Market and Kearny and 3rd Streets, 1909. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

“Whose Streets? OUR Streets!” yell rowdy demonstrators when they surge off the sidewalk and into thoroughfares. True enough, the streets are our public commons, what’s left of it (along with libraries and our diminishing public schools), but most of the time these public avenues are dedicated to the movement of vehicles, mostly privately owned autos. Other uses are frowned upon, discouraged by laws and regulations and what has become our “customary expectations.” Ask any driver who is impeded by anything other than a “normal” traffic jam and they’ll be quick to denounce the inappropriate use or blockage of the street.

Bicyclists have been working to make space on the streets of San Francisco for bicycling, and to do that they’ve been trying to reshape public expectations about how streets are used. Predictably there’s been a pushback from motorists and their allies, who imagine that the norms of mid-20th century American life can be extended indefinitely into the future. But cyclists and their natural allies, pedestrians, can take heart from a lost history that has been illuminated by Peter D. Norton in his recent book Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. He skillfully excavates the shift that was engineered in public opinion during the 1920s by the organized forces of what called itself “Motordom.” Their efforts turned pedestrians into scofflaws known as “jaywalkers,” shifted the burden of public safety from speeding motorists to their victims, and reorganized American urban design around providing more roads and more space for private cars.

Typical street scene in 1909, long before private cars had become a major problem. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

For decades, over 40,000 people have died each year in car crashes on the streets of the United States. This daily carnage is utterly normalized to the point that few of us think about it at all, and if we do, it’s like the weather, just a regular part of our environment. But it wasn’t always this way. Back when the private automobile was first beginning to appear on public streets a large majority of the population, including politicians, police, and business leaders, agreed that cars were interlopers and ought to be regulated and subordinated to pedestrians and streetcars.

It’s almost impossible to imagine the speed with which conditions on urban streets changed at the dawn of the motorized era. Here’s a quote from the California Automobile Association’s Motorland magazine in August 1927 describing the rapid growth in car ownership:

In 1895 there were four cars registered, in 1905 there were 77,400 in use, in 1915 the total had risen to 2,309,000, and in 1925 there were 17,512,000 passenger automobiles on the highways, and the total is now in excess of 20,000,000.

Motorland magazine cover, July 1927

With over two million cars clogging city streets in 1915, and death and injury tolls rising, cities took various measures to address the problem (quoting from “Fighting Traffic”):

From 1915 (and especially after 1920), cities tried marking crosswalks with painted lines, but most pedestrians ignored them. A Kansas City safety expert reported that when police tried to keep them out of the roadway, “pedestrians, many of them women” would “demand that police stand aside.” In one case, he reported, “women used their parasols on the policemen.” Police relaxed enforcement.

Pedestrians on Market Street, 1937. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

The common usage of the streets by all was considered sacrosanct and attempts by motordom and/or police to regulate people’s use of the streets was widely resisted. Plenty of police didn’t agree that pedestrian behavior should be criminalized on behalf of motoring:

New York police magistrate Bruce Cobb in 1919 defended the “legal right to the highway” of the “foot passenger,” arguing that “if pedestrians were at their peril confined to street corners or certain designated crossings, it might tend to give selfish drivers too great a sense of proprietorship in the highway.” He assigned the responsibility for the safety of the pedestrian—even one who “darts obliquely across a crowded thorofare”—to drivers… By 1916 “jaywalker” was a feature of “police parlance.” Police use modified the word’s meaning and sparked controversy. “Jaywalker” carried the sting of ridicule, and many objected to branding independent-minded pedestrians with the term… The New York Times objected, calling the word “highly opprobrious” and “a truly shocking name.”

Typical of auto industry-sponsored advertising shifting the burden for road safety from motorists to the children who had customarily been able to play in the streets safely. (Motorland magazine)

Anti-jaywalking campaigns came to San Francisco too.

In a 1920 safety campaign, San Francisco pedestrians who thought they were minding their own business found themselves pulled into mocked-up outdoor courtrooms. In front of crowds of onlookers they were lectured on the perils of jaywalking.

In 1941 jaywalking became a topic of interest in local papers, with several images captured of women jaywalking. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

Clearly 20 years of anti-jaywalking campaigns in San Francisco and the country as a whole had not convinced people to abandon their customary ways of crossing public streets. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

In 1942 this shot at 5th and Market shows the women walking against the signal. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

As the 1920s continued, more and more cars were being sold, and the streets were both crowded and contested. Streetcar operators blamed cars for clogging thoroughfares and slowing down their lines, causing late runs and generally inconveniencing passengers. Motorists parked everywhere, jamming curbsides two-deep, when they weren’t weaving through chaotic urban streets. Attempts to regulate and standardize traffic patterns began during this era, with lanes, crosswalks, traffic signals, and parking regulations slowly emerging as “solutions” to the problems created by tens of thousands of private cars filling the streets.

February 3, 1927, Van Ness and Fell Streets, with helpful labels to show what motorists are doing wrong. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

More 1927 instructional photography. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

When sales slumped in late 1923 and into 1924, analysts speculated that the market for cars was saturated (at about 7 Americans per car at the time). The car industry consisted of dozens of companies, who began to fail or merge during this first contraction in sales. The industry reorganized its public relations and launched concerted efforts to redefine “saturation”:

There was no “buying-power saturation,” [motordom] said. The real bridle on the demand for automobiles was not the consumer’s wallet, but street capacity. Traffic congestion deterred the would-be urban car buyer, and congestion was saturation of streets.

By the late 1920s, a young graduate student named Miller McClintock had become the nation’s pre-eminent traffic researcher thanks to his 1925 thesis “Street Traffic Control.” His career is a window into the process of private corruption of public interests that riddles American history up to the present.

In his 1925 graduate thesis Street Traffic Control, the old McClintock had maintained that widening streets would merely attract more vehicles to them, leaving traffic as congested as before. The automobile, he wrote, was a waster of space compared to the streetcar, noting that “the greater economy of the latter is marked.” “It seems desirable,” McClintock wrote, “to give trolley cars the right of way under general conditions, and to place restrictions on motor vehicles in their relations with street cars.” He described the automobile as a “menace to human life” and “the greatest public destroyer of human life.”

Two years later all had changed. McClintock wrote of “the inevitable necessity to provide more room” in the streets. He called for “new streets” and “wider streets.”… In 1925 McClintock virtually ruled out elevated streets as expensive and impractical; two years later he urged that they be considered.

What had happened in the two years between the diametrically opposed advice given by McClintock? He had been hired by Studebaker’s Vice President to head up the new “Albert Russel Erskine Bureau for Street Traffic Research,” which was first placed in Los Angeles where McClintock was teaching at UC, but a year later moved by Studebaker to Harvard University, where the car company continued to fund the ostensibly “independent” institute. As the years went by McClintock became one of the foremost authorities on traffic planning, though his organization dropped the “Albert Russel Erskine” from its name when the chairman of Studebaker Motors committed suicide in 1933!

McClintock came to San Francisco early in his career. In the August 1927 Motorland magazine, he penned an article summarizing his research “Curing the Ills of San Francisco Traffic”: “… it is recognized that an ultimate requirement for the solution of street and highway congestion is to be found in the creation of more ample street area.” And sure enough, it was in this exact period that San Francisco embarked on a series of street widenings throughout the city, including for example, Capp Street and Army Street in the Mission District. Interestingly, McClintock’s traffic study shows the predominant car-free life of San Franciscans at the time:

On a typical business day studied by the traffic survey committee, 1,073,963 persons entered and left [the central business] district during a fourteen-hour period from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. Vehicles of all types, including streetcars, carried 744,667 people in and out of the district, In addition, 329,296 pedestrians entered and left the district during the same period… In no other city is there such a large pedestrian movement into the central district, nor such a large outrush of people during the noon hour. Both of these conditions may be attributed to the large capacity of apartment houses immediately adjacent to the district…

Incredibly, streetcars were used by 70 percent of the people depending on some kind of transportation to get downtown, while only a quarter used passenger cars, but the latter made up 61 percent of vehicular traffic as compared to 11 percent for the streetcars! What has been poorly understood in the triumphant narrative of the private automobile is how cars benefited from enormous public expenditures, even when they were being used by a relatively small minority of the population. New infrastructure to accommodate motorists far outstripped any public investment in public streetcar service, let alone any subsidies for the privately owned lines. Meanwhile, electric streetcar companies were slowly going bankrupt, with their fares publicly restricted and the public streets on which they operated slowly being taken over by private vehicles.

Traditional use of the streets by pedestrians was being criminalized by new traffic codes. McClintock put forth a new Uniform Traffic Ordinance, adopted by San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, which was intended to “legislate jaywalkers off the streets,” crowed a Motorland magazine editorial. In 1915, Ford already had a factory at 21st and Harrison in the Mission making Model-T’s, and by the mid-1920s, the new car business was fully ensconced along Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco:

Chevrolet dealer at Van Ness and Sacramento, 1933. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

Rambler dealer, Van Ness Avenue, August 1964. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

Interior of Don Lee Cadillac showroom (now AMC Theaters). (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

Don Lee Cadillac dealership, Van Ness and O'Farrell, 1928. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

Miller McClintock continued his work on behalf of the auto industry from his bought-and-paid-for perch at Harvard University.

Miller McClintock [became] the impresario of a new kind of highway road show. In the spring of 1937, the Shell Oil Company combined McClintock’s traffic expertise with the talents of the stage designer Normal Bel Geddes to build a scale model of “the automobile city of tomorrow.”… Others interested in the rebuilding of cities for the motor age adopted Shell’s technique. At the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition, United States Steel displayed its vision of San Francisco in 1999, with wider streets, cloverleaf intersections, and an elevated highway.

Overshadowed by the far more successful World’s Fair in New York City, and in particular by the tone-setting “World of Tomorrow” exhibit there built by General Motors, the 1939 US Steel vision of San Francisco in 1999 is worth peeking at:

"San Francisco in 1999" Golden Gate International Exposition, 1939. US Steel financed this diorama, meant to reinvent San Francisco as a Corbusian radial city with a new rationalized and centralized port combining all piers in a single monumental jetty extending from 16th Street. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

This close-up from the US Steel 1939 vision of San Francisco in 1999 shows the intersection of 7th and Howard streets with elevated roadways passing under each tower. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

Here’s a description of the exhibit by Richard Reinhart in his book on the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition “Treasure Island: San Francisco’s Exposition Years”

Artist Donald McLoughlin had prepared a dioramic view of San Francisco in 1999 for the US Steel exhibit in the Hall of Mines, Metals and Machinery. This prognostic nightmare showed the city stripped of every vestige of 1939 except Coit Tower, the bridges and Chinatown. All maritime activity had disappeared from the Embarcadero. Shipping was concentrated at a super-pier at the foot of 16th Street.

North of Market Street every block contained a single, identical high-rise apartment house. South of Market, sixty-story office towers of steel and glass alternated with block-square plazas in a vast checkerboard pattern. Elevated freeways ran through the geometric landscape.

McLoughlin correctly anticipated the removal of maritime activity from San Francisco’s waterfront, though his massive modern pier is spread along the Oakland bay shore rather than on a prominent pier jutting out from 16th Street. Visions like this, and the better known version in New York, informed the post-WWII population as it fled cities for the suburbs. Those who remained though, had a different idea of what our cities would become, and thanks to their stopping the highway builders in their tracks in the late 1950s and early 1960s, San Francisco was not crushed in this way.

Interesting to recall that while 30,000 citizens were mobilized to stop freeway building in San Francisco (the very same elevated, pedestrian-free streets McClintock had come to endorse as an industry flack) thousands more, mostly African American and white youth, staged a vigorous civil rights campaign along auto row, demanding that blacks be given equal treatment in hiring by auto dealers, especially Don Lee’s Cadillac dealership.

Crowd cheering civil rights employment settlement with auto dealers, 1964. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

Contrary to the fervent wishes of today’s motorists, streets have not always been the domain of cars. Clever marketing prior to the Depression led to radical redesign of both the physical streets and our assumptions about how public streets should be used. As we ride to and from work on our bicycles these days, or get together in Critical Mass or Bike Party social rides, we are participating in a new push to redefine how streets are used, and most importantly, how we think about public space. While we haven’t yet found a new consensus, the rising tide of bicycling, parklets, Sunday Streets, car-free zones, etc., all amply demonstrate that the private car’s days are in decline. Add a dollop of global warming and a couple of scoops of cheap fossil fuel scarcity, and the question of Whose Streets is once again a key issue of social contestation. Perhaps at least we can stop blindly accepting death and mayhem as an inevitable and natural consequence of our social transportation choices!

Cartoon by Jean-Francois Batellier, a French artist who sells his art and books on the streets of Paris.

A Bike-and-Roll rental station in front of the Hyatt Regency at Market and Spear.

I’ve been bicycling in San Francisco since the late 1970s so I vividly remember when almost all bicyclists could recognize each other on the streets of the city. There really weren’t that many of us even as recently as the beginning of the 1990s, just two decades ago. We’ve come a long way, and one of the less recognized aspects of this bicycling boom has been the incredible expansion of bike rentals and bicycling tourism.

