Golden Gate Park is the Los Angeles of urban parks. It’s sprawling, uninviting, and has too many roads.

I’ve never seen a nice urban park that was criss-crossed by so many car-friendly roads. More importantly, the park lacks inviting pedestrian access. What is the natural path for pedestrians to get to the museums? South Blvd from 9th and Lincoln? Maybe if strolling past a LONG line of parked cars is your idea of experiencing what should be an urban oasis.

And, of course, as mentioned, the transit access to the park is also mediocre at best.

Solution? How about we close all roads to cars except important through streets (Kezar and the Highway 1 crossover). Then, run a light rail branch off of the N Judah line up Cole St, and jog onto Page and into the park. Continue along the JFK Dr’s alignment to the Concourse, and the line could terminate anywhere in the Richmond district, perhaps along Geary to connect to other/future transit. This line could even provide a nice, convenient alternative for some residents of the Richmond to get downtown with transit. It would be a relatively short, cheap line, making use of the existing infrastructure. A daytime/special event bus would bring visitors further into the park towards the ocean, and possibly out to Sutro baths.

Eventually, Kezar could hopefully be tunneled beneath this corner of the park, allowing for a beautiful grassy esplanade to serve as the natural entrance to the park for PEOPLE, instead of cars.

Easy for tourists, convenient for residents, good for San Francisco.

Light rail is a bit sketchier, primarily because very few of the “stations” have names that are clearly identifiable on a map, or even marked clearly on the platform itself. I want to see big signs on island platforms that say “9th and Irving” or “24th and Church” that correspond in large font on a transit map.

The buses are a complete disaster in this regard. You look at a map, and you have no idea where the stops are, what they are called. And many of the stops are marked just by swatches of yellow paint on the ground or on a utility pole. A tourist or a day tripper is not going to be bothered to learn such a convoluted system, so they will stick to transit modes where stations are clearly identifiable and easy to figure out. One of the big disappointments of the TEP, if it ever gets implemented, is that there doesn’t seem to be much of an effort to take those identified “crosstown” routes, reduce stops and then enhance the remaining ones.

But ask them to transfer to a bus, and then you’ll see the real difference between them and urbanites.

Buses are scary to suburbanites — they don’t know where they go, they might get on the wrong direction, and they might get off at the wrong stop and get stuck in some frightening housing project. (And yeah, the people on buses scare some of them too.)

To overcome these fears, you really have to hold their hand and give very specific directions.

My fiancee’s mom lives in the suburds of Chicago and as we have friends in the city we are always taking the commuter trains in and out on the weekends. Many families, groups of ladies shopping and young people ride into the city on a Saturday and it appears to be quite normal. This is what is needed in the Bay Area

Thanks for sending the better directions to the Academy. (Caltrain to the N works, too, and Caltrain is a really nice option for folks south of Millbrae.) I agree that crystal clear directions are essential.

I also agree that San Francisco needs to do a better job promoting Muni outside the city. People in other parts of the Bay area often do not know where Muni goes or are too intimidated to take it. I honestly know people who have lived their whole life in Marin who did not know that there was an entire subway system below Market Street until I took them on it. Ah well.

http://www.calacademy.org/visit/getting_here/

I just sent the following email to the info@calacademy.org address. Please feel free to contact them too if you agree with me about this.

————

I appreciate that the academy is trying to promote public transit as the best way to visit, but the current web page is not well thought out. Far too many choices are given, which confuses people who are not frequent transit users and actually makes them unlikely to use public transit.

For example, why is there a “Market Street Alternative Route” “If you prefer not to take the N-Judah streetcar”? Why would someone ever prefer not to take the faster option? For that matter, why are there 4 options from City Hall?

As an illustration of the kind of directions you should be providing, here are two examples. They’re not perfect, but they’re more specific and useful than the current directions. They tell visitors exactly where to transfer, and how quickly they will arrive at the museum.

———-

From the Peninsula on BART:

Get off at Glen Park station and transfer to the #44-O’Shaughnessy bus (inbound direction to California & 6th) directly across Bosworth street from the station. In about 17 minutes, you will arrive in front of the museum.

From the East Bay on BART:

At Civic Center station, transfer to the Muni Metro subway, one level above BART. Take the N-Judah in the outbound direction. In about 15 minutes, get off at the 9th and Irving stop, and walk 5 minutes north on 9th Avenue into Golden Gate Park.

———

Thanks very much for listening.

Solution: create spurs along 9th for the N and along 6th/8th for the B/G and make the parking garage a new station/ railyard for Muni.

