Archive for the ‘Streetscape’ Category
Streets Stimulus
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| This is Denver, not the Bay Area, but one basic issue is the same: each driveway or mid-block curb cut is a lapse in security for a pedestrian. How many other walkable street mistakes can you find? Image courtesy of Flickr user Complete Streets. |
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.
SB 375 and AB 1358: Victory for Livability Legislation
September 30 at midnight is the deadline for the Governor to sign bills into law, and in light of the record-late budget, legislation has been stacking up. Amidst all the signed and vetoed bills, I am happy to report that SB 375 and AB 1358, two important pieces of “livability legislation” that we have been following, have both been signed into law. SB 375, the landmark bill that unites transportation, housing, and land use planning with CEQA reform, is an important step towards incentivizing the growth of transit-oriented neighborhoods as part of a multi-pronged effort to achieve AB 32’s greenhouse gas emission mandates. The other bill is AB 1358, the Complete Streets Act, which will require local governments to account for all users of the street (including pedestrians, cyclists, transit riders, and the disabled) when updating the circulation elements of their General Plans. When governments then turn to execute the updated directives in their General Plans, we can hope to see calmer, more walkable streets emerge all over the state of California. The combination of both bills point toward a brighter future — turning our back on the unchecked proliferation of residential subdivisions and strip malls, while embracing the growth of dense, compact, walkable neighborhoods. Now, if only we could manage to stop raiding the public transit fund every year.
Complete Streets Act to Hit the State Senate Floor
Finally — the Complete Streets Act (AB 1358), first introduced in February 2007 and then later held in the Senate Appropriations Committee, has been reintroduced and will go before the full California State Senate next week (week of August 4, 2008). The bill was authored by San Francisco Assemblymember and presumptive 3rd District Senator Mark Leno, and its passage will be an important step toward reducing the automotive bias of streets, so that streets throughout California will be safer and more welcoming to all users. AB 1358 defines street users as “motorists, pedestrians, bicyclists, children, persons with disabilities, seniors, movers of commercial goods, and users of public transportation.” In particular, AB 1358 requires that the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research (OPR) set forth guidelines for streets that safely accommodate the movement of all users — this is similar to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s Routine Accommodations, but would apply statewide — and it authorizes OPR to consult air quality management districts and transportation planners. In turn, when cities and counties revise the circulation element of their General Plans, they would do so in accordance with the updated OPR guidelines. Passage of AB 1358 will help California fulfill AB 32’s mandates for reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, which General Plan updates must now take into account — and it will lead to the creation of more livable streets throughout California.
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]
Reclaiming Market Street
Whatever you might happen to think about San Francisco’s District 6 Supervisor Chris Daly, we should at least thank him for reigniting the conversation about closing off Market Street to cars, specifically the over two mile stretch between The Embarcadero and Octavia Boulevard in Hayes Valley. This comes fast on the heels of plans to close off car access to several miles of The Embarcadero for two weekends later this summer (one of which is Labor Day), plans that have prompted protests by angry Fisherman’s Wharf merchants. Yes, the discussion of car-free Market Street does resurface from time to time, and “Da Mayor” Willie Brown’s former proposal of such a policy was unsuccessful — but it is nonetheless encouraging to see that the conversation continues. Merchants, of course, will always raise hell protesting any proposal that involves limiting vehicular access to their stores, but anyone in San Francisco who is in the know and who drives a car (or is that an oxymoron?) already tries to avoid Market Street, except to cross it. We should be careful when applying the usual merchant complaints (usually raised in the context of neighborhood commercial districts) to a discussion of Market Street, which is a special case that deserves a special conversation — and which is a natural location to experiment with the creation of livable urban spaces. Market Street is not a place to “score a parking spot,” and essentially any location from the Ferry Building to the Castro District is a short stroll from a subway station, to say nothing of the plethora of bus stops lining the street from end to end.
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| 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.