I wrote a flyer back in 1986 calling for a “City of Panhandles” and one of the arguments I made in that largely unnoticed document was that a systematic effort to provide safe, separate bikeways crisscrossing the City would itself lead to a tourism boom. As it turns out, we’re experiencing a dramatic increase in tourists cycling even before we provide adequate infrastructure. San Francisco is just an incredibly beautiful place, and people come from all over the world to experience its beauty. Growing numbers of those visitors aren’t much interested in seeing it through windshields and are opting instead (or in addition) to rent bicycles.

There are three “big” companies doing bike rentals in SF: Bike and Roll, Blazing Saddles, and Bay City Bikes (a number of smaller places, like the BikeHut at Pier 40, also rent bikes). I recently spoke with Darryll White, owner of Bike and Roll, and he gave me some impressive aggregate numbers. Since 1995 the local bicycle rental business has grown from about $500,000 a year to over $10 million! The remarkable thing about this huge increase in tourist cycling is that about 90 percent of the rentals are heading to the Golden Gate Bridge and to Sausalito, where the City Council has erupted into battles over bike parking vs. car parking, even pondering charging fees to touring bicyclists. The Golden Gate Ferry service keeps at least four of its ferry runs going to accommodate the cycling tourists, which have hit peaks of 2,500 per day during recent summer months.

Blazing Saddles rents bikes and go-carts from its Hyde Street facility near Fisherman's Wharf.

This past Wednesday I was buying food at the Heart of the City Farmers’ Market in UN Plaza and lo and behold, a mini-mass of 9 cyclists went rolling by on Market, heading westward. All of them were on Bike and Roll bikes, and I stopped to marvel at the sight. Imagine if there was a dedicated bikeway up Market that connected cyclists all the way to the Pacific Ocean? Talk about a tourist attraction! And since it would go right by the Haight-Ashbury, the museums in the park, as well as the Civic Center, imagine how heavily trafficked by cyclists from out of town this will be.

As it happens the SF Bike Coalition is now promoting a plan to Connect The City, a version of crosstown bikeways, including a dedicated bikeway that runs from the Embarcadero to the Pacific Ocean by way of Market Street, the Wiggle, and Golden Gate Park. It’s a wonder that the politically powerful tourism industry hasn’t thrown their weight behind it yet. The bicycle renaissance going on across the world has an important connection to San Francisco (Critical Mass was born here in 1992) and thousands of cyclists come here for the beauty, the food, and the politics. If San Francisco were creating dedicated bikeways, and presenting itself as a bicycling capital, tourism from near and far would only increase that much more.

The big three maintain a fleet of approximately 3500-4000 bikes and employ on average one mechanic per 100 bikes to keep those bikes rolling. New bike shops continue to open around town, showcasing the bicycle as one of the few growing business sectors that doesn’t require its workers to sit in front of computers all day, mining pixels. Commuters, messengers, and recreational riders have already radically expanded the use of our common public space by bicycles during the last twenty years. The challenge now is to really redesign the city’s streets to make safe, horticulturally and artistically designed bikeways as common as thoroughfares for cars. I’m not a big fan of capitalism or business, but it’s pretty obvious that if we build a beautiful system of bike boulevards, bicyclists will come to ride them by the tens of thousands. When they do, they spend a lot of money and keep a lot of our local economy going.

What could be simpler? Transform a citywide network of streets to promote daily bicycling, promote it to the global tourism industry, and get ready for the boom, doubling and tripling the huge expansion we’ve already seen. It would create good, local jobs to remake the streets (design, reconstruction, gardening, maintenance), more to accommodate the increase in local cycling (retail stores, rentals, bikesharing facilities, workshops), and then a further increase as the tourists pour in to cycle across San Francisco’s beautiful landscape (tour guides, rentals, mechanics, restaurants, hotels, cafes)… Whatever diminishing of car and gasoline sales might occur would be more than made up for by an ecologically healthy, economically relocalized, bicycle-centric boom that increases San Francisco’s global profile as a trendsetter and a tourist destination.

Different vehicles shape a different streetscape in Peru.

Our daily urban lives shape our imaginations in so many ways. Few things box us in like our everyday transit options, and the patterns of traffic that shape our sense of public space. These patterns themselves are historical of course. A quick look back at the famous Market Street film shot a few days before the 1906 earthquake shows how chaotic and unpredictable the flow of traffic was when San Francisco’s main artery hadn’t yet been paved and standardized. Similarly, leaving the U.S. and visiting other countries provides a fantastic opportunity to experience other assumptions and possibilities for urban space, and surprisingly perhaps, a different range of vehicles.

In Peru for a couple of weeks I first had to adjust to a major cultural difference–unlike California, pedestrians don’t have any legal rights, let alone cultural preference. When you start to cross the street at a corner in a Peruvian city, you better be ready to run. Because the cars are not going to wait for you, in fact they tend to speed up when they see someone trying to use the road space ahead of them. I noticed the same thing on highways too, a consistent refusal to yield to entering traffic, a universal assumption of individual ownership of the right of way. Here’s a video below the break we shot standing on a traffic island in Peru’s second largest city while waiting for the traffic to clear so we could cross the street.

We entered Peru on a bus from Ecuador, crossing the Macará river.

Crossing the river, that's our bus.

We rode from Cuenca, Ecuador to Chiclayo, Peru, which took about 22 hours.

Bus travel was a big part of our journey in Peru, though we took a plane from Chiclayo on the north coast all the way to Cusco in the southern Andes. The beginning of our time in the country finished our descent from the Ecuadorian Andes to the stark desert of northern Peru. Our international bus arrived in the Peruvian city of Piura, which I hadn’t heard of before, but it’s a good-sized city of a half million or so, sitting amidst a heavily irrigated desert of citrus farms and more. The most surprising discovery as we rode in on the dusty streets was to see countless moto-taxis and freight tricycles. They outnumbered autos, filling the streets with the canopied three-wheelers.

This was our first view of vehicular traffic in Piura, Peru.

Motorcycles dominated, both individually and as motors for rickshaws.

We changed to another four-hour bus ride from Piura to Chiclayo where we grabbed a plane after a few hours of sleep in a hotel, having been on buses for about 22 hours. Once we made it to Cuzco we delighted in the ancient capital of the Incas. The incredible stone-masonry of the Inca culture is incomparable, and what a fun surprise to find one of the original streets of their capital still functioning. It’s called Antisuyo and the massive granite blocks, so perfectly fit to each other, have survived centuries of earthquakes that crumbled lesser structures. The narrow, pedestrian friendly streets on the slopes of Cuzco are a walker’s paradise.

Here I am standing on Cuzco's Antisuyo, an original street from the time of the Inca Empire. The anti-seismic granite construction is visible in the amazing stonework here and in many places throughout former Inca territories.

From Cuzco we went on one of the world’s famous “walks” on the Inca Trail. Four days, three mountain passes (the highest being 14,000 feet!), and a great deal of it on the thousands of original steps that make up the well-trodden Inca Trail. We learned a bit about the Inca Empire along our journey, and knew that their road system equalled the Romans in terms of engineering, management of water and drainage, and perhaps even sheer extent. Inca Trails extended from the capital in Cuzco all the way to Colombia in the north, Chile in the south, and encompassed a population of millions.

Here I am slowly making my way to a 14,000 foot pass.

It's hard to describe the historic resonance of hiking a road built centuries earlier and used heavily during an entirely different culture and time in history.

After an amazing four days that got us to Machu Picchu we caught a bus from Cuzco to Arequipa, but our “bed bus” was a broken down second-tier bus rather than the luxury ride we thought we were buying. The views of snow-capped mountains and endless green valleys in the Altiplano were stunning, and after about 8 hours we arrived in the high plains town of Juliaca. This town depended even more on pedicabs and freight bikes than we’d seen in the north.

The altiplano as seen from our bus out of Cuzco on the way southwest to Juliaca.

The relatively comfortable bus terminal in Juliaca, Peru.

Street scene in Juliaca, Peru.

There's something so charming about pedicabs!

Great to look out the bus window and see more pedicabs and freight trikes than cars and trucks.

We had a dramatic late dusk ride along the sides of a huge lake called Lagunillas, as rain and thunder engulfed us on the way to Arequipa. The city’s night lights sprawled before us as we descended to it from the mountains. When we woke the next morning we realized we were still quite high (over a mile high) and in a surprisingly arid environment. Walking into downtown we found ourselves on Calle Bolivar, a pleasant pedestrian-centered avenue, which was a hint of something a little different in Peru’s second largest city.

Calle Bolivar-Sucre in Arequipa, Peru, a street recently reclaimed for pedestrians.

Here in the historic center of Arequipa (two huge volcanoes are obscured behind the cathedral by dense clouds) the traffic chokes the surrounding streets.

The historic city center’s streets were jammed with taxis and combis, which we soon realized was normal in Peru’s cities. Crossing the street was a continuous challenge but we started to get a handle on moving through the city (that video above captures the drama). We also found another street, Calle Mercaderos, which was closed to traffic and functioned like a long linear mall. In streets like this we see a different use of public space than we get normally in the U.S. Like the best European city centers, Peru too has taken important streets and dedicated them to pedestrians and public sauntering (and shopping of course).

Calle Mercaderes in Arequipa, a classic pedestrian zone mostly dedicated to shopping and people watching.

Finally we made our way to Lima, the country’s capital. Traffic is insane in Lima, but the city won us over for lots of reasons. For one thing we stayed just off Avenida Arequipa, which happens to have a lovely center median that has a bike way or “ciclovia” running down the middle. We were staying with a friend and had fun learning to navigate Lima by way of the ubiquitous “combis,” which come in all shapes and sizes and colors. The sing-song announcements of destination that the combi fare-takers used to help passengers decide which one to take was one of the pleasures of the ride. But the congested traffic, the bizarre competition between different combis to race ahead to get passengers at the next stop, and the generally aggressive driving by all vehicles presented an streetscape that was unmistakeably hostile to pedestrians.

This is the ciclovia on Avenida Arequipa in Lima, Peru, just outside the apartment we stayed in.

This is a pretty average scene of multiple competing combi lines jammed into traffic, each trying to get to the curb to get more passengers into its seats.

We found the combis pretty comfortable, always clean, and easy to navigate once you figured out where you were going. They only cost about 30 cents a ride too!

Lima is modernizing of course. They’ve put in a freeway that is locally known as “the Ditch,” but down the middle of it is one of several Bus Rapid Transit lines called the Metropolitana. Here’s a couple of shots of another Metropolitana line along one of the regular broad avenues in Lima.

The Metropolitana in Lima looks a lot like the Macrobus in Guadalajara, or BRTs in almost any city.

This is a shot back towards the arriving Metropolitana (at far right), while we sit in gridlock.

We were hapy to connect with local cycling activists, who hosted me giving a Talk on cycling and Critical Mass history. Cicloaxion got a boost from the World Naked Bike Ride a few years back, and now there are several different cycling advocacy groups in town.

Octavio, Edu, and Manu took us on a great ride around the historic center, teaching us how to navigate the insanity of Lima's traffic, and treating us to a great meal in Lima's Chinatown.

And ciclovias exist on a number of streets, along with barely used bicycle parking facilities.

Here's an underutilized Ciclovia in downtown Lima, used here as a parking spot for a couple of freight bikers.

Never did see any bikes parked here... Why do bike racks so often get put in places where they aren't used?

There are a lot of freight bikes rolling around Lima too.

There were lots of these guys rolling around downtown Lima.

Less than a month ago, Lima joined the growing world movement towards Sunday Streets with what they have dubbed “Ciclodia.” Thousands of Lima cyclists and joggers get out on Sunday morning to enjoy a six-kilometer stretch closed to all traffic on Avenida Arequipa. It was great to wake up on Sunday morning to the silence, after having been wakened each of our previous days by the roar of combis and their horns jockeying for position on the same street. So Lima, and Peru more generally, present a panoply of street uses, and a veritable menagerie of vehicles! Nothing jogs or imaginations or our fantasies like immersion in other cultures and other possibilities.

The crowds are emerging for Ciclodia in Lima, Peru, Sunday, March 20, 2011.

Street closed for Cycling Day, Lima Peru.

Lima is evolving and it was exciting to see the burgeoning cycling culture there too.

Chris Carlsson will be giving one of his four-hour bicycle history tours on local transit history, this Sunday, April 3, from 12-4 pm. Meet at CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission at 9th at noon, bring water and snacks. (A $15-50 sliding scale donation is requested to benefit Shaping San Francisco.)

Sunday, February 27, 2011, the 28-kilometer Cicleopaseo in Quito, Ecuador, heading southward.

The Quito Ciclopaseo happens EVERY Sunday, takes up over 20 miles of roadway each time, and is usually attended by over 50,000 cyclists during its 9-2 hours.

I just spent a few days in Quito, Ecuador, a remarkably beautiful city of a couple million sprawling 40 kilometers north-to-south through a series of valleys and plateaus in the Andes, surrounded by snow-capped volcanoes and rugged green mountains. I interviewed Heleana Zambonino from Quito for Streetsblog a while back, and wanted to see for myself the dynamic bicycling scene she described.

One of several well designed ciclovias in Quito.

This "Ciclo-Q" sign indicates a long north-south bike route through Quito, mostly in dedicated ciclovias, though some of them are on sidewalks which cause predictable conflicts.

