Comments on: Eyes on the Street: The Mean Sidewalks of San Francisco

By: stefan

stefan — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 23:58:14 +0000

Since we're stuck with all these garages fronting sidewalks, any good ideas on how to pretty them up? Make them more ped-friendly?

By: jamie

jamie — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 07:01:21 +0000

I'm a lot more worried about getting hit by some knucklehead trying to do an end run to the Bay Bridge 1st Street entrance by zipping down Folsom, right on Main, and right onto Harrison than I am the blocks and blocks of walls built as part of buildings pre-Loma Prieta in the RIncon Hill neighborhood ... then again, our neighborhood plan for high-density housing close to the transit hub of the Bay Area and jobs center attempts to make sure we never, ever look at the god awful blocks and blocks of garage doors and curb cuts that I see when I venture out past West Portal.

By: Barna Mink

Barna Mink — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 19:12:55 +0000

"for home owners who don't use their garages for parking" Newsflash: in large parts of SF, these people park on the sidewalk. See, I'm all for front gardens and other niceties, and I agree that they lend a very civilized look to houses (and I am in the process of planning to put one in as well), however there are much more fundamental issues the city is facing here. Let's not forget that the prime reason for the disappearance of the (once very popular) front garden was the desire of homeowners to pave them over, to (illegally, I might add) park their cars in that space, whether the reason is that they own more cars than garage, or that they converted the garage to an (illegal) in-law, or that they started using their garages for storing all their crap, or a combination of all these. The simple fact is that a lot of people in this city care more about having the public space in front of their building be their own private parking and car-wash, than to have something you can call a "sidewalk" or a building that is pretty to look at. All of these are very important to me, and I would love to mandate beautiful streets, but until the city starts enforcing what is already the law, I don't have a lot of hope that they would enforce those new mandates or incentives...

By: marcos

marcos — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 18:44:37 +0000

@jwb, interesting case study. Aside from the apartment building (1924), most of both sides of the street were build in 1900, according to assessors records. The apartment building is on the east side of the street, has three 10' stories over a 15' ground floor and is built out to the lot line as a solid, flat undifferentiated mass as was common at the time. The cornice line along that side of the street comes close to that 45', three stories of set back Victorian over a service basement. The Victorians across the street, including some really sweet Italianates, are two story walk ups plus a partially sunken ground floor access making for 25' height, plus or minus some change. The cornice line appears to be The east side of the street is upslope, houses buttressed into the hillside and west side downslope, probably with very nice gardens and rear views. The sidewalks on the east side are about 15' wide according to GoogleEarth. Sidewalks on the south side are 19' wide. The width of the street is about 35.5' Total ROW is about 76.5' without the garage add ons, but 88' with them. The east side has 3 street trees, the west side more than 5, this at the north end of the block. I don't think that the stark difference between urban tone of the two sides of the streets is solely dependent upon the design of the garage. The west side of the street is more inviting and human scale in several dimensions, sidewalk, height and trees. The heights are instrumental, because if one took two triangles, one from each side of the street: 88' x 28' x 92.5' = 17.65° 76.5' x 28' x 81.45 = 20.1° 88' x 40' x 96.6' = 24.44° 76.5 x 40' x 86.33' = 27.6° So adding the garage structures on the east side narrows the ROW and pushes the pedestrian out further and makes a larger apparent angle. I'd wager that this angle limits amount of morning sun and the tree options for the east side and makes an already poor situation worse. -marc

By: jwb

jwb — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 18:34:28 +0000

I don't know if I'd describe Rosa Parks as a nice place to walk through. It's just a parking lot to my eye. And SF public housing has always been a huge abuser of the parking lot. I would say the majority of city-owned property in the area bounded by Geary, Haight, Franklin, and Divisadero is paved over for parking, much to the detriment of the neighborhood. At some point in the foggy past, some bureaucrats decided that the most important thing for poor people in public housing was to have tons and tons of parking. As a result those neighborhoods are practically devoid of retail outlets and services.

Witness the almost maniacal devotion to parking in this area of the Western:

http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=37.777821,-122.426727&spn=0.003095,0.00398&t=h&z=18

By: Jym Dyer

Jym Dyer — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 18:32:34 +0000

=v= The city's policies generally leave no option for the ground floor other than conversion into a garage. Conversion back from a garage to living space is disallowed, based on obsolete thinking that having off-street garages somehow improves on-street parking. (There are decades of evidence to the contrary, of course.) There are tens of thousands of San Franciscans living in perfectly habitable "unwarranted" units. These are ground floor in-laws that could instantly become "illegal" units if somebody has a petty grudge. It's high time the city legalized these units, especially along transit corridors. Otherwise there's really no option except ripping out street trees and front gardens, putting in garages, and waiting for your soft storey to fail when the Big One hits.

By: MJ

MJ — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 18:12:48 +0000

One disadvantage for San Francisco is that it has scarcely any service alleys between blocks. I don't know *why* it doesn't--other neighborhoods built in the US at the same time have them, and I don't think topography was a barrier.

By: jwb

jwb — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 18:05:12 +0000

I'd like to nominate the 1900 block of Webster St. as a study in garage contrast. On the west side of the street, a row of nicely maintained homes, all with sunken garages. Their stoops are the most prominent feature of these homes, and it's nice to walk by, except for the car sometimes parked on the side walk.

http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=37.788828,-122.432156&spn=0,359.968157&z=15&layer=c&cbll=37.788927,-122.432161&panoid=K3CUpQIe0ohX3N9QzlF4fQ&cbp=12,221.13,,0,4.76

On the east side of the street, you have a row of houses all with huge, hulking loading docks. Even though the quality of the houses on the east side is similar to the west side, the presentation for pedestrians is lifeless.

http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=37.788929,-122.432156&spn=0,359.968157&z=15&layer=c&cbll=37.788831,-122.432142&panoid=K3CUpQIe0ohX3N9QzlF4fQ&cbp=12,124.21,,0,2.57

By: Kimi

Kimi — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:52:46 +0000

Valencia Gardens public housing in the Mission is a nice example of how to take apartment garages out of the equation and make a visually pleasant and very practical method of addressing the residents' need for cars. There's a middle road, Rosa Parks, that runs from Valencia to Guerrero and assigned parking spots for apartments so residents don't need to compete as much with others for street parking. Rosa Parks Street has very little traffic and children often play there, and it's a very nice space to walk through.

By: ZA

ZA — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 16:51:32 +0000

Michael Rhodes, you make a fair observation about the adverse pedestrian environment in San Francisco, however there are a few more variable we should consider:

1. With the loss of a lot of the streetcar network that sustained hilltop communities, the car has become an unfortunate necessity. Concurrent road paving sometimes lead to garages, sometimes not.

2. Many of the 'garages' are coal basements, and even the most aggressive automotive suspension can't cope with those drops. A realistic in-house garage would mean converting the basement into living space, and the living room into an on-street garage...beyond the means of many home owners.