A Facelift for the College Avenue Safeway
The Safeway and 76 gas station, at the northeast corner of College and Claremont Avenues in Oakland, together occupy a site whose layout is entirely inappropriate for an urban setting, particularly for the intersection of two major avenues. The large parking lot, which fronts directly onto parts of both College and Claremont, is a (sub)urban design error I have long hoped to see corrected — particularly in the Rockridge commercial district, which features a mostly uninterrupted frontage of buildings that open onto the street and contribute to a pleasant pedestrian experience. (Unfortunately, the Highway 24 overpass, which is the neighborhood’s most intrusive interruption, is much less easily corrected than this Safeway parking lot.) Good thing, then, that Safeway has released its latest plans to transform the current site, which is essentially a strip mall. The new plan has more parking (212 spaces) than ideal for a supermarket a few blocks from BART and located in an eminently walkable neighborhood — Safeway’s newer lifestyle stores are not quite farsighted enough to attempt changing the lifestyle of driving. The first floor will feature several small retail spaces (totaling 16,000 square feet) fronting onto College and a small section of Claremont. The 59,000 square foot grocery store will be located on the second floor, so that the parking would at least be hidden behind the retail and under the grocery store. The plan’s weakness looks to be the Claremont frontage, which will feature little retail. All in all, the plan is an improvement over the current auto-oriented store and gas station. Constructing the new building right to the property line will make this wide intersection more attractive by emphasizing its non-perpendicular angularity. For more design images and renderings like the one pictured above, check out the project website.
Better Streets for the Mission District
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| Courtesy SF Planning Dept. |
San Francisco is arguably one of America’s most walkable cities, with its dense, lively downtown complemented by a multitude of compact, bustling commercial districts that provide pleasant strolling experiences. But it also has its fair share of boulevards, like outer Geary and 19th Avenue, whose designs are rigged to maximize automotive throughput — at the direct expense of the pedestrian experience, which ranges from drab and noisy, at best, to downright dangerous, at worst. These boulevards may be wide, but they fall considerably short of grand. Solutions range from reducing speed limits on 19th Avenue to landscaping and dedicated bus lanes and stations on Geary that provide a sense of place and a pedestrian oasis in the median. In contrast to 19th Avenue, the Mission District boasts thorough transit access and a collection of comfortably walkable commercial strips, but there is room for improvement, as the bland landscape of Cesar Chavez (pictured above) demonstrates — with its long, multi-lane, infrequent pedestrian crossings; ample space for cars but narrow sidewalks; inadequate transit and bicycle amenities; and no greenery in sight.
Thumbs Up For Market-Octavia and 55 Laguna
A busy week prevented me from posting about this earlier, but better late than never: as you may have already read in the Chronicle, there have been favorable updates at the Board of Supervisors concerning the Market & Octavia Plan, which I addressed in a post a couple weeks ago. Supervisors Mirkarimi and McGoldrick had articulated competing visions for the contentious issues of affordable housing, parking, and density in the Market & Octavia plan area: more details are provided in that linked post. But the two proposals have since coalesced into a single compromise plan. Thankfully, Mirkarimi’s stricter parking requirements survived, helping to ensure that the Market & Octavia Plan maintains livability at its heart; the compromise also adopted Mirkarimi’s affordable housing funding plan, which set forth a tiered impact fee (of $0, $4, or $8 per square foot, depending on the location of the development) and the opportunity for developers to contribute to the citywide affordable housing fund in lieu of TDR fees. However, the compromise incorporates McGoldrick’s density cap, which will apply not just to Duboce Triangle, but to all blocks zoned as Residential Transit-Oriented (RTO), which includes most of the residential blocks deeper in the plan area, off of Market Street. These amendments were passed at first hearing at the Board last Tuesday, finally drawing some consensus on this comprehensive plan that has been highly contested in recent months.