Here the Ciclovia bends through a major intersection by taking part of the nicely redesigned sidewalks.

Mashol, Pablo, me, and Frank, pausing in one of Quito's many beautiful parks.

In fact, the ecology of bicycling in Quito is quite well developed. In two days we visited five distinct entities, all busily promoting bicycling and urban transformation in various ways. The first day started with Frank, Mashol, and Pablo giving us a tour of the historic center. Frank runs a small bike rental and tour business called Cicleadas del Rey and he’s been involved in many aspects of Quito’s burgeoning bike culture. He graciously loaned us bikes for our days in Quito.

Frank coming out of Cicleadas del Rey on Avenida Amazonas in Quito.

After the historic tour, we rode back to the neighborhood where we started—Mariscal—and met Carlos Tacuri, a guy who started bicycle agitating in Quito when he was 14 (he’s now 32). He has a shop called Construbicis, the closest thing to a Bike Kitchen in Quito. He has designed his own frame (another paradoxical example of globalization: his bike frames are manufactured in Taiwan) and is now putting together local bikes there and he’s very open with his shop and tools.

Carlos Tacuri and me next to his float-bike, outside of Construbicis in Quito.

From Construbicis we rode on one of the well-designed ciclovias that connect three university campuses in this part of Quito. Another common right of way many bicyclists use when they need to are the separated lanes dedicated to high-speed crosstown bus lines. Quito has three different routes, (Trole Bus, Ecovia, Metrobus), all running mostly north and south, which is one of the odd things to get used to for a North American in Quito. When you look at local maps you see the city arrayed from left to right—the City sits in an Andean plateau with lots of hills and doesn’t extend that far from east to west, but quite far from north to south. The maps are very wide and confusingly put north to the right and south to the left—proving again how much our image of space is shaped by the visual representations we grow up with.

This is the dedicated lane space for the Trole and Ecovia buses, often poached by speeding bicyclists.

The Ecovia Bus.

We made our way through a nice neighborhood to a sleek bar-café called La Cleta (the Freewheel), where we met a group called ABC, who later sent me a short manifesto called “El Pueblo Bicicletero Ec.” We had a nice discussion, sitting around in their bar on seats made of old wheel frames framed by their sharp silhouette paintings on the walls.

Inside the "La Cleta" bar and cafe.

Having our political discussion at La Cleta... great folks!

It was clear that they felt the bike scene in Quito had been co-opted by the local government, and a new initiative was needed to reclaim the momentum for urban transformation. These guys were the more lefty radicals of the bunch we met. In a side room they have a radio station “Radio Pedal, 102.9 FM” and they had me record a station ID for them, which was fun.

Here’s a quote from their new manifesto called “El Pueblo Bicicletero Ecuatoriano” (Ecuatorian Bicycling People):

El Pueblo Bicicletro Ecuatoriano is a space of reflection and bicycle political action. We recognize ourselves as a people that bicycles—as women, as workers, as recreational riders, urban cyclists, boys and girls, elderly, everyday working people, and others that use bicycles to move themselves from one point to another in the city or the country. The bike is not used only as means of transport but is also used in diverse working activities. The bike is not merely a means of movement but also a tool of work, as well as an instrument of transformation and political contestation. The actual structure of the city dehumanizes completely the relationship between the people and Mother Nature (Pachamama), so now we are here to take seriously pedestrians, cyclists, and to take it as seriously as we have until now the indiscriminate use of cars.

That night I gave a public Talk at a local university loosely based on a short history of California bicycling I wrote recently, and that went over well, thanks to my partner Adriana’s capable translation. I showed slides of Critical Mass from around the world and talked about 19th century Good Roads agitation, rubber and slavery, and the resurgence of bikes and politics with CM in the 1990s.

Lunch at Ciclopolis, the biggest formal bike organization in Quito, responsible for managing the Cicleopaseo every Sunday.

The following day we went to Ciclopolis for lunch. Ciclopolis is in a nice two-story building in central Quito where they have a half dozen staffers, a fleet of bicycles, and a major organizational focus on sustaining and running Cicleopaseo, the weekly closure of a 28-kilometer route through Quito every Sunday 9-1, for cyclists and others to use recreationally. They also run a program called Todas en Bici, which offers training to women and children on how to ride bicycles in city streets. As it happened, after meeting Belen at lunch we passed her in a taxi on Saturday morning while she was conducting her training ride on a ciclovia in the city center.

Belen was running the Todas en Bici class for new women cyclists when we saw her next to our taxi on Saturday morning!

Clad in safety vests and helmets, these women were learning to navigate city traffic on a quiet Saturday morning in Quito.

We had a spirited discussion Friday around the lunch table about leadership, facilitation, co-optation, government, electoralism, NGO/nonprofits, and much more. They’re a great bunch, but perhaps a bit stuck in their role as managers of Cicleopaseo. The Ciclopaseo is a lot like San Francisco’s Sunday Streets, but it happens EVERY Sunday all year long, and requires several dozen “stations,” hundreds of street closures, and a great deal of logistical support. We had a peek at their phalanx of radios, red cross bikes, trailers, barricades, etc.

Ciclopaseo, Feb. 27, 2011, Quito, Ecuador.

Ciclopaseo, Feb. 27, 2011, Quito, Ecuador.

After that we rode south a long way to get to the HQ of Biciaccion, the organization from which Ciclopolis split in 2007. It is Biciaccion, along with the folks at ABC and others who originally organized Critical Mass in Quito, long before they all ended up in different and somewhat alienated groups. (Diego from Ciclopolis had been a part of that long history too, and showed me some images in a scrapbook of early bike agitation in Quito. A group called Accion Ecologica was the precursor to all the bike activism in Quito back in the 1990s.)

This flyer promoted an early Critical Mass ride in Quito, late 1990s.

Another 1990s action, these cyclists just parked along a highway to make their point directly to drivers!

Biciaccion is still going strong, with a fantastic website, and a series of campaigns around Ecuador to promote Cicleopaseos, bike training programs, ciclovias, and more. They also have a great website here.

There’s a complicated personal back story to some of the divisions among the Quito bicycling activists, including a broken marriage, competing electoral campaigns, and mutating organizational loyalties. But those dramas only underscore the healthy vitality and diversity of the bicycling community in Quito. In many respects they are far ahead of any city in the United States, even if they, like us, have a long way to go on our car-choked planet.

White bikes have made it here too... and for sure, death on the roads is easy and all too common, as Quito's streets are still choked with automobiles most of the time.

POSTSCRIPT: More South American news–

Heavy news from Porto Alegre, Brazil, where a bank executive drove at high speed through the February Critical Mass, sending almost a dozen to the hospital and mangling dozens of bikes. Video coverage and updates here.

On a lighter note, a massive Critical Mass took place in Buenos Aires, Argentina, even rolling on a local freeway. Video is up on Facebook.

William Coulter was a maritime artist who also drew for the local press. This 1896 image depicts three whales inside the bay near a Sausalito-bound ferry.

There are thousands of people using ferries on the San Francisco Bay these days, so it’s hard to remember that ferry service died out for several decades. Of course the long history of Bay Area mobility is a story of water travel. Whether moving hay into the City to feed the thousands of horses pulling wagons and omnibuses, or bringing the lumber in to build the wooden City, or taking big loads of grain or (by the early 20th century) canned fruit and vegetables to far-flung ports, everything came and went by ship for a long time. But it was also true that most people wanting to go from one part of the Bay Area to another would find ferry travel the most convenient and appropriate means to make their trip.

The Southern Pacific Company's Bay City ferry plies the waters of San Francisco Bay sometime between 1870 and 1900

In 1850, just a year since the beginning of urbanization, the first ferry service was established between San Francisco and Oakland, running across sand bars to San Antonio Creek, better known now as the Oakland Estuary. Ferries were the main transportation choice for travelers between San Francisco and Sacramento, and points in between, and continued to be well into the 20th century. Back in 1862 the San Francisco and Oakland Railroad Company built a ¾ mile pier from West Oakland into the Bay. Thus begins a decades-long concentration of cross-bay ferry traffic between West Oakland and San Francisco’s Ferry Building. After the Civil War in 1868 real estate promoters laid out streets and docks in Sausalito and begin providing North Bay ferry service. When the first transcontinental railroads spanned the country, the original terminal was in Sacramento where passengers transferred to fast ferries to finish their trip to San Francisco and the coast. Before long the new railroad barons had acquired the local ferry services and by 1881 they extended the wharves well into the Bay on what became known as the Oakland Mole, where trains and ferries met in the Bay all the way to 1957.

Oakland Mole ferry slip in the early 1900s.

Another Coulter image, this one of the Ferry Oakland that had just collided with a small skiff near Goat Island (now Yerba Buena Island).

John Leale was a San Francisco ferryboat captain for four decades spanning the last quarter of the 19th century until just before WWI. He lived long enough to see the opening of the Bay Bridge that would nearly destroy ferry service in the Bay Area. His memoir, “Recollections of a Tule Sailor,” captures a San Francisco and water-borne life that is long-forgotten now. (“Tule sailor” is a disparaging epithet once applied to inland boatmen by blue water sailors. The bulrush or tule, with its long hollow reed-like spikes, filled thousands of acres of delta lands in the lower reaches of the Sacramento River.)

On his arrival in San Francisco in 1864 he docked at the Folsom Street Wharf and from there took a horse-drawn omnibus to the Third Street Wharf, then jutting into Mission Bay:

“A whitehall boatman rowed us over to the Potrero to the home of a relative, at a point which later became the Union Iron Works [Today’s 3rd Street and 20th Street]. Third Street at that time ended at about Townsend Street or Steamboat Point. Between there and the Potrero was a large bay at the head of which was San Francisco’s first Butchertown [close to Costco at 10th and Bryant]. I later learned that it was a long way by land from the Potrero to Third Street with its mud and unpaved road… The morning after my arrival, I meandered to the top of a nearby hill, and after surveying the beautiful bay and mountains before me and I realized that I was indeed in California.”

“My first job in California was cook of the Schooner “Emma Adelia” of which Captain Andrew Nelson was captain and owner. My work was not cooking alone but also tending the jib sheet and working cargo. During the summer we ran in the fruit trade [up and down the Sacramento River]. The passengers who got on board well up river had a whole day’s entertainment plus looking for a cool spot, for a summer day on the Sacramento is “heap hot.” Rio Vista was usually the last landing and the boys would turn in for about five hours, to be called when Angel Island was reached, for we must have coffee before beginning to discharge. This would be perhaps three or four o’clock in the morning, and if it happened to be low water with the corresponding steep gangway plank, it was a tough job. At about 11:30 AM we would leave the city again for the next trip. So it will be seen that the life of a deckhand on the river in those days was a bit strenuous.”

Ferries crisscrossed the Bay by the dozens every day. Over the last century and a half, over two dozen major cross-bay ferry lines existed, serving 29 destinations. The Golden Era of ferry transit stretched from the 1870s to its peak in the 1930s. Ten million passengers went through the Ferry Building in the first decade of the 20th century and just thirty years later there were 60 million annual bay crossings, along with 6 million autos. 250,000 daily commuters travelled through the Ferry Building to work or other destinations. Ferries made approximately 170 landings a day at this time, and the Ferry Building was served by trolley lines which left every 20 seconds for city destinations. The ferry was as deeply rooted in the daily lives of San Franciscans as cars and planes are now. When Tom Mooney was finally pardoned from jail in 1939 (where he served 22 ½ years for the bombing of the July 22, 1916 Prepardeness Day March—a crime he demonstrably did not commit) he left San Quentin Prison by ferry and went to Sacramento to receive his pardon from Governor Culbert Olson. After the pardon and press conference he returned to San Francisco by ferry where he was greeted by 10,000 well-wishers as he emerged from the Ferry Building into Market Street.

Video: Silent footage from the Prelinger Archive, probably from the 1920s.

By the end of the 1930s the two great bridges were complete and the patterns of urban life and cross-bay travel were altered forever. The great urban theorist Lewis Mumford had no trouble in 1963 describing what the Bay Bridge had done to Ferry travel:

“The Bay Bridge, between San Francisco and Oakland, brought far greater damage than benefits to both cities: it pumped up a once unnecessary volume of private traffic between them, at a great expense in expressway building and at a great waste in time and tension, spent crawling through rush-hour congestion. This traffic eventually wiped out, by impoverishment, the excellent rapid transit that had been installed on the Bay Bridge [the Key System] a form of transportation that the citizens of San Francisco have now repentantly voted to restore [the BART system], at an expense far greater than the cost of the original system. The ferry ride across the bay from Oakland was one of the region’s greatest recreational resources — an incomparable experience, so exhilarating, at almost any time of the day, that one often sought an excuse for making the journey. It was not a long ride — not more than twenty-five minutes or so, and certainly not longer than the present depressing rush-hour crawl over the bridge.”

A similar story follows the ever-popular Golden Gate Bridge, which opened in May 1937. Flourishing ferry service between Sausalito and San Francisco rapidly declined after the Bridge opened, stopping entirely by 1941. For the next 29 years the only way to get from San Francisco to Marin County and points north was by driving across the Golden Gate Bridge. During those same three decades motor traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge went from 3.3 million trips at the beginning to 28.3 million by the late 1960s. Local traffic planners and highway engineers had proposed new bridges to cross the Bay from Telegraph Hill to Angel Island and Tiburon, but they had not gotten off the drawing boards.

