Location of parklet proposed for Post Street.

This Wednesday, December 15, 2010, the Department of Public Works (DPW) will hold a hearing (PDF) to gather public comment on two parklets — extensions of the sidewalk built in parking spots to make space for outdoor seating — that have been proposed in San Francisco.  One parklet would be installed on Post Street between Jones and Leavenworth, in front of farm:table, a popular cafe whose miniscule premises consist of just a common table and a few sidewalk seats.  The other parklet would be installed on Valencia Street between 21st and Hill, in front of Ritual Coffee Roasters, an establishment whose interest in parklets is not surprising in light of demonstrated enthusiasm for both Park(ing) Day and Sunday Streets. 

Of these two proposals, I am particularly excited about the Post Street parklet, in part because it’s in my own neighborhood — but also because this area is one of the densest quarters in the country outside of New York, and yet there is a lack of public open space to serve the dense population.  The neighborhood has largely been overlooked, even as livable streets-oriented upgrades have been installed in other parts of town.  Even a sliver of new community gathering space in the form of a parklet would be a welcome addition to this neighborhood.

That said, both parklets deserve your support.  If you happen to be available at the time, please drop by the hearing (Wed. Dec. 15 at 9:00 am, Room 400 in City Hall) to speak in favor of the proposals.  Or if you can’t attend in person, comments can be emailed to nick [dot] elsner [at] sfdpw [dot] org – directed to Nick Elsner at DPW.

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.

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.

Has the new 17th Street pedestrian plaza in San Francisco’s Castro District set off a spark? San Francisco is not the only Bay Area city that dreams of creating bustling new pedestrian open spaces, nor is it the only one that isn’t quite satisfied with the current state of its main street.  But of all places, Palo Alto, which has of late gained more of a reputation for NIMBYism than for embracing progressive city planning? Well, sort of. Not surprisingly, this latest push for pedestrianization is of local collegiate origin, coming from students in a class at Stanford University’s design institute, but the idea seems to be catching on fast; the Facebook group created just this week has added on average more than 100 new members each day.  Right now, it is basically a brainstorm to close off several blocks of University Avenue, Palo Alto’s main drag, to cars — specifically, the blocks between High and Cowper streets, accounting for most of the downtown commercial strip. The plan, which is of course only a sketch at this point, suggests initially allowing cross traffic through the pedestrian zone, but then later transitioning to a bona fide car-free zone in which motorists navigate a counterclockwise loop around the zone using side streets.

Similar car-free experiments have been tried repeatedly in cities large and small throughout the United States and beyond — sometimes successfully, and other times not, although success does not necessarily turn on whether the pedestrian mall is in a suburban or urban area. Still, there are reasons to believe that pedestrian space, even if it did not extend the full length of downtown, could become a valuable civic amenity. University Avenue is not a major transit street (Palo Alto’s primary transit corridor is the pedestrian-unfriendly El Camino Real), but it is a relatively narrow, traditional main street that has active retail uses at the street level, with ample off-street parking tucked behind the storefronts that could absorb an estimated 120 displaced on-street spots. The street connects to the Palo Alto Caltrain station — a regional bus hub, and the second busiest station on the line — and it leads straight into the Stanford campus. So University Avenue generally enjoys a healthy level of pedestrian activity, but it is also subjected to considerable vehicular congestion, particularly at rush hour, when a long line of cars waiting to merge onto Highway 101 sometimes protrudes westward into the street grid. Merchants on Market Street in San Francisco have been slow to realize that closing off car access could actually increase traffic to their businesses, but even they are finally coming around. What will the learning curve be in Palo Alto? It just so happens that the students have already approached some Palo Alto city officials, merchants, and their customers. The response: “most of the merchants are especially enthusiastic.” You don’t say.

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.

It is an urban planning mantra that walking and transit are flip sides of the same coin. Transit riders begin and end their trip on foot; so streets that create a secure and enjoyable pedestrian experience are an important component of eliminating car trips and reducing automobile dependence. Even motorists have to be pedestrians for a portion of their trip — which only highlights the fact that the pedestrian experience is the lowest common denominator, worthy of both investment and careful thought. Many older Bay Area neighborhoods that first came into existence around transit routes naturally get the basics right, without undue effort. These are places like our urban CBDs, and neighborhood commercial districts on the streetcar lines that once blanketed San Francisco and the inner East Bay — but also select suburban locations like the older Peninsula downtown districts that sprung up at railroad depots. By contrast, other Bay Area locales that were designed with the express purpose of catering to automobiles are pedestrian wastelands — characterized by dark, uninviting freeway overpasses; long suburban blocks punctuated by strip malls, parking lots, curb cuts; narrow, interrupted or even nonexistent sidewalks; and, generally, little to no active street environment. These latter places present the greatest challenge, and they require that a calculated planning effort be applied to create walkability out of auto-oriented design. In the summer of 2008, the title of America’s most walkable city was bestowed upon San Francisco, and many of the city’s beloved neighborhoods deserve the title. Other neighborhoods — the long, bland industrial blocks and wide traffic sewers South of Market come immediately to mind — do not, although citywide blueprints for active and complete streets are a work in progress.

