schedule hidden away at headquarters), and the delays then propagate throughout the whole length of the run. This harms reliability and on-time performance rates, causes buses to arrive in bunches, and annoys riders in the process. Giving transit space to breathe on Market Street will not only keep buses throughout the City on schedule; it will also create an environment that could support more frequent service on primary routes, which is another pillar of the Transit Effectiveness Project.

Someone is no doubt ready to cry out in retort: traffic congestion is just part of city life, right? What city’s main downtown thoroughfares aren’t clogged at rush hour? Don’t cars add to some of the noise and chaos that makes the big city, well … the big city? In calming and civilizing Market Street, might we inadvertently destroy its heart and soul? There is actually a very fair point lurking behind these retorts. Some experiments with creating car-free zones have been quite successful: Copenhagen’s Strøget is a famous example. Others, particularly those in the United States, have become unsuccessful “dead zones.” In the less successful cases, cities have terminated the experiment, permitting the return of automobiles. Many of these car-free zones were quite small and not particularly ambitious; Market Street is distinguishable from these examples in many ways: including its size, its transit, and its already established importance as a major employment and retail center for the City and the Bay Area.

State Street in Chicago. Courtesy Flickr user mss2400.

But we would be remiss not to mention State Street in Chicago (pictured at right), which, like Market, is a major downtown transit street. State Street’s once-bustling retail district lay at the heart of downtown Chicago, but like so many other urban centers, State Street experienced decline in the 1960′s and 1970′s with the advent of suburban shopping malls. It was partially in response to this decline that State Street was pedestrianized in 1979, in an attempt to create a distinctive district that would draw shoppers back to the urban center. But the once-lively boulevard only sank further into neglect. The experiment with a car-free State Street failed, and in 1996, the street was redesigned to accommodate four lanes of vehicle traffic. The formerly wide sidewalks were kept purposely narrow to help reduce the feeling of emptiness on the street. There are obvious parallels between Market Street and State Street, but does the failure of an auto-free zone in 1979 Chicago automatically imply the failure of a similar experiment in 2008 San Francisco? In 2008, while plenty of people still seek the American dream of raising a family in a suburban house with a yard and a car, there has been a resurgence of interest in urban centers and an increased appreciation for the convenience of a city lifestyle. But in the 1970′s, the American dream was alive and well; urban centers all around the country, including State Street before it was pedestrianized, were decaying. And unlike the expensive shops lining nearby North Michigan Avenue’s Magnificent Mile, State Street featured the type of mid-level retail that became increasingly prominent in suburban malls, which meant that State Street lacked a unique experience to draw suburbanites to the city center. Despite the apparent similarities between State Street and Market Street, the differing contexts suggest that there is still reason to believe that the car-free experiment could be more successful in San Francisco than it was in Chicago.

Even if cars are banned from Market Street, drivers would still be able to cross the street at each intersection, and Market Street itself would still be open for all transit vehicles, bicyclists, and pedestrians; very likely also commercial deliveries and taxicabs. It is really these users that give Market Street most of its activity and energy, so banning cars may just remove congestion without removing street energy. Moreover, the major parking garages around downtown and Civic Center are located off of Market Street itself, so the experience of parking an automobile downtown would not change appreciably. This suggests that the merchants of a car-free Market Street would not suffer from decreased visitors and pedestrian traffic. (Remark: Personally, I would like the parking experience downtown to change appreciably, by becoming more difficult. But the point here is that the commonly raised parking excuse loses credibility in this instance.)

If private cars are not ultimately banned, there are still ways to make Market Street safer and more successful through better enforcement of double parking and smart street design (traffic calming, transit preferential treatment). Restricting through-traffic, by forcing all vehicles to turn off of Market at certain points, is another promising method, although it does impact pedestrians and bicyclists. A 2004 SFCTA study found that forcing all eastbound vehicles to turn right at 8th Street would decrease traffic volume at 4th Street by 35%; similarly, forcing eastbound vehicles to turn right at 4th Street would decrease traffic volume at 1st Street by 30%. Forced right turns would at least reduce traffic volume and would discourage motorists from using Market as a long-distance through traffic corridor. Long distance drivers would instead be encouraged to use Mission, Howard, or another parallel street. Still another course of action might be to ban autos, as an experiment, from smaller segments of concentrated activity, like 1st through 5th Streets, rather than the entire length from The Embarcadero to Octavia, as was proposed by Supervisor Daly. Implementing these sorts of solutions, while not as “pure” as a completely auto-free Market Street, can still go a long way toward improving both transit flow and safety for pedestrians and cyclists.

The real point here is that Market Street is a special place that deserves careful thought and attention. Even if private cars have not yet been banned, it is good that the City continues to have this conversation in search of a solution to the Market Street puzzle. And while we do not necessarily want to get into the habit of quoting Supervisor Daly, he does have a good point that when discussing San Francisco’s main boulevard, we should “go for the gold” — because even if we do not get the gold, we might at least get silver or bronze. Rock on, Chris, rock on.