A rendering of a planned bridge from San Francisco north across Angel Island and through Tiburon. (Thanks to Eric Fischer for making these available on his Flickr page.)

Instead, the indomitable ferry came back into the picture. In August 1970 a newly minted Golden Gate Ferry service began from Sausalito to San Francisco. By the end of December 1976 the Larkspur Ferry began its service. It was another year and a half before the familiar Golden Gate Ferry terminal behind the Ferry Building was dedicated in summer 1978. Golden Gate Transit provides a decent history of itself, as well as this overview of its current service:

GGF operates two commute passenger ferry routes across the San Francisco Bay that connect Marin County and the City and County of San Francisco: (1) Larkspur/San Francisco: 11.25 nautical miles/13.01 statute miles, and (2) Sausalito/San Francisco: 5.5 nautical miles/6.33 statute miles. Today, GGF operates 41 weekday crossings and 9 weekend/holiday crossings on the Larkspur-San Francisco route; 18 weekday crossings and 13 weekends/holiday crossings on the Sausalito/San Francisco. Since March 31, 2000, dedicated San Francisco Giants Baseball Ferry Service has been provided between Larkspur and the newly opened waterfront ball park located in downtown San Francisco. This special service has become a favorite mode of transportation from the North Bay to the ballpark due to its convenience.

Ferry at Willie Mays Field, September 2010.

One of the untold stories of the current Golden Gate Ferry service is that at least two of the daily runs between Sausalito and San Francisco are able to keep running thanks to the revenue provided by bicycle-renting tourists who ride across the Golden Gate Bridge and return by Ferry!

The Vallejo Ferry Service only recommenced in 1986, initially as a commercial operation of the Red & White Fleet in San Francisco to shuttle midday visitors north to the newly opened Marine World in Vallejo, and commuters back and forth in morning and evening runs. The commuter runs proved unprofitable and within a few years the city of Vallejo had to take over the service under strong pressure from its ferry riding citizens.

The Bay Ferry operations all got a big boost when the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake knocked out the Bay Bridge for several months. State transportation money was made available to excursion and tour boats while also bolstering existing public ferry services. The network of ferries established under pressure from clogged freeways and a basically dysfunctional automobile-based transit system seemed to finally solidify with a new public awareness of their indispensability. After a week-long BART strike in 1997, ferry passengers surged again, and as of a few years ago, the Vallejo Baylink service was running three daily ferries back and forth.

The ferry’s future is bright. Water-borne transportation is likely to enjoy a considerable expansion whether due to high oil prices, impassable traffic jams, or just an embrace of a more civilized way to move across our beautiful Bay.

Chris Carlsson will be presenting a Shaping San Francisco Talk at CounterPULSE, tonight, January 19, 7:30-9:30 on “Before (and after) the Car: San Francisco Transit History”. You are invited to contribute your own knowledge and insights to this public history discussion. It’s free.

Definitely No to the Freeway! (La Via Express)

While the world has gathered in Cancun, Mexico, to discuss again a shared approach to Climate Chaos, action is already being taken in countless communities. On a visit last week to Guadalajara, Mexico, more than a thousand miles west of the Climate Meeting, I had the pleasure of discovering a vibrant grassroots movement to block the construction of a new 23-kilometer elevated freeway through the heart of the city. Interestingly, this movement leans primarily on people who live along the proposed route of the freeway, but found crucial support and activism from Ciudad Para Todos (City For All), a three-year-old group of bicycle and transit activists who are Guadalajara’s most vocal opponents to the reign of the car.

This is the current situation along much of the line. Train tracks down the middle. High tension electric lines on the right, underground gas and oil pipelines under the left.

Ciudad Para Todos gained Guadalajara's attention with a months-long campout in the green space at the far end of this road to protest a bridge.

I met Étienne von Bertrab and Negro Soto Morfín, two of the main Ciudad Para Todos activists, at the World Car-Free Cities Conference in Portland, Oregon in 2008 and later they invited me to speak to the 2nd annual Congress of Urban Cycling in Mexico held in Guadalajara in September 2009. We got together just after Thanksgiving and they filled us in on the new campaign.

In June 2010, just before they left for York, England for this year’s Car-Free Cities Conference, the Jalisco State Government published a video online describing the new freeway (La Via Express) plan. The Jalisco state government (which encompasses the city of Guadalajara) declared its intention to build a freeway on the same railroad line that a previous city government had proposed for a linear park and garden corridor with bicycle and pedestrian zones. The corridor conveniently cuts through the city and is used by laborers riding bicycles 20-30 kilometers a day between home and work.

Avenida Inglaterra is just above the red line crossing the image; it is currently a rail corridor with utility lines and limited open space on either side.

Étienne and Negro brought the government video with them to England and showed it to the gathered planners and activists on the first day and made two guerrilla video responses. At first the Jalisco government protested to Youtube and demanded the videos be taken down on the grounds of copyright violation (they had garnered 12,000 views in just the first four days), but when that news broke, even more people went to see the videos. (Youtube did take down the videos for a while, but restored them after protests from Ciudad Para Todos.) All three are posted here, but this is the one primarily in English:

The guerrilla videos made by Ciudad Para Todos were circulating and galvanizing local opponents, but the neighbors had already begun organizing before they even saw the video. We met Dr. Alicia Jaik, an energetic former medical doctor, now running a small corner store along the proposed route. Her neighbor is a local politician and when he asked her what she thought of the proposal she announced her dismay. “What should we do?” asked the politician. “Get to work!” was her immediate response. Signs sprung up along the houses up and down the street.

One of the signs alongside the proposed route.

This is posted on the sidewalk in front of Dr. Alicia's shop, indicating the places where neighbors have already begun the transformation.

A short time later Étienne was walking along the rail line with a local journalist and was thrilled when he saw the signs. With the journalist in tow, he knocked on Dr. Alicia’s door and after realizing they had much to discuss, he was invited to a meeting called a few days later. At the meeting Etienne and Negro and their colleagues presented their videos, their larger critique, and the plans that had been created by the previous municipal government for a linear park. They were met with great enthusiasm. “What can we do? When can we start? Can we do it this Saturday?” demanded the neighbors. Etienne and Negro hadn’t anticipated an action plan emerging so quickly, but they saw a good thing when it appeared. “Why not?”

That Saturday was the first gardening party, beginning with the removal of tons of accumulated trash. From that July meeting there has been a regular Saturday work party ever since. There are now over 400 new trees planted and at least eight different neighborhood associations involved. Neighbors have established new relationships with each other, and public feasts have become a regular feature of the Saturday work parties and other days. The independent Hotel del Bosque sits on an adjacent corner. They were at first cool to the activism, but became an enthusiastic participant, including their recent support of a mural painted by some local graffiti artists.

This mural was just painted in the past couple of weeks on a wall facing the corridor.

A university campus is adjacent too, and students have been eager participants as well. Painstaking work with local businesses has gained further support, many of them angered by the backroom dealing going on with big connected Mexican companies ICA, Cemex, and Grupo Mexico. A press conference of two local business associations was held on December 2 supporting demands for more transparency, public hearings, and technical evaluations of the freeway plans before anything begins. Meanwhile, the facts on the ground are getting better every weekend.

Neighbors have begun implanting a linear park on their own.

Homemade signs adorn the newly minted unauthorized park.

This lovely garden has obviously been growing for much longer than the rest of the efforts nearby.

Neighbors and passersby already make use of the shady trees and park benches that locals have installed as part of their guerrilla park-making.

Picnicking and hanging out in the grassroots linear park.

On September 22, 2010, World Carfree Day, our intrepid activists decided to install a monument in the middle of the contested terrain. They acquired a junked car, and turned it into a large flower pot, fixing it in place at one of the busiest intersections on Avenida Inglaterra. On the morning they were going to put it in place, the first arrival was pondering how to move massive concrete pieces into place when a man drove by on a big backhoe, most serendipitously! He quickly agreed to use his machine to move two big slabs of nearby concrete across the railroad tracks and even suggested a better placement for them. Voila! A new monument was installed, and we had fun visiting it last Tuesday. Here’s a few shots of it, followed by a video showing its installation, including the arrival of a Critical Mass-like procession by the GDL en Bici crowd.

The yellow sign above indicates this car was a public art installation for Carfree Day, 2010.

Heavy cement was moved by a guy passing by serendipitously on a big backhoe!

Flowers Not Motors!

This back seat is a rest stop for bike and ped commuters crossing a long way from one side of the city to the other.

The down-to-earth politics of this new Freeway Revolt in Mexico are a shining example to climate change activists everywhere. As Dr. Alicia put it to us, “Aqui, nadie es nadie, todos somos todos.” (Roughly translated as “Here, nobody’s a bigshot, we’re all in it together.”) She was emphasizing that they weren’t relying on the political parties or their representatives, to the contrary, they were disallowed in this campaign. Our friends in Ciudad Para Todos underlined the same point: The local diputado (elected representative in the state government) could participate as a citizen, but they wouldn’t support his offer to bring in work crews, equipment, and resources, whereby his political party would colonize the effort for their own ends. Dr. Alicia told us, “Before neighbors wouldn’t really talk to each other. Now we’re a community!” She’d been gardening across from her house for years, but now there are hundreds of neighbors doing the same up and down the rail line. The doctor is already scheming ways to deepen the new community’s life. She was planning to establish a free outdoor library near the benches that had already been built. “Take a book to read, leave one behind.”

Adriana and Dr. Alicia in the park.

A dead tree across from her small store had come back to life with several dozen fluttering hand-written “leaves.” One of our favorites said “Leave the closet and let’s be citizens all the time.” It’s just such a reinvigorated—and visionary—citizenship that is the foundation of the transition that we must make in the face of Climate Chaos, the Energy and Economic Crises, and the generally dissatisfying daily lives we lead in the second decade of the 21st century.

The dead tree with living "leaves."

Leave the closet and let's be citizens all the time!

Thanks to Adriana Camarena, my compañera who fully participated in gathering this story, and without whom I wouldn’t have been able to write it!

Boneshakers in the 1870s.

“If the increase continues, the time is not very distant when not to own and ride a bicycle will be a confession that one is not able-bodied, is exceptionally awkward, or is hopelessly belated.”

—“The Bicycle Festival,” July 13, 1895 New York Times

The bicycle came to San Francisco during the last quarter of the 19th century. Like other places, it first developed based on wooden wheels, similar to those that were bearing stagecoaches and being drawn by horses. Horse-drawn streetcars were the predominant mode of transit in the 1870s, peaking in the 1880s, at a time when the individual horse was also still a major source of personal transportation.

Emperor Norton on a velocipede

And then came the velocipede, an odd device that attracted some early adopters of the era. Here’s Emperor Norton, a fellow who was adept at self-marketing long before Facebook made it a basic survival skill!

The boneshakers were aptly named, running over heavily rutted streets on solid wooden wheels, eventually improved by coating the in solid rubber. The bicycle was not a transit option at that early stage, but a novelty, and a device that attracted the adventurous few who were ready to break with the limits of human powered locomotion. In “The Winged Heel” column in the San Francisco Chronicle of January 25, 1879, the writer fully grasps the possibilities:

“The bicycle ranks among those gifts of science to man, by which he is enabled to supplement his own puny powers with the exhaustic forces around him. He sits in the saddle, and all nature is but a four-footed beast to do his bidding. Why should he go a foot, while he can ride a mustang of steel, who knows his rider and never needs a lasso?.. The exhilaration of bicycling must be felt to be appreciated. With the wind singing in your ears, and the mind as well as body in a higher plane, there is an ecstasy of triumph over inertia, gravitation, and the other lazy ties that bind us. You are traveling! Not being traveled.”

(I have to admit a great appreciation for that last aphorism, echoing through time a later motto of Processed World magazine that I helped produce in the 1980s: Are you doing the processing? Or are you being processed?)

Cycling in Golden Gate Park in the 1890s.

Lone cyclist in Union Square, 1880s. Courtesy San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library.

The second club nationally and the first on the west coast was the San Francisco Bicycle Club, founded on December 13, 1876. They petitioned the Park Commission for permission to ride their new-fangled devices in Golden Gate Park. Overcoming their astonishment that there was actually a club for wheelmen, the park commissioners allowed them to “enter Golden Gate Park at the Stanyan Street entrance to the South Drive before 7 a.m. only.” Intensive self-policing kept the wheelmen within the bounds of the concession, and before too long the “privileges were extended.” (“When San Francisco Was Teaching America to Ride a Bicycle,” by Ida L. Howard, San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 26, 1905) But it was in the next decade that bicycling began its precipitous take-off.

“The Bay City Wheelmen [founded in 1884] was the first competition for the SF Bicycle Club. It raised enthusiasm to the highest pitch. Each man was eager to find opportunities for the keenest rivalry, for the honor of his club was at stake, and in those days wheeling was a clean sport. Sport for the true love of sport. There were none of the sordid motives which follow in the train of professionalism. To become a professional was to place one’s self outside of the social pale.”

Bay City Wheelmen at 21st and Shotwell, c. 1894.

