The Car-Free Challenge is also a great way to show support for TransForm.  Although this organization has gained notoriety in the past year by charging forward in the campaign to oppose the Oakland Airport Connector, they have being doing important land use, transportation, and climate change advocacy for years now — certainly at the local and regional level, and more recently at the state level, including legislative efforts and work with the State Air Resources Board.  TransForm puts in a lot of time to make the Bay Area a better place, and they are well worth your support.  Participating in the Car-Free Challenge is a great way to do just that.

To get you in the mood to leave the car at home, TransForm provided this entertaining YouTube video:

Finally — and I do realize the irony of tacking this to the end of a post about going car-free — but just in case you’ve been stuck in a cave the past few months, Muni’s planned service cuts go into effect starting today, May 8, 2010.  There are a separate set of temporary service changes (including bus substitution) associated with the St. Francis Circle rail replacement project, and those changes also start May 8.  If you have not done so already, you can avoid unpleasant surprises by planning ahead.  Please take a moment to study all the service changes.

My main priority for Sunday Streets was the E-Embarcadero; I spent most of the afternoon riding and taking pictures of historic streetcars running demonstration service on waterfront tracks between Fisherman’s Wharf and the Caltrain Station. It was a great day for railfans:

The highlight of the day was the winged No. 162, which was an absolute pleasure to ride. This is quite simply a beautiful car, restored to immaculate form:

Finally, a couple more shots of cars, including No. 162, resting up at Geneva Yard:

For still more Sunday Streets streetcar pictures, and for full-sized versions of these pictures, check out the Historic Streetcars set on my Flickr account. The Market Street Railway group also has a large compilation of pictures.

Courtesy Sunday Streets SF.

Talk about an action-packed Labor Day weekend here in the Bay Area: BART plans to run longer trains to accommodate all the events happening on both sides of the Bay, including Slow Food and Ha(i)rrison Street in San Francisco; in the East Bay, there is the annual three-day Art & Soul festival in downtown Oakland, the Cal football kickoff against Michigan State at Memorial Stadium, and the A’s and the Twins at the Oakland Coliseum. You can ride SamTrans, Caltrain, or BART to enjoy art and wine in Millbrae; VTA or Caltrain will take you to downtown San Jose, where there is more art, but seemingly no wine. A number of Labor Day events are also planned for folks north of the Golden Gate. Last, but certainly not least: the first of the Sunday Streets (our homegrown Ciclovía) is at last upon us this Labor Day weekend. This Sunday, August 31, from 9:00 am to 1:00 pm, over four miles of streets in San Francisco will be closed to vehicular access: mostly along the waterfront and the Embarcadero, between 3rd and Oakdale in the Bayview and Portsmouth Square in Chinatown. In addition to the freedom of unencumbered walking and biking, activities focused on exercise and health will line the entire route of street closures — driving home the point that a transit-oriented, carfree lifestyle is not only about reducing traffic congestion and improving air quality; with built-in physical activity, it’s just an all-around healthier way to live. Don’t miss the demo E-Embarcadero historic streetcar service between Fisherman’s Wharf and the Caltrain Station. Muni service will be free between 8:00 am and 2:00 pm on the F-Market & Wharves and the KT-Ingleside/Third Street lines. It should be a fun weekend, with a great weather forecast in store.

However, the statistic is also revealing in a different way. Several costs are required to buy into an auto-centric transportation system — the cost of the vehicle, gasoline, insurance, and upkeep — and in some sense, those private costs can be bundled together and thought of as “driving fare.” Although the two-thirds figure includes the private costs riders must pay for transit fare, it ignores the “driving fare.” After taking into account “driving fare”, Erik adjusts the calculation to find that a mere 8.5% of money in the Bay Area is applied to transit. Even this figure ignores quantifiable costs (like those associated with parking garages), and other costs which are much harder to quantify — the stress associated with long driving commutes, and the health and environmental effects of pollution from cars. More generally, though, the tendency to keep careful tab of transit costs but to neglect to mention crucial auto-related costs indicates the extent to which American society is willing to overlook the fact that maintaining an auto-centric transportation system has hidden costs that may be insufficiently weighed when making policy decisions.

• The Bikescape blog has a posted a podcast about the Transit, Not Traffic campaign, featuring Dave Snyder (of SPUR and Livable City), Susan King of the Green Party, and Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi. The podcast is listed under the October 21, 2007 post.

• John Diaz has an article in the Chronicle describing Prop H as “the most dangerous measure” on the ballot this November. This article also describes the recent scandal in which Prop H supporters mailed out brochures, thus breaching their compromise with Peskin to not advertise against Prop A in favor of Prop H.

