Last week on PARK(ing) Day, I carved out some time to run around to a few different neighborhoods in San Francisco, enjoying parking spots that were transformed temporarily into miniature parks and pockets of usable public space. While I had planned to get a post up with some pictures much sooner than this, I didn’t even get a hold of the pictures until several days after the fact. Anyway, I hope that you’ll enjoy these additional, albeit tardy, snapshots of this wonderful annual event.
The prize for the wonkiest park(ing) spot may have to go to the San Francisco Planning Department, which set up shop behind Caffe Trieste, at Gough & Market. The Planning Department corner featured a “build your own urban environment” exhibit that even attempted to get visitors excited about transit and the density bonus:
A park(ing) spot of wholly different character in the Tenderloin, featuring bales of hay on Leavenworth between Turk and Golden Gate:
A crowded lunching spot on New Montgomery — and around the corner from that, the park(ing) spot at SPUR’s new Urban Center on Mission Street:
And finally, North Beach, where merchants lost no time in appropriating the extra sliver of captured street space to expand the seating capacity of their cafes and restaurants:
Transbay Blog 
Nice coverage here to further awareness of not only this special day but some of the challenges to successfully integrating human scale into high density living/working environments. To further push back against the often dominate automobile transportation infrastructure, consider this website:
WALK SCORE find a walkable place to live
http://www.walkscore.com/
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Posted by QwkDrw | 25 September 2009, 5:16 pmThere are so many opportunities to improve the WalkScore.com algorithm, by integrating transit and “on the ground” information relating to things like topography and streetscape obstacles. That would be a huge project of course, but more nuanced than right now, where it uses concentration of many types of uses as a proxy for those other things that tend to go hand-in-hand with walkability. Still, just the fact that the site exists shows an increasing level of awareness of these issues, which is a good thing.
Posted by Eric | 25 September 2009, 5:38 pm