The explosion of bicycling is easily traced in the production statistics over a scant ten years, from 1885 to 1895. Where six factories produced about 11,000 bicycles in 1885, there were 126 factories in the U.S. producing a half million bikes ten years later. (SF Chronicle, May 12, 1895)

The bike clubs organized century rides around the Bay Area and annual “Bike Meets” where the fastest cyclists would compete against each other before large audiences. One of the biggest ever was during the 4th of July weekend in 1893 when an estimated 20,000 spectators would jam a special track built at Central Park just south of City Hall to watch the scorchers as they hurtled around the loop.

Central Park at 8th and Market in 1896, site of bike racing track built special for Bike Meet in 1893.

Varney Bicycles sign on old Ferry Buildilng, c. 1880s.

Generally absent from most accounts of the bicycling boom in the 1890s is a closer look at the key ingredient that made it possible: rubber. Rubber was the magic ingredient that altered the transportation landscape, but not before it had already become an essential ingredient to much of the newly industrializing world. In his excellent book, The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire (Penguin: 2008), historian Joe Jackson describes the Rubber Age:

[During the 1860s] rubber had become essential for war. In addition to its many uses in railroads and steam engines, military catalogues of the era show new designs using rubber for shoes and boots, blankets, hats, coats, pontoon boats, bayonet guards, tents, ground sheets, canteens, powder flasks, haversacks, and buttons. Rubberized silk was used for military balloons. War also created a boom in reconstructive surgery using hard rubber teeth, nose pieces, and custom-molded prosthetics.

Jackson continues a hundred pages later:

The 1890s would be the decade of the bicycle. The seven million bicycles found worldwide in 1895 used most of the world’s rubber, a boom that would not have occurred if not for the invention of the “pneumatic rubber tyre.” Although there had been bicycles previously, they rode on solid rubber tires. These were puncture-resistant, a boom on roads where nails were frequently shed from horseshoes, but they lacked suspension, were hard to steer, and were an unpleasant ride. This changed by the late 1890s. The market was flooded with steel tubes, ball bearings, variable speed gears, and high-quality chains. Above all else, it was flooded with replaceable rubber tires and inner tubes, mass-produced in the factories of Dunlop in Birmingham, England; Michelin in Clermont-Ferrand, France; and Pirelli in Milan, Italy. The bicycle was cheap and popular. People suddenly had a means of freedom that had been unknown.

But where did this rubber come from? Synthetic rubber was not developed until WWI. Before that it was derived entirely from several species of latex-sweating trees, the finest of which was Hevea, found scattered throughout the Amazon. Two major regions of the world were permanently altered in the frenzied pursuit of rubber supplies: Amazonia and the Congo. In both cases, an extreme brutality was used, mutilating and murdering literally millions of people to produce the precious rubber, the whole process lashed by the rising demand in the U.S., Europe, and Japan created by the bicycling boom.

Five major tire and rubber companies emerged in the three decades after 1870, the three mentioned above and Goodyear and Goodrich in the U.S. North American rubber imports jumped from 8,109 tons in 1880 to 15,336 in 1890. From 1875 to 1900, the U.S. consumed half of all the rubber produced in the world. What was happening at the point of production? Joe Jackson spares us little in his description:

During the fifteen years of Belgian King Leopold’s stewardship, the population of the Congo Free State dropped from 25 million to 10 million—15 million dead for approximately 75,000 tons of rubber. That equaled one life per every 5 kilograms. In 1907, similar evils came to light on the Upper Amazon. The Putamayo is a vast area around a river of the same name, which runs through territory that was disputed between Peru and Colombia; the river joins the Amazon near the western border of Brazil… Slavers rounded up entire tribes and forced them to work on rubber plantations… Rubber baron Julio Cesar Araña’s company “systematically employed terror and torture against it native work force for higher profits. The Indians were beaten, mutilated, tortured, and killed as punishment for “laziness” or the amusement of bored overseers. Women and girls were raped, the elderly were killed when they could no longer work, and children’s brains were bashed out against trees. Morever, Araña registered his Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company in London, thus linking Britian, the world’s leading antislavery nation, with a firm that was enslaving Indians… Araña had manipulated the British cult of free trade like a maestro, equipping his company with a tame set of British directors who allowed easy access to London funding… The Huitoto, Boras, Andokes, and Ocainas were flogged till their bones showed. They were denied medical treatment, left to die, then eaten by the company’s dogs. They were castrated. They were tortured by fire by water, by being tied head-down, and by crucifixion. Their ears, fingers, arms, and legs were lopped off with machetes. Managers used them for target practice and set them afire with kerosene on the Saturday before Easter as human fireworks for the Saturday of Glory. Whole tribal groups were exterminated if they failed to produce sufficient rubber. Julio Araña’s peak production of 1.42 million pounds of smoked Putamayo rubber cost thirty thousand lives.

Meanwhile, bicycling was being embraced by women in unprecedented numbers, as many saw the device as their best means for at least a partial self-emancipation. Women’s clothing was changing, and social mores were too. In “Thousands Ride the Noiseless Bicycle,” in the San Francisco Chronicle (May 19, 1895), the shift is described:

In the Park the other day, out of forty wheelmen, thirty-five were appropriately dressed in knickerbockers of some sort, short coats and caps. It is the same way with women. The long skirt is being pretty generally discarded, and if a woman cannot wear either bloomers or a short skirt she might as well keep off the wheel… People used to ride only for pleasure. Now they ride instead of taking the cars, and own wheels instead of feeding horses and washing carriages. Doctors use the silent and inexpensive steed very extensively in making professional calls. For night calls it is always ready, and there is a considerable saving in hack hire, livery stable fees and coachman’s wages. The keepers of livery stables say the bicycle has cut into their business far more seriously than electric cars ever did.

A well-known riding teacher says that most of his women pupils take their first lessons in skirts on a woman’s wheel. They go out on the road this way from three to ten times. They they come back to him in bloomers, learn to mount and dismount from a man’s wheel, which is a great deal harder than the other way, and never again can be induced to ride a woman’s wheel. Girls who ride for pleasure like to ride with men, of course, and the only way to do it is to keep the pace they set. It cannot be done in skirts on a woman’s wheel, and a man, even a polite escort, cannot be expected to ride slow forever, and so it happens that men’s wheels grow more popular with women every day, and after awhile when people stop talking about it and the small boy stop hooting it will all be very charming and agreeable.

July 26, 1896 report on the Good Roads demonstration.

The mass of cyclists in San Francisco were not narrowly focused on bicycling alone. They became the backbone of a broad movement for improved streets and “Good Roads.” On July 25, 1896, thousands of cyclists filled the streets in the largest demonstration seen in the City’s history. Hank Chapot wrote a great article (pdf) about the Great Bicycle Protests of 1896, and here’s a brief excerpt:

San Francisco, though the third wealthiest city in the nation, was an aging boomtown. Streets were muddyor dusty, full of horseshit, and increasingly crisscrossed with a hodgepodge of streetcar tracks and cable slots, creating an unpredictable, hazardous mess. The city’s old dirt roads and cobblestone thoroughfares were originally laid down for a village of 40,000 were now serving a metropolis of 360,000.

On Saturday July 25th of 1896, after months of organizing by cyclists and good roads advocates, residents took to the streets in downtown San Francisco, inspired by the possibilities of the nation’s wonderful new machine, the bicycle. Enjoyed by perhaps 100,000 spectators, the parade ended in unanimously approved resolutions in favor of good roads, and a near riot at Kearny and Market.

A five-year wheelman named McGuire, speaking for the South Side Improvement Club stated: “The purpose for the march is three-fold; to show our strength, to celebrate the paving of Folsom Street and to protest against the conditions of San Francisco pavement in general and of Market Street in particular. If the united press of this city decides that Market Street must be repaved, it will be done in a year.” Asked if southsiders were offended that the grandstand would be north of Market, McGuire exclaimed, “Offended! No! We want the north side to be waked up.We south of Market folks are lively enough, but you people over the line are deader than Pharaoh!”

So as we continue to ride in a new bicycling renaissance in San Francisco more than a century later, we can take inspiration and lessons from our predecessors. A citywide system of dedicated bikeways is long overdue. Imagine how many would ride if there were safe thoroughfares to bicycle on that would make it the most pleasant and most direct way to get from anywhere in the city to anywhere else? Point A to point B, smelling the flowers, the clean air, hearing the birds, and enjoying your friends and neighbors… why not?

Cyclists near the Conservatory of Flowers, 1899. Courtesy San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library

“When you have attained a proficiency which enables you to take out your handkerchief, wipe your nose and replace the mouchoir in your pocket without slackening your pace, you have fairly graduated… For fun there is nothing like cycling, and before many years two or three family wheels will be as much a part of the ménage as the modern range and sewing machine are now.”
—San Francisco Chronicle, 1896

The invention of cable cars in 1873 by Andrew Hallidie is an oft-told saga, with a perhaps apocryphal point of origin on a rainy winter day in 1869 when he saw a team of horses pulling a horsecar up a steep grade on Jackson Street between Kearny and Stockton. One horse slipped, the car man slammed on his brake but it broke, and the horses and streetcar ended up at the bottom of the hill in a mangled, mutilated mess. Andrew Hallidie wrote that he wanted to construct a public transit system that would alleviate the “great cruelty and hardship to the horses engaged in that work.”

Horsepower was the primary means of locomotion at that point in history, but it was another great beast whose bodily fluids gave rise to the industrial revolution that is often overlooked: the whale. While San Francisco was growing by leaps and bounds a relentless industrial exploitation of the great creatures of the sea was unleashed at the same time. Long forgotten now, San Francisco was during the later decades of the 19th century the primary whaling port on the west coast of North America. Before the discovery of petroleum oil, the first oil war wasn’t between nations, but between humans and nature in the form of the vast numbers of whales that once populated the seas. Slaughtered at sea, chopped up and boiled, the resulting precious whale oil when brought back to shore would command handsome prices. It was the essential ingredient to early illumination and lubrication for the burgeoning industrial revolution.

In some cases ships came in with whale carcasses in tow, not yet finished with their brutally simple reduction of complicated life into uncomplicated commodities.

Whale processing at Allen 7 Plant, San Francisco, no date. Courtesy San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park (A1.35,909n).

Along San Francisco’s southern waterfront the Arctic Oil Works established itself near 23rd and Illinois where whaling ships would tie up and disgorge their dark cargoes.

Arctic Oil Works from shore, Mission Rock in background, Yerba Buena Island further behind that. Courtesy San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park (A11.22,463.1n)

Whale hunters confer on Howard Street, c. 1880s. Courtesy San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park (A12.21,552n)

Whale baileens drying at Arctic Oil Works, 1870s, later to be used as women's corsets and buggy whip handles. Courtesy San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park (A12.232pl).

While this slaughter at sea provided lubricants and lamp oils to the newly emerging city, most arrivals were involved in the ever-expanding business of mining, a business whose profits gave rise to an endless succession of technological breakthroughs. Andrew Hallidie was luckier than a lot of the men who settled in San Francisco during its first decade, but was in some ways a typical example too. He came from an English family of inventors and machinists, and his father had several patents on wire rope that he developed between 1835 and 1849, his son being born a year after the first patent. By the early 1850s father and son decided to take their chances on a new life in San Francisco and arrived in 1852 after a two-month journey from the Panamanian isthmus, then known as the Republic of New Granada (approximately present-day Panama and Colombia). Both father and son Hallidie were skilled workers and would have had no trouble landing on their feet in booming San Francisco. But like most of the folks rushing in, they headed for the hills in pursuit of gold.

Without much success after a year, the father went home, but young Andrew stayed in California and resumed his study of engineering. He spent his time surveying water ditches and roads, working in machine shops, and blacksmithing in the mountain mining communities. He sharpened and repaired tools for the miners too, when he wasn’t trying to find his own strike. In 1855 when he was only 19, he constructed a wire suspension bridge over a 220-foot span of the middle fork of the American River. A year later he started manufacturing metal rope in the gold country, and demand took off.

In 1857 he returned to San Francisco and started a small wire rope factory at Mason and Chestnut, using all the old horseshoes he could find as raw material. Within a decade he was a big success. Andrew Hallidie had arrived at the epicenter of a technological revolution, driven by the gold rush, and later by the capital-intensive drive to extract more and more wealth from the mountains between California and Nevada. His wire rope helped fuel the exploitation of nature, and his bridge-building efforts spanned rivers throughout the west. The Civil War was a boon to his business, as it was to manufacturing and innovation in San Francisco’s metalworking industries in general, since all manufactured goods from the east ceased delivery during those years.

A decade after he started his business he was a respected and successful businessman. Hallidie, with his penchant for engineering, wasn’t content to rest with the wire rope business and began to apply himself to figuring out how to transport ore out of the mountains by “endless ropeways” that large loader buckets full of rock and metals could move along. A great number of experiments led to successful technological solutions and a number of patents that would shape the coming boom in cable cars.

A Clay Street Hill Railroad dummy on the day of its trial trip, August 2, 1873. The inventor, A.S. Hallidie, and his wife are seated at the front of the car. The cable line started at the corner of Kearny and Clay Streets, shown here, and ended on Leavenworth on the western side of Nob Hill. Courtesy Friends of the Cable Car Museum.