Market-Octavia: Building a Vibrant Hub
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| Courtesy Stanley Saitowitz / Natoma Architects, Inc. |
For several years, the City of San Francisco has worked to develop the Market & Octavia Neighborhood Plan, studying neighborhoods centered on the pivotal intersection of Market and Octavia, bookended by Church Street on the west and Van Ness Avenue on the east. The plan was one part of the Better Neighborhoods 2002 effort — a sadly ironic name, because a mere 365 days is nowhere near sufficient to start and finish such a large-scale planning process, particularly in San Francisco. In some areas covered by the Market-Octavia plan, one has the impression of being in an unclassifiable neighborhood that is nonetheless quite close to favorite, well-established locales. The plan encompasses an area historically known as “the Hub”, so named for the Muni turnaround located there, and the neighborhoods contained within the plan area continue to evolve and come into their own, coining names like Deco Ghetto to reflect both an emerging identity and broader acknowledgment of that identity. Other parts of the plan area, including Hayes Valley, already enjoy established commercial districts but have been given a new chance to blossom since the retreat of the Central Freeway to the south side of Market Street.
It is also in this area that the slanted South of Market street grid curves and reorients into an arrangement that reflects the cardinal directions, adjusting to form the Mission/Castro grid. This is a departure from the pattern firmly established all the way from the Ferry Building, resulting in a suspension of the security resting in the predictable pattern of downtown streets. But some clever planning could take advantage of this insecurity and transform it into a distinctly urban sort of excitement, in which even the unsuspecting pedestrian would be smoothly guided by intuitively navigable streets designed for humans, rather than for the sole function of moving automobiles efficiently.
Market-Octavia is exactly the plan that aims to knit these disconnected neighborhoods together into a more unified and walkable set of districts that San Francisco could rightly be proud to call its own. The plan reflects thoughtful cooperation between community members and city planners. This vision was not forcefully hoisted upon neighborhood residents; rather, the goal was to achieve a consensus. It simultaneously blends a respect for the eminently livable residential scale of San Francisco’s most beloved neighborhoods, while advocating for a forward-thinking vision of elegant density graced by moving examples of contemporary design, like the Octavia Gateway pictured above — a building that provides a splendid answer to the problem posed by the narrow, awkward parcel of land on which it would sit, at the northeast corner of Market and Octavia.
Interested In Your Very Own Street Tree?
Interested in your very own street tree? My apologies for the dearth of updates. Off-computer life has gotten very hectic lately, but I’m hoping to get the ball rolling again soon. Until then, you could always … plant a street tree? Though sometimes basic streetscape improvements get lost in the shuffle of more complicated issues, trees and greenery go a long way to creating a pedestrian-friendly environment that encourages people to forgo automobile use and savor the street environment instead. In addition to making a street more beautiful, pedestrians can take comfort in having a buffer that shields them from car traffic. And it’s always handy to have a few more carbon dioxide-consumers around. If you live in San Francisco and are hungry for your very own street tree, here is a handy 7-step protocol for how to do it, courtesy of the Neighbors Project.
[Neighbors Project]
Remembering the 15-Third
In April, after construction delays and budget overruns, Muni, at long last, inaugurated its newest rail line, the T-Third Street. Advertised as “Connecting People, Connecting Communities”, the T-Third Street is an investment in some of San Francisco’s long-overlooked communities, particularly the humbler Bayview and Visitacion Valley neighborhoods, in the southeastern corner of the city — a place many people in the Bay Area and even San Francisco know only through the Chronicle’s homicide reports. The line provides direct rail service from downtown to the 3rd Street corridor, as well as to the UCSF Mission Bay campus and the new neighborhood that will surround the campus some years in the future. Solely from the perspective of transit service, the 3rd Street corridor should not have been given first priority for a rail line, but the T-Third project demonstrates a tangible and substantial investment in troubled neighborhoods, making it an excellent political tool. Back in April, the SFMTA held an opening ceremony in which city supervisors, “Da (Old) Mayor” Willie Brown (who spoke because the project was studied and developed under his watch), and even Madam Speaker Pelosi, in a grand sort of “Kumbaya”, pontificated about the deep symbolism of the new line and how it would help usher in a new era for the neglected southeastern neighborhoods. The transition from the old 15-Third bus to the new T-Third rail line became a metaphor for the future promise held by the 3rd Street corridor — promise which the T-Third would itself encourage and help to cultivate.