A vigorous debate has unfolded in the past few weeks over infrastructure spending in the federal stimulus package. Transit advocates, frustrated by the less-than-stellar past eight years, desperately seek any sign that our urban (for a change) President-Elect will effect a policy shift by robustly allocating the promised funding to transit projects — only to be disappointed by Obama’s repetitious chant favoring the expansion of roads and bridges. The conversation is, as usual, one that zeroes in on automobiles and mass transit, pitting them against each other. Less discussion has been devoted to infrastructure for a less glamorous form of transportation: walking. But a healthy, successful city is comprised of healthy, successful streets; and a high-quality, walkable street environment is the underlying link that unifies the transit and density discussion. In recognition of this truth, the Congress for the New Urbanism sent a proposal to James Oberstar, chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, who has already been receptive to devoting more stimulus money to transit. The CNU proposal advocates for a well-rounded use of the stimulus funds, focusing on network connectivity rather than individual corridor projects. Under the proposal, some portion of a city that has 150 intersections per square mile would qualify as a “network,” which means it would be eligible to receive federal stimulus funds — not to widen a freeway or to improve transit in a particular corridor, but to transform all streets in the designated network area into green, livable streets. These streets would be upgraded in accordance with good urban design principles, in order to enhance the pedestrian experience and increase transit ridership. The multimodal vision is similar to that embraced by California’s Complete Streets Act passed this year, but it would translate into more immediate results.

We cannot help but to admire both the simplicity and the creativity of CNU’s proposal. What makes the proposal so attractive is its grounding in sound urbanist principles. The CNU proposal leverages the power inherent in a street grid to disperse traffic throughout an open, integrated network of routes. This is preferable to funneling a high volume of cars onto a few wide arteries, which encourages many drivers to use the exact same route. As a result, these wide arteries attract congestion like a magnet, and when the roadway reaches capacity, there is the perception that it must be widened to further increase capacity, leading to a vicious cycle of induced demand. This is not just a transportation and environmental problem; it is also an economic problem. Businesses are generally not located on freeways and expressways; rather, they are located on city streets. Drivers that speed through a city via freeway or other wide arterial will have little to no contact with the actual city, and thus have fewer opportunities to enjoy and contribute to the prosperity of the city by patronizing its businesses. This pattern has led to the decline of many once-prosperous urban districts and corridors, including here in the Bay Area. It confirms our observation that the freeway/artery model is inferior to the grid model, in which traffic is dispersed throughout a network of streets. But shovel-ready freeway expansions are an unfortunately prevalent item appearing on state wish lists, and going forward with a road-centered stimulus based on such projects will bring the United States even more squarely in line with the undesirable freeway/artery traffic model.

City streets, unlike freeways, naturally support a variety of transportation modes; and they can support those modes even better if we implement complete street design principles that calm traffic, and prioritize a high-quality pedestrian streetscape above moving cars faster. By proposing that intersection-dense street networks qualify as a single project unit for the purposes of stimulus funding, CNU’s proposal shifts investment away from freeways and toward our nation’s neglected city centers. Under the proposal, any street in a qualifying network could be enhanced with stimulus money. Note that this does involve spending money on the roads themselves. Roads should be kept in good working condition. Given that some money must be spent on road networks, it is preferable to invest in city streets, because funds can be applied both to repaving and to creating complete streets that are friendly and accessible to all users no matter their travel mode. The result will be increased concentration of human and economic activity in our cities — in the exact areas where trips are generally shorter, and where it is often easier to walk, bike, or take transit than it is to drive. And as noted above, a high-quality pedestrian experience is absolutely central to the success of this vision. Attractive, walkable, complete streets encourage people to shift to other modes and reduce their automobile usage, and they carry great economic benefits for cities. But even more fundamentally, they form the basic infrastructure needed for effective circulation — and to ensure that our streets retain plentiful non-automotive capacity that will accommodate future growth.

This is not to say that it is not critical to maximize the stimulus money that goes toward transit — it certainly is. But the elegance of CNU’s proposal is that moves beyond the roads-versus-transit struggle that has dominated the stimulus conversation, by emphasizing that a sensibly-crafted road stimulus can nonetheless resonate with the objectives of a transit-focused stimulus, while still improving road infrastructure. The proposal concedes that there are benefits to road construction projects — but it calls for the right type of road infrastructure investment in the right places, by leveraging the energy, vitality and efficiency inherent in cities’ street grids. If you like CNU’s proposal, you  might consider getting in touch with your Congressional representative and encouraging them to integrate the CNU network designation into the stimulus package. And while you’re at it, please add your voice in support of Transportation for America, which has been taking a leading role on our behalf in pressing Congress to adopt a sustainable stimulus.

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]