A reader comment written in response to the Diaz piece is a reminder of how much work we still need to do (even in “transit-first” San Francisco) to bring about a paradigm shift away from cars and towards public transit. The comment, written by SFgate user “gcotter”, reads:

People MUST have parking where they live. This is not optional. Unless they can park their car safely at home they will not be able to leave their car at home and take public transit to work. People have the right to own and park their own cars at home. We can make public transit a more attractive option through pricing but we shouldn’t think that limiting parking will limit car ownership. [...] We CAN have both Cars and Transit if we’re smart about it!

People must have parking? Parking is not optional? Has this poster even been to San Francisco? If so, s/he cannot have helped but to notice hundreds of apartment buildings downtown and beyond that do not contain a shred of off-street parking. Clearly, the over 70% of downtown residents who do not own a car have no problem with a lack of parking. The commenter also remarks “we shouldn’t think that limiting parking will limit car ownership.” Sorry: not only should we be thinking this, but in some sense, this is the whole point. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the easier we make the whole process of driving and parking, the more people will be enticed to drive instead of take transit. Make it more difficult to drive — for instance, by not providing easy and immediately accessible parking in every building — and transit will be the more enticing option. Some people do legitimately need to drive, but many people who could be taking transit choose not to. The goal here is to chip away at this latter group of people and convert them into transit riders. The attitude that a car is somehow a given is exactly the attitude we must strive to correct.

In remarking that “we CAN have both Cars and Transit if we’re smart about it!”, the poster fails to realize that it is contradictory to propose transit improvements while simultaneously building huge parking garages. The garages will facilitate easier parking, thus encouraging more people to drive at the expense of transit, and the additional cars on the road will further degrade transit reliability. Not only that, but the influx of new parking downtown will induce a greater demand for that parking. Some years down the road, there will be another parking crunch, but by then, there will be many more cars on the road than we have now, competing for a much larger supply of parking. Our street network will not be able to support this ever-increasing flow of cars. To prevent this future from coming to pass, we must take action now.

Perhaps the most disheartening line of all is:

People have the right to own and park their own cars at home.

This attitude is prevalent all over the United States but is downright laughable in other countries. The U.S. has subsidized driving and parking to the point that drivers do not even realize that there are serious societal costs associated with their lifestyle choice. Many view driving and parking as a fundamental right and become hostile if they sense infringement on that “right.” This position ignores the pollution and degradation of quality of life brought about by urban traffic congestion, but these undesirables are infringed upon everyone — even those of us who do not drive. In addition, parking lots and garages exist solely for the purpose of storing cars, and thus occupy valuable space that would be better returned to the wholly public realm. For these reasons, driving and having one’s own guaranteed place to park at home should never be considered a “right.”

I would like to believe that this election, progressive San Francisco would blow Prop H clear out of the water, but comments in the vein of the reader comment above indicate how much work we still have to do. When it comes to caring for the environment and taking pride in one’s community, San Franciscans are more than happy to talk the talk, but are they also willing to walk the walk?

If one is used to driving a car, there is no doubt that switching over to a carfree lifestyle could feel like a major change, but I claim that the vast majority of those changes are positive ones. When a driver considers momentarily whether to take transit or to drive to some location, the mental calculation that usually occurs compares transit fare to gasoline costs, and in some cases, the driver is led to believe that having a car is cheaper. The problem with such a calculation is that it ignores the wear and tear that occurs to the vehicle every time it is driven, and the costs of maintenance required to fix that wear and tear. It also ignores the cost of vehicle itself, insurance costs, and parking. When comparing the total costs of owning and operating a vehicle to the total costs of leading a carfree lifestyle by walking/biking/taking transit, the carfree lifestyle emerges as the clear winner.

In addition to saving a vast amount of money, there are obviously clear environmental benefits: going carfree means reducing one’s carbon footprint and taking a stand to help curb our increasingly warm planet Earth. It also leads to a more active lifestyle, as walking and/or biking become necessary. I find also it to be a more social and engaging lifestyle. Walking helps you feel more in tune with your surroundings. Rather than observing everything from behind a shield of metal and glass, everything around you is up-close and personal, immediate, and vivid, as the life of the street becomes a part of your daily experience. Instead of just speeding through your environment, you are an integrated part of it.

Urban planning that is centered on maximizing the ease of automobiles results in maintaining surface parking lots, building monstrous parking garages with driveways that interrupt sidewalks, and obnoxiously wide streets that require at least half a minute to walk across. On the other hand, planning cities around people, rather than cars, creates settings that I think almost of all of us find immediately more inviting: wide sidewalks, narrow streets, interesting shops on the street level to look into, and just a general sense of vitality and life on the street level. Traffic speeds might be slower, but the street will be safer, more attractive, and more inviting.

I’ll let the World Carfree Network website have the last word:

But we do not want just one day of celebration and then a return to “normal” life. When people get out of their cars, they should stay out of their cars. It is up to us, it is up to our cities, and our governments to help create permanent change to benefit pedestrians, cyclists, and other people who do not drive cars.

Let World Carfree Day be a showcase for just how our cities might look like, feel like, and sound like without cars…365 days a year.

Hear, hear.