Living near 16th/Mission, you could imagine the palpitations I suffered when I opened up the PDF of the TEP’s first realignment proposals and saw the differences between the 33 and 24 split up, swapped and rejoined like some Frankenstein experiment gone all wrong. Fortunately that was euthanized.

The 33 is also a “hospital line,” with SFGH, St. Mary’s and Children’s Hospital as well as the Mission Health Center. Eliminating service on Stanyan would cut off St. Marys from the mix.

The other option is to blow off the Inner Sunset and route the 33 to the west into the park at Fell, with stops at the McLaren Lodge, Conservatory of Flowers, Music Concourse/Museums and right onto 8th Ave, left back onto Fulton and to Arguello and the end of the line. That would cut out the nasty Stanyan/Fulton knot and still have similar service within a few blocks with a few stops removed, again a TEP priority. But that would not serve the UCSF connection which was part of the justification for the G Line.

Often ideas that one just pulls out of one’s ass smell somewhat like ass.

-marc

*rimshot*

(1) 33 line

I strongly beg to disagree with marc about the 33 line. The Stanyan portion is an integral part of the route (ie it serves my house). But as someone who rides the 33 regularly starting on Stanyan and heading in both directions (either to the Mission or to connect to the 38 on Geary), and relies on the 33 to support a daily car-free life, I can tell it is heavily used in this segment and is critical to serving the north panhandle, lone mountain, and inner richmond in a direct way without a ridiculous circuitous jaunt several blocks east through the park to serve a museum. As you pointed out — the 33 is the all-cool neighborhood connector, one of the most useful lines in the City, and it would severely degrade its purpose by rerouting through the park.

(2) location of museums
We have to face reality and look at priorities in terms of land use. We could take up prime land near regional transit in the downtown for a museum with a huge footprint, or we could use that same space for a much greater density of jobs, housing, shopping, etc. We’re certainly not going to put the offices in the middle of GGPark, so let’s be real here. There’s room for a few big cultural attractions downtown near BART. But we’re near maxxed out on room for them. There’s room for a couple more moderate sized ones — for instance the Exploratorium is moving to one of the remaining major piers along the Embarcadero. But more museum expansion in the downtown is not serving us or the region very well. While I have myself in the past criticized these institutions for not locating themselves in more transit accessible locations, I’ve come to realize that our priority for using scarce land in the middle of downtown next to BART really isn’t the de Young museum. We just need to do a better job at improving transit to the Park and other locations. The dumb Culture Bus certainly isn’t the answer, but we can’t pick everything up and move it downtown. We’d need a few more downtowns for that. And on top of that, I rather enjoy some of these civic institutions in the park.

Maybe that will change a bit if the bus is marketed differently like BRT and is a visibly different experience, but I know that whenever I visit a strange city, I look at their subway and train map and do not bother trying to understand their bus system. Build more grade-separated trains, for sure. But until that happens, the only way to get people out of their cars is to let them park near those trains.

The worst part of the 33 is the Stanyan to Fulton, and if the alignment went down Lincoln to 9th Ave and into the park, then that would add a cool neighborhood, the park attractions and probably increase the travel time from the Mission to the Richmond by 10 min.

This would all require several more miles of overhead wire, along Lincoln and through the park, @ $1m/mi. Maybe the parking revenues from the garage can subsidize that!

-marc

Inner Sunset is one of The City’s most lively shopping and eating neighborhoods, but cars ruin it and make it dangerous. People are crowded onto the sidewalks. Crossing the street on foot is hair-raising.

They should put special discount coupons for the Academy in the hands of the driver of the 44 to give out to riders of that specific line.

Aside from this point, there are major issues that could not be addressed due to time constraints and word limits:

1) How do Recreation and Parks, the Music Concourse Community Partnership, and the Concourse Authority intend to fulfill the mandate of Proposition J and turn the concourse into a pedestrian oasis?

2) Muni riders such as myself know that Muni service — the 44, 71, N-Judah, 5, and 21 all run near the portion of the park that attracts the most car traffic — is seriously eroded by traffic congestion. If there is no current analysis on the impact of congestion on Muni service and the overall of economic health of the city, one should be commissioned; And,

2) Knowing what we know about traffic in and around GGP, do we really want to go forward with putting the CAMP in the Main Post of the Presidio?

About the Museums: what are you going to do out there? When the Asian moved downtown everyone out there wanted to make sure the rest stayed b/c they wanted to make sure they could drive to them. So, a huge garage is built and now they can drive there. As the one commissioner said “it was not unexpected.

Signs would be a good idea and so would closing a larger section of JFK on Saturdays. I never go to the park except on Sundays b/c you don’t see the cars.