every city/town needs well-designed streets and places and infrastructure and policy. let local flavors shine thru? of course. but to suggest that we should not first look to ‘urban widgets’ (aka design patterns) to get solutions is wrong.

no ‘R&D’ is necessary. it’s been done. design the cycletrack, and install it. design the wider sidewalk and stop rounding the edges so much at intersections, and install it. change your zoning regs and implement them. this stuff is not rocket science. it takes a special kind of conceit to believe that we’re all so special that we can’t live off the hard work that others have done before us.

SF is diverse? no. we have no black middle class to speak of. that, to me, means ‘no diversity’.

outside of that, though, i’m begging SF for the infrastructure that Toronto has — streetcars — in what is probably the most totally diverse city on the planet — and i don’t give a rat’s tail who lives there or why — just that they have awesome public transit. give me that cookie-cutter stuff, please. and i’ll take the cookie-cutter bike infrastructure from New York and Portland and any other place that has it — i don’t care how big or white those towns are. bring on the cookie-cutter — no ego problems over this way.

the whole ‘wait wait wait, we need cultural sensitivity because our kids are different from your kids — they don’t need safe infrastructure the way you have provided it to your kids, White Portland,’ is maddening.

sometimes race is not the pertinent issue.

I think that it’s important for Livable Streets folks to stop using the phrase ‘jaywalking’– it’s like the ‘Death Tax’ or ‘Pro-Life’– ‘jaywalking’ was created and promoted by pro-car folks to dominate the streets with cars. See Peter Norton’s “Street Rivals: Jaywalking and the Invention of the Motor Age Street”

Living in SF, I do as the natives do, crossing on the green, and have taught my children accordingly. But my kids seem to think that crossing with the light will somehow keep them safe in itself. It has been quite a battle to convince them that they still have to look both ways, so I have started carefully crossing with them against the light while making a big deal of the importance of looking all around when doing so. Since SF allows cars to turn on a red light (NYC does not allow this), pedestrians are at a distinct disadvantage here. I would prefer my kids to be alert jaywalkers rather than lazy law abiding citizens!