These days we see capitalists competing in various industries across the planet. Back in 1870s San Francisco, capitalists with an eye on new transportation technology found themselves in competition from one block to the next. Hallidie’s new cable car was built on Clay Street and had its maiden voyage on August 2, 1873. There were several technological alternatives to the particular designs of his system, but his was the first to get up and running over the top of Nob Hill, in spite of his difficulties in acquiring the capital he needed to begin. Once he did, the new cable car proved to be a big success.

Within a few years, the Sutter Street Railroad opened using a slightly altered cable car design (they avoided paying Hallidie royalties when the U.S. Circuit Court held that Hallidie’s system had not yet been perfected and was thus experimental, and could not claim patent infringement), and within the first year they attracted almost a million passengers. By the mid-1880s the Sutter Street Railroad had expanded its cable car lines across Market to Mission and on to Brannan, and out Pacific Avenue all the way to Divisadero. Big powerhouses were needed by each system to keep the “endless ropeways” turning underground.

Leland Stanford took up the challenge by 1878, opening the California Street Cable Railroad in April of that year. Mark Hopkins and other railroad barons began building their mansions at the top of Nob Hill in this era, and all invested in the new Cable Car railroad that made ascending the hill a pleasure. It attracted 11,000 passengers on its first day and eventually was extended westward all the way to Presidio Street at the edge of the city’s big four cemeteries covering nearby Lone Mountain. The Presidio Street terminus became a hub for connections by steam railroad out to the beach and Cliff House, or to other lines that ran to Golden Gate Park.

Several competing companies were opening lines as fast as they could in the late 1870s and early 1880s. Charles Crocker’s Geary Street, Park & Ocean Railroad ran from Market Street to Central Avenue along Geary Street. At Central the line connected with a steam dummy running further west on Geary before turning south to terminate at the small wooden station at Fulton and Fifth Avenue, still standing today. Cemetery trips were a major source of revenue for all the lines that passed near the big burial grounds where today’s inner Richmond is.

In 1883 Charles Crocker, Collis P. Huntington and Leland Stanford of the Southern Pacific Railroad opened a new cable car line on Market Street which became the largest in the city and the fourth largest in the U.S. The cable car altered landscapes and residential development patterns. One historian of the era claimed the cable cars “…leveled the sand dunes, reclaimed the marshes, filled up the gulches, and instead of a desolate and barren waste that was, there have sprung up blocks and streets of comely residences, the home of thrifty and industrious citizens.”

With the spread of cable car lines across the city to the west and south, workers could build homes on the distant hillsides and still get to work in a timely manner. The process of urban sprawl would continue from the cable car-induced boom of the early 1880s, through various ups and downs, all the way to the present era, now turning distant valleys and hills miles to the north, east, and south of San Francisco into endless suburbs. BART has an analogous role to that of the cable car back in 19th century San Francisco, fueling intensive urbanization along its lines.

Friedel Klussman, to whom any move to abolish San Francisco cable cars is a call to arms, receives a handsomely decorated testimonial letter from grateful employees of the California St Cable Railroad Co. Ernest Thompson and A. J. Wall (right) make the presentation in behalf of their fellow employees, two of whom are looking on, as is Mrs. Carl Eastman (1948). Photo courtesy San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library.

The cable car was in turn supplanted by the rise of electric streetcars in the 1890s. But a romantic attachment kept them going long beyond the era when they were the cutting edge of modernity. Immediately after WWII, the city planned to take out all the remaining cable car lines and replace them with the new, modern diesel buses that auto, tire, and oil interests were pushing. But Friedel Klussman, a Pacific Heights matron, led a vigorous campaign to save the cable cars. It became a popular cause and a 77 percent vote in November 1947 saved the diminutive vehicles on their remaining lines.

In 1979 the safety and reliability of the cable cars came under scrutiny, and the system was closed for major repairs. In 1982 the cable car system was closed again for a complete rebuild. This involved the complete replacement of 69 city blocks' worth of tracks and cable channels, the demolition and rebuilding of the car barn and powerhouse, new propulsion equipment, and the repair or rebuild of 37 cable cars. The system finally reopened on June 21, 1984.

Today the cable cars are a tourist attraction and the kernel of the now-expanded historic streetcars that run mostly on the F-line. Together they provide a glimpse into an earlier era of public transportation, and thanks to the electricity that powers them, little evidence of the wholesale slaughter at sea that, concurrent to the original cable cars, provided essential lubrication to the opening decades of industrialization.

However, you can catch a glimpse, while riding on the California Street Cable Car, of the old granite walruses that still decorate the front of the Union Bank building. They are what's left of the many granite renditions of wild animals that once graced the facade of the Alaska Commercial Corporation's headquarters on the same spot of California, between Sansome and Battery. The Alaska Commercial Corporation was the de facto government of the eastern Pacific Rim for a few decades in the late 19th century, and during that reign, they mercilessly "harvested" the living creatures that once flourished.

Treating the Arctic as a classic mining region, the Alaska Commercial Company extended its transportation and supply routes until it had 91 stations in Alaska, the Yukon and Siberia. Through these posts, trappers kept the company well supplied, not only with seal furs, but with red, white, blue and silver fox, otters, marten, mink, wolf, wolverine, bears (including polar), muskrat, ermine, lynx, beaver, sable, ivory, swanskin and whalebone. Furs and feathers were shipped to London for auction, then reshipped to the United States for processing and resale.

Life turned into dead capital, literally, on a San Francisco financial district facade between Sansome and Battery.

Visiting the ghostly motor city these days is an eye-opening and surprisingly inspiring experience. The city has fallen from more than 2 million residents a generation ago to around 800,000 today. A great deal of the land area where homes and factories once filled the blocks are now expansive vacant lots, masquerading as greenways in this wet June, filled with grasses and wildflowers. Some of these vacant lots have been converted into urban farms, but the larger majority is simply empty, reverting to some version of nature. Wild pheasants skitter across the vacant lots while songbirds, from bright red cardinals to brilliant yellow finches, fill the trees and bushes with their cheerful sounds.

Wild pheasant runs across empty lot in east Detroit.

Detroit, like everywhere in the U.S., was a big bicycling town during the 1890s. Lost to most of our memories now is the relationship between that bicycling boom in the late 19th century and the automobile industry that came to dominate personal transportation and 20th century industrial life.

In 1894 more than 250,000 bicycles were manufactured in the United States; 400,000 in 1895. In 1899, 312 bicycle factories, with capital worth $30 million and a production of 1.1 million machines, worked to satisfy enthusiasts. The bikes cost $100 plain and $125 fancy, a not inconsiderable sum of money at the time. But within 10 years the bicycling fade began to fade, replaced by newfangled motorized contraptions.

Many auto manufacturers got their start as bicycle makers, notably Dodge, whose namesake brothers produced bicycles until 1901 when they opened a machine shop in Detroit to make stove parts, and later auto parts. In 1910 they established The Dodge Brothers plant in Hamtramck, where they made engines and other parts for Ford and Olds. In 1913 they began making cars and by their deaths in 1920 their company was one of the largest in the industry.

Henry Ford with a bicycle in the early 1890s.

Henry Ford got his start making bicycles too, and when he came out with the quadricycle he set off a craze in Detroit. It wasn’t until 1902 that he got his first motorized vehicle going but it was so fast that he was afraid to drive it himself.

LisaRuth cruising through the empty fields of eastern Detroit.

In Detroit for the US Social Forum (I’ll have a report posted shortly at my blog) we spent some happy hours bicycling around the wide open city. An early stop was The Hub, Detroit’s most vibrant community bike shop, where one of the guys got excited by our questions and immediately pulled out their only copy of an old 1896 bicycling map of Detroit.

Ogling the 1896 map.

The full 1896 map of bike ways in Detroit, color coded.

The conditions for bicycling by color code.

Close-up on Downtown area of Detroit.

After three days at the Social Forum, more and more bicycles piled up on every lockable fence and pole in front of the big downtown convention center Cobo Hall (I’m sure it had never experienced so many convention goers arriving by bike), we helped our hosts promote Critical Mass on Friday night.

Bikes locked all over the front of Cobo Hall convention center in Detroit.

Detroit has had a small-ish Critical Mass going back some years, but this was its biggest ever, about 375 riders. A great route was planned and most followed, which took us downtown, along the riverfront, out into eastern Detroit, through the remarkable Heidelberg Project, and finally back into the center of the City. Here’s a gallery of shots.

Critical Mass rolls through the Heidelberg Project in eastern Detroit.

In eastern Detroit.

Rollling past Cobo Hall in downtown.

The arterial routes in and out of town are incredibly wide. This is Gratiot inbound.

Rolling back out of downtown towards the end of the ride.

One of the best parts of this Detroit Critical Mass was the enthusiastic reception by locals all along the way:

Enthusiastic fast food workers take an unauthorized break to cheer us on.

A front porch bbq greeted us with hoots and hollers.

Downtown bar patrons came out to cheer too.

These kids were climbing the fence with excitement.

Passersby greeted us everywhere.

Detroit is a city reinventing itself. After a generation of abandonment by business and capital, the residents who have stayed are fully engaged in a process of rethinking what their city should look like, who should have the power to make decisions about it, what kinds of work should be done, and so on. The bicycle is making a comeback too, and though it’s still at the beginning of a regenerative process, the roots are well implanted and it’s very exciting to see what develops in the years to come.

The next generation of Detroit bicyclists, already riding in Critical Mass!

The organization fighting the massive freeway plan in Vancouver

I’m just back from a fantastic five-day visit to Vancouver to help celebrate and publicly ponder Car-Free Vancouver Day. The event started six years ago along East Vancouver’s Commercial Drive (“the Drive” as it is often called there). It has grown to encompass five separate neighborhood street closures, one being the very wide 4- to 6-lane Main Street where it is closed for about 17 blocks. To San Franciscans the event has a certain familiarity, combining something of our venerable tradition of street fairs with the newer excitement of “Sunday Streets.” But unlike the well-established and highly commercial street fairs, or the city-sponsored Sunday Streets, Car-Free Vancouver Day is a product of grassroots organizing, with hundreds of volunteers working hard for months to produce an exciting day of urban reinhabitation.

Street closure as art gallery.

Learning to unicycle on Car-Free Vancouver Day

"Score a goal for community!"

Serious salsa dancing for fun

Transition town meeting in mid-street.

The event has its roots in the years-long campaign to stop a $10 billion freeway and port expansion plan that will bulldoze local farms, neighborhoods, and indigenous sites, in addition to wrecking a couple of extant urban wilderness zones at Burns Bog and Surrey Bend. The Gateway Sucks campaign emphasizes that this plan, which is still proceeding, will lock in more urban sprawl and sabotage the local greenhouse gas reduction plan, all to increase trade in raw goods and disposable junk.

Car-free Commercial Drive in midday

The East Vancouver neighborhood was the first to propose a day-long closure of the its main corridor Commercial Drive as a way to demonstrate popular opposition to further freeway building. Urban activists like Matt Hern, who along with his family was my super fantastic host, saw a street closure as a way of animating the community, bringing people face to face in a car-free zone for at least a day, but in so doing, promote a more convivial and integrated neighborhood life year-round. Based on my short visit, I’d have to say that it’s been a smashing success—the provincial British Columbia government has yet to back down on their gargantuan 20th-century development plan, but the rising tide of community activism, urban gardening, bicycle advocacy and much more is palpable in Vancouver.

East Tenth Avenue is one of Vancouver's primary bike boulevards.

Similar to Berkeley's traffic-calmed cul-de-sacs, Vancouver makes bicycling a priority in many locations.

Community gardens abound in Vancouver.

The City Farmer gate made of old tools.

The recently elected mayor is a source of controversy. On one hand he’s a big bicycle advocate and has pushed through two tangible improvements for cyclists that have generated plenty of heat from merchants and auto-centric citizens. One long-standing demand of local cyclists, an additional southbound lane for bikes on the major arterial Burrard Bridge, has been established.

This is the Burrard Bridge in Vancouver. Why can't we do this with one lane on the west span of the Bay Bridge once the east span is complete? That way bikes could ride all the way across...

Another is a two-way bike lane that has replaced one of the westbound lanes on a major boulevard in downtown, Dunsmuir Avenue.  Even more dramatic is that Dunsmuir is reached by an old viaduct that was built as part of a freeway plan several decades ago but never completed. Now the onramp has the bike lane on it and a whole lane has been switched over to two-way bike traffic. If Vancouver can do this, why can't San Francisco start planning to narrow the five lanes on the Bay Bridge, reduce the speed limit to 30 or 40 on the west span, and with the eventual completion of the new east span bike lane, we'll be able to cross the bay on bike at long last?

Dunsmuir viaduct two-way bike lane.

Dunsmuir viaduct bike lane.

This is the Dunsmuir viaduct from below. It's an old freeway ramp that was stopped a generation ago from completion through downtown. Now it has a bike lane on it, but a study has begun to see if removing it might be the best plan.

Merchants are complaining but bicyclists are delighted about the new two-way bike lane on a major downtown boulevard in Vancouver, Dunsmuir Avenue.

Using the divider as dedicated bike parking.... brilliant!

The whole downtown area endured (celebrated?) the Winter Olympics this past February, and the city’s budget is now being slashed. The same pro-bicycling mayor hired a city manager who is gutting the local school budget, park maintenance, libraries, and everything else they can cut to address the massive cost overruns the city incurred to host the Olympics. The False Creek area, once a seedy industrial zone, has been utterly refashioned (not unlike San Francisco’s Mission Bay) with the Olympic village housing area (promises for large amounts of public housing have been reneged on now, not surprisingly) and a refurbished shoreline promenade looking out at a manmade “Habitat Island.”

"Habitat Island"?

Well yes, we have to make habitat now, having fully destroyed it in the past.

Weird modernistic ped bridge near False Creek, with "green" roof on new building behind it.

San Francisco and Vancouver have a lot in common. Big money keeps flowing in, driving real estate prices into the stratosphere, and keeping them there. But an increasingly active citizenry is resisting the untrammeled capitalist growth and development model with an indomitable spirit that makes Vancouver a great place to visit IN SPITE of its much-touted “success.”

I had the pleasure of speaking to four separate gatherings of organizers, presenting some of my “typical” themes. Building on the logic of Nowtopia, I argued that the Car-Free Vancouver Day movement should work to avoid having their festival succumb to the logic of being not much more than an alternative mall. That means utilizing the public space they’ve opened for much more than commerce, in fact finding so many compelling things to do in it that they displace commerce in ways similar to the way that bicycles displace cars during Critical Mass (many of the activists in Vancouver are big Critical Mass participants too). I was happy to see a lot of other activities while I was rolling around between Main Street and Commercial Drive. Here’s some images of music and bikes to wrap up this report:

Music in the streets, in many forms and styles.

Brass to start get your party on.

The Velopalooza beer bike... central to a week-long celebration of bicycling earlier in June.

Marigold demonstrates a mature ride.

Me too!

This was in the tree over the amazing Purple Thistle crowd, a youth center with enormous creativity and energy.

Editor's note: This is one in an occasional series of stories on the history of transit in San Francisco.

After walking through the mud and sand of early San Francisco, locals were ready for other kinds of transportation. A brisk business began as soon as roads could be laid out, relying on horse-drawn omnibuses and hacks (stagecoaches and carriages). The breakthrough came quickly, when the horsecar made it to San Francisco after sweeping the market in eastern cities in the late 1840s.

Unlike the omnibus ride, the horsecar was smoother and went a reliable 6 mph on its steel rails, making regular stops and providing straps for standing passengers to hang on to. As the horsecar regularized urban inner city transit, it helped usher in zoned fare systems and ringing bells for passengers to signal a stop. Not that it was accepted without resistance. Interesting to note, during these days of challenging the dominance of the private automobile over urban space, how at a much earlier juncture in transportation evolution citizens fought the new-fangled horsecars too.

Horsecars line up at Ferry building in San Francisco, 1875.

In the 1956 book Trolley Car Treasury, Frank Rowsome, Jr. describes the attitude that confronted the horsecar advocates:

“Iron-track cars were radically new and very probably dangerous to the established order. The metal strips in the streets would likely cause carriages to turn over. It was felt that property value along such streets would be injured, trade in stores would fall off, and car-riding would cause the lower social orders to become still more contentious.”

The horsecars gained acceptance pretty quickly though. It helped that local merchants usually had a big increase in trade after the start of a new horsecar line on the street in front of their establishments. Not that it was an altogether pleasing experience. The smell tended to stick in your mind. Rowsome describes a “special horsecar smell, blending the odors of smoky coal-oil lamps, sweating horses, and the pungency that came when the straw on the floor was dampened with many a dollop of tobacco juice.”

In San Francisco horsecar lines were crisscrossing the city by the 1860s. Here’s one of the first lines, #14, at Market and Post on its way to Woodward’s Gardens:

Horsecar #14 pauses at Post and Market on its way to Woodward's Gardens, c. 1860s.

In the 1880 Census there were 233,959 San Franciscans and an estimated 23,000 horses. Just a few years later the horsecar peaked in 1886 when there were 525 horse railways in 300 cities in the U.S. One hundred thousand horses provided the “horse power” to make those carriages go. By then, a generation had adapted to their use and urban development patterns had already begun to change. Instead of having to find housing in dark and dingy tenements next to a factory, a workman could commute 5 or more miles a day on a horsecar, which allowed a growing dispersion and separation of residential from commercial land uses.

But horses need fuel too. A typical streetcar horse ate 30 pounds of grain and hay a day, meaning in 1880 there was demand for about 350 tons a DAY of hay and feed. A booming business brought hay to San Francisco along Channel Street, not far from today's Willie Mays Field. Back in the 19th century Mission Creek was a bustling industrial port handling tons of hay, lumber, and other goods every week.

In the mid-1880s San Francisco needed 350 tons a day of hay and grain to feed its 23,000+ horses.

We can only imagine how bad it smelled. The Brannan Street Wharf was one of the outflow points for San Francisco’s raw sewage, much of which would wash back up Mission Creek and settle on the mudflats at low tide. Shit was a big problem in those days (it still is, we just don’t notice as much!).

How to manage all the horseshit falling on city streets and in the horsecar company stables? San Francisco was lucky since from the mid-1870s on as much horseshit as possible was deposited on the sand dunes that became Golden Gate Park. In eastern cities they had more of a problem with storing it until it could be carted off. A few companies tried to persuade neighbors that an enormous shit pile was not a hazard to public health but a benefit of fine germicidal properties. Snake oil came in a wide variety of forms in those days!

Capitalist rationalization was applied to horse grooming in those early industrial days.

The most crucial decision was when to sell off horses in services. (The tannery or glue factory was only a last resort, and meant that someone had miscalculated; most ex-streetcar horses returned to farm life for their last few years.) Horsecar horses led highly regulated lives. They were stabled for nineteen or twenty hours a day, in stalls specified by industry standards as not less than 4 feet wide and 9 feet long. Their workdays were measured in miles, not hours (they were expected to make it 12-15 miles a day).

Like transit systems right up to the present day, social struggles erupted on the horsecars too. In an curious near-coincidence of dates, April 17, 1863 (43 years and a day before the great Quake and Fire of April 18, 1906) is the date Charlotte L. Brown was ordered off an Omnibus Railroad car by the conductor because she wasn’t white.

The story is well-told in a new book Wherever There’s a Fight:

Brown sued the company for two hundred dollars. In response to the lawsuit, Omnibus Railroad justified its conductor's action by arguing that racial segregation was necessary to protect white women and children who might be fearful of riding side by side with an African American, an argument that was commonly used to justify segregation. But in November 1863, a San Francisco superior court judge rejected this reasoning and awarded Brown damages of five cents (the streetcar fare) plus legal costs.

Her success in court, though, did not immediately translate into change. Within days of the judgment, another streetcar conductor forced Brown and her father from a car. The tenacious Brown brought another lawsuit. And in October 1864, District Court Judge C. C. Pratt ruled that San Francisco streetcar segregation was illegal. He stated:

It has been already quite too long tolerated by the dominant race to see with indifference the negro or mulatto treated as a brute, insulted, wronged, enslaved, made to wear a yoke, to tremble before white men, to serve him as a tool, to hold property and life at his will, to surrender to him his intellect and conscience, and to seal his lips and belie his thought through dread of the white man's power.

Unfortunately the local transit systems, often privately owned and quite local to a block or a few, continued to refuse service to African Americans. Three years later, in 1866, Mary Ellen Pleasant filed another suit, this time against the North Beach Municipal Railroad. She, like Brown, was an independent African American woman, and determined to gain her rights; they were also both well known activists in the Abolition movement, Pleasant having been instrumental in establishing the west coast terminus of the Underground Railroad in the 1850s. She won her case and was awarded $500, though the award was overturned by a State Supreme Court appeal even while they affirmed the illegality of enforcing segregation on transit systems. It wasn’t until 1893 that the state of California passed a statewide prohibition on transit segregation.

The last horse-drawn streetcar in San Francisco rolled up Market Street in 1913, but mostly horsecars had been abandoned by the turn of the century. In San Francisco an aggressive capitalist consolidator and modernizer named Patrick Calhoun purchased every independent streetcar line in 1901 and merged them into his United Railroads. An early project was to make uniform the rolling stock and track gauges, which led to the abandonment of the last four miles of horsecars that had been the backbone of transportation just a generation earlier. The cars were already being sold in the mid-1890s to anyone who wanted one, $20 with seats, and $10 without. Famously a number of them ended up in the sand dunes near the beach just south of Golden Gate Park in an odd village that came to be known as Carville by the Sea.

Carville by the Sea, life in the dunes in horsecars!

The BP oil spill goes on. And on. We watch the oil on live web cam pouring into the Gulf of Mexico. And we watch. Political rage is muted, practical responses even more distant. What to do? How do we “take action” on something like this? How can individuals meaningfully respond to this catastrophe? Stop driving? Boycott one brand of gas? Stop buying things made of plastic? Let’s not flatter ourselves. A few folks I know are planning to go to a local ARCO gas station (owned by BP) to protest, which will surely be a big moment for the minimum wage employee in the cash booth, and probably an irritant to the half dozen or more motorists waiting to fill their cars.

The numbing impotence we feel is painfully calibrated to our inability to affect what’s happening. Consumer choices we might make will have zero impact on this disaster, and can’t shape the larger dynamics of a globe-spanning, multinational oil industry either. Just listen to Democracy Now on Friday morning to hear how Chevron has destroyed thousands of square miles of the Nigerian delta in its incessant exploitation of the oil there, or how the Ecuadoran Amazon too is covered in vast lakes of spilled oil.

The deeper questions about technology and science are far from our daily lives. The world we live in is embedded in complex networks of technological dependencies, which none of us have chosen freely. Nor do any of us have any way to participate directly in deciding what technologies we will use, how they will be deployed, what kind of social controls will be exerted over private interests who organize and run them for their own gain, etc. (supposedly the federal government regulates them in the public interest, but that is clearly false as shown YET AGAIN by this disaster). The basic direction of science is considered a product of objective research and development, when it has always been skewed to serve the interests of those who already have economic and political power. Public, democratic direction for science and technology is not only non-existent, we really don’t even discuss it as a possibility!

British Petroleum should be given the death penalty. Oh wait! They don’t have death penalties for corporations. In fact, though they apparently have all the rights of individuals with respect to “free speech” (which they are free to buy at any price they wish), they cannot be held accountable as individuals for overtly criminal behavior. And even if they were, their bottom-line obsessing, litigation-phobic approach to the worst oil spill in history is just an example of normal corporate behavior in 2010. Their efforts to control press access and spin the story to their advantage have been consistent since the original accident, insisting on journalists being embedded on BP boats or planes so they can control what is seen and reported.

Penalizing corporate executives that get “caught” only legitimizes the rest of the criminal class in their everyday destruction of the planet. Maybe BP executives will be held criminally responsible (probably not), but the entity whose logic controls the behavior of anyone who is its executive is virtually immune. Unlike its political competitors in human form, the corporation is also apparently immortal.

The abject obeisance of the Obama government during the first 30 days of the oil geyser is a shame. Government ignorance and inaction, following the routine corruption that granted safety and environmental waivers to BP for this drilling project, should rock its legitimacy as much as Chernobyl did the Soviet government’s in 1986. I hope that blind faith in technology would also suffer a severe blow. Assurances about safe technology, proper safe guards, etc. are made about all our energy sources, from undersea oil drilling to nuclear power to the fictional “clean coal.” (Just last Tuesday I was speaking at a class at UC Santa Cruz where a couple of earnest students tried to argue that nuclear power was the solution to global warming!) This oil geyser resembles nothing so much as an uncontrollable nuclear meltdown. But rather than radiating thousands of square miles of countryside as happened in the Ukraine in 1986, this is filling the Gulf of Mexico with billions of gallons of crude oil. The sea is already dying, which is beginning to cascade into seaside communities and economies. The death of the Gulf will have unknown further effects on weather, ocean ecology, bird migration, and much more, and that’s before the massive underwater oil plume reaches the gulf stream in the Atlantic and does even more damage. It’s an insane, unwanted experiment in a foreseeable and preventable ecological catastrophe of unprecedented scope and severity.

Turns out that BP is closer to us, in a bigger way, than a lot of folks realize. Only a couple of years ago BP and the University of California at Berkeley signed a $500 million deal that will build a new biofuels research institute at the school, to be managed by BP and it is to BP that all patent discoveries will go. Obama’s Energy Secretary Steven Chu was the UC official who made the deal. Now his deputy energy secretary is the former chief scientist for BP! Maybe folks who want to protest this disaster should explore an alliance with the dynamic student movement that has already been in motion since last fall. Protest and obstruction do have their place.

Nature in the City's new proposal for a 10-mile "wild" corridor.

But other things are afoot in San Francisco too of a more affirmative nature. A couple of weeks ago the Public Utilities Committee of the Board of Supervisors held a well-attended public hearing regarding new ways of working with local water supplies from ground water and storm water to rain catchment and graywater. On Wednesday night Nature in the City presented their new campaign for a Bioregional Park (PDF) in the heart of San Francisco, a long-term feature of which is a 10-mile corridor that sweeps from the Presidio in the north down the spine of the City’s major peaks and then angling east across McLaren Park to Bayview Hill and Candlestick Point.  A natural corridor that knits together as many existing open spaces and parks as possible, planted with native plants to restore basic habitat for local critters, bugs and plants, would also help them to migrate through the urban environment. Bikeways, hiking paths, even daylighted creeks could be part of this.

And the SF Bike Coalition just announced their new campaign Connecting the City—San Francisco's Crosstown Bikeways for All (which is not as ambitious—after all these years—as a modest little flyer I put out in 1987 calling for a City of Panhandles). So far it’s a campaign to raise money, but it demonstrates a willingness to finally push for a more serious challenge to the dominance of private cars over our public streets. It’s a campaign that dovetails nicely with the notion of a wild corridor, new ways to think about watersheds and underground creeks, and more. It’s welcome development for the bigger agenda of altering how we live.

Ultimately these small choices are the only way we CAN start to lay a new foundation, technologically and socially, for a real transformation of life that will preclude disasters of the magnitude in the Gulf. A materially comfortable life for all should be the goal of a creative and energetic campaign of social and technological re-invention so that we radically reduce our use of energy, water, and other materials.

Combining the various incipient insurgencies for other uses of public streets, maybe we can start by getting some accurate numbers. What percentage of the land area of San Francisco is covered in public streets? What percentage of that street area is dedicated to cars as opposed to bicycles, pedestrians, or even transit lines (obviously buses use the same streets as cars, but not nearly as many streets as cars; nor do they generally park curbside)? What percentage is open space, parklands, sidewalk gardens, etc.? What are the largest contiguous zones of open lands not built on in some fashion?

I propose that once we get the numbers, which we can only guess at now, it will be possible to raise the demand for a specific percentage of city streets being permanently turned over to new uses, including daylighting subterranean waterways, building city-spanning parkways for crosstown bicycling, walking, and for the critters, scurrying and slithering. What do you think? Five percent of the streets converted to new auto-free uses? 10 percent? 25 percent? How far can we go?

Our era is characterized by a profound impotence in the face of national and global breakdowns. We don’t have a political vision, let alone a movement of movements, ready for prime time. We have to build the capacity to reinvent life one block, one neighborhood, one city at a time. The good news is that thousands of your friends and neighbors are already involved in just these efforts. Paul Hawken in his book “Blessed Unrest” identifies 30 million grassroots environmental organizations around the world! He calls them the immune system for Earth. Let’s hope the immune system will behave like our own bodily immune systems, and start killing the threats to our global health, the corporations that left unchecked will certainly kill us and everything else on the planet.

We are often attracted to city life for the energy, the boisterousness, the noise. I am a city guy having lived all my life in cities (born in Brooklyn, Chicago until age 10, Oakland until 17, and San Francisco since I was 20). I often make the joke that "nature is trying to kill me," when one of my friends suggests we go camping. Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s I was a punk rock fan, and went to dozens of shows with ear-splitting volumes. I've been to plenty of other events through the years with overwhelming noise, from other concerts to major sports events, etc. Maybe that's why I have had a ringing in my ears for the last two years (tinnitus). And perhaps not surprisingly, I've become increasingly frustrated at the oft-overlooked urban problem of noise pollution.

The roar of approaching motorcycles drowns out all conversation until they're well past.

There are many specific contributors to our unnecessarily noisy environment, from the incessant sirens of emergency vehicles to the mechanized roar of the early morning garbage trucks, to the always galling car alarm serenade.

San Francisco's streets, however, are not that noisy compared to say, New York City. Or even compared to what it must have been like in the early decades of the 20th century when the City was criss-crossed by streetcars. Our cable cars are good examples of the kind of noisy transit that used to dominate the streets. For those who live along the tracks of the J-Church or N-Judah, or the cable cars, they know well how noisy a "light rail" vehicle can be.

Transit and street noise is taken largely for granted. We know it takes mechanical devices using fossil fuels to carry us around, unless we've embraced bicycling.

For us cyclists, the sounds of our whirring wheels and gentle gear changes is a pleasant confirmation of our self-propulsion. One of my favorite aspects of Critical Mass is the completely altered soundscape that accompanies our progress through the City. Sure, sometimes we're hooting and hollering, and there are at least a half dozen folks who might show up with serious sound systems pumping loud tunes into the air (a side note: the SFPD ticketed all the sound systems last month for lack of sound permits in their ongoing war of attrition, trying to literally raise the price for participating in CM). But the majority of time the sound is that of rolling bikes, murmuring voices, tinkling bells, and laughter. It's such a lovely kind of quiet, full of life and sweet energy, but so different from the anonymous, unaccountable thrumming of machines that fills our ears so often that we frequently stop noticing until they are turned off. And once you've ridden through the city in a mass of bicycles, it's hard not to remember that different urban environment, and wonder why it can't be more like that all the time.

One of the pleasures of a vibrant street life is the serendipitous encounter with street artists or performers, whose work is often dependent on the availability of a quieter public space. I had the pleasure in 1980 of running into Jean-Francois Batellier on the streets of Paris, France, one of the more prolific street artists there at the time (he appears in the car-free plaza in front of the Centre Pompidou daily to vend his drawings, books, postcards etc.) A lot of his work speaks to the alienation of modern life, the destruction of the urban fabric, and specifically a lot of great cartoons addressing the car culture. I got his book at the time, and one of his pieces stayed with me all these years:

By Parisian street artist Jean-Francois Batellier.

I really hate the motorcycle that you hear from blocks away. As it approaches, sidewalk conversation has to stop since no one can yell loud enough to be heard over the roar of the engine. The motorcycle has to be a full block away before anyone can even try to resume talking in a normal voice. Many Streetsblog readers are enthused about the new public plazas, mini-parks and parklets that are finally getting a local tryout. I love them, and see in them a harbinger of a more convivial, friendly, sociable city. But in this awkward interim period before they're fully developed, and while the preponderant use of local throughways is still overwhelmingly automobiles, we sit in our new parklets next to traffic, the sonic environment dominated by internal combustion engines (not to speak of the olfactory environment!).

By Parisian street artist Jean-Francois Batellier.

Another pet peeve is the sonic deterioration of BART. I recall riding it when it opened in the early 1970s and being impressed by its smooth, quiet, gliding quality. These days, whenever the train is going through a turn, whether between the Civic Center and 16th Street stations, or from downtown to West Oakland, the jarring screech of the metal wheels on rails is deafening; again it stops all conversation. Even just at high speed through the Transbay Tunnel it's much harder to converse than it used to be.

Noise is recognized by the San Francisco Department of Public Health (DPH) as a serious issue. And there is a Noise Task Force that brings together representatives of the police, DPH, city officials, entertainment businesses, and others. The enforcement of noise pollution ordinances is somewhat balkanized, with a half dozen agencies having varying responsibilities for it. The fight over late-night nightclubs is often driven by noise concerns, and Community Boards mediation services are often employed to address conflicts between neighbors with radically different tastes when it comes to amplified music and other kinds of noise.

It's an issue that comes up in more and more of our lives, and as more of us are getting older, we can hope for a more respectful approach to social space and noise. I know there will be comments here that say basically "if it's too noisy for you, stay home (or move to the suburbs)!" I've been struggling with bars and restaurants for a while already, but it's not nearly as bad as the problems my 78-year-old father has. If we don't find a restaurant with a quiet corner, we might as well not go out to eat because he really can't hear a thing over the roar of most San Francisco restaurants.

Sad to say, I'm heading the same way, even though I'm only 53. I've pretty much given up on bars, unless there's a quiet room or booth in the back. I can count the restaurants on one hand that are quiet enough to have a personal conversation that doesn't require yelling to be heard. It's a mystery to me why the common wisdom for restauranteurs is that a loud roaring restaurant is the most profitable. It would be nice if the private spaces in which we gather to drink, dine, and talk would honor the desire to talk as much as their narrow focus on selling us food and beverages. Perhaps some bar owner might still decide to promote a quieter environment. I'm sure there are a few out there already.

Ultimately our streets are our primary public spaces besides parks. We have a right to less noise, especially that imposed by trucks and motorcycles that are far exceeding the allowable decibel levels as they roar through our streets. If we continue to spend more time in our reclaimed street space, we should demand that right.

Most of us in 21st century San Francisco are firmly terrestial. We got here in a car, on a bus, a plane, or rarely now a train. Part one took a look at walking across the sand dunes that once dominated the landscape.

Today, we look at the experience of travelling by sailing ship, which is how most of the early San Franciscans arrived. Arrival by ship was the main option until after 1869, when the transcontinental railroad opened. Ship transit continued as a common experience until well into the 20th century. It really wasn't until after World War II that transoceanic travel left the seas in favor of the skies. Who knows, maybe it'll be back again soon, challenging us to overcome our landlubber status!

There had already been a steady ocean-going trade across the Pacific for two centuries before the San Francisco Bay became a participant. Manila galleons carried goods between Mexico and the Philippines, Spanish colonies during the 1500s and 1600s (it's a little known fact that Filipinos were among the first to arrive in California, long before the Gold Rush). By the time Mission Dolores was being founded in the Spanish territory of Alta California, and the United States won its independence from England, American merchants were aggressively entering the world shipping business. Ships flying the stars and stripes were soon calling at ports in the West Indies, China, and India, not to mention leading the industrial exploitation of the largest mammals in the sea, the whales.

The Mission economy, based primarily on trade in cow hides and tallow, was supplemented by the first great slaughter on the west coast that decimated the native sea otter population between the late 1700s and the 1840s. Richard Henry Dana was a sailor in that era, and colorfully describes his experience in the San Francisco Bay in 1835 in his classic "Two Years Before the Mast."

"Here, at anchor, and the only vessel, was a brig under Russian colors, from Sitka, in Russian America, which had come down to winter, and to take in a supply of tallow and grain, great quantities of which latter article are raised in the missions at the head of the bay. The second day after our arrival, we went on board the brig, it being Sunday, as a matter of curiosity; and there was enough there to gratify it. Though no larger than the Pilgrim, she had five or six officers, and a crew of between twenty and thirty; and such a stupid and greasy-looking set, I certainly never saw before. Although it was quite comfortable weather, and we had nothing on but straw hats, shirts, and duck trowsers, and were barefooted, they had, every man of them, doublesoled boots, coming up to the knees, and well greased; thick woolen trowsers, frocks, waistcoats, pea-jackets, woolen caps, and everything in true Nova Zembla rig; and in the warmest days they made no change. The clothing of one of these men would weigh nearly as much as that of half our crew. They had brutish faces, looked like the antipodes of sailors, and apparently dealt in nothing but grease. They lived upon grease; eat it, drank it, slept in the midst of it, and their clothes were covered with it. To a Russian, grease is the greatest luxury. They looked with greedy eyes upon the tallow-bags as they were taken into the vessel, and, no doubt, would have eaten one up whole, had not the officer kept watch over it. The grease seemed actually coming through their pores, and out in their hair, and on their faces. It seems as if it were this saturation which makes them stand cold and rain so well. If they were to go into a warm climate, they would all die of the scurvy."

Yerba Buena Cove in 1851, a forest of masts, many of them on ships that had been scuttled and sunken into the mud of the cove (today's Financial District).

Starting with the 1848 Gold Rush, thousands of people arrived in San Francisco from across the seas. The new port was soon a forest of masts as sailors and passengers alike abandoned ship and took off for the gold country. This in turn gave rise to an industry of labor "recruiting" in San Francisco known as "crimping," which gained the better-known moniker for those who were thus recruited of being "Shanghaiied." Finding sailors for ships through trickery, bribery, and force was a thriving business in San Francisco all the way into the 20th century. In fact, it was not made illegal until a federal prohibition was signed by President Teddy Roosevelt in 1906, and then didn't fully disappear until after the LaFollette Act of 1915 imposed new regulations on Maritime Employment, and commercial sailing vessels were phased out during WWI. Prior to these progressive reforms in the 20th century, courts repeatedly upheld the rights of ship owners and ship captains to control anyone who was on board as an "employee." An 1897 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court (Robertson v. Baldwin) held that "seamen are ... deficient in that full and intelligent responsibility for their acts that is accredited to ordinary adults, and [need] the protection of the law in the same sense in which minors and wards are entitled to the protection of their parents and guardians," concluding that sailors had to be protected from themselves and were not subject to the 13th Amendment's prohibition of involuntary servitude!

The 1830 ship The Chandler was discovered as the Millennium Towers were being built a couple of years ago at Main and Folsom. After a pause for an archeological analysis, the crews dug down four stories further to build the enormous foundation they hope will survive future earthquakes!

The Chandler's prow.

The sudden rapid development of San Francisco as a world port thanks to the Gold Rush gave a huge boost to the sailing ships of the era. The Clipper Ships that dominated world trade during the mid-19th century were developed to meet the radically increased demand for goods and passenger service between the east coast, San Francisco, and China. Ships crossed the Pacific Ocean from China, the Philippines, Chile, and Australia, while French, Germans, English, and Americans made their way on great sailing ships around the Cape Horn in terrifying journeys that often ended in shipwreck and death. Early steam ships that made the arduous journey to San Francisco became profitable immediately. The Clipper ships too were enormously profitable for their owners, since no serious cargo could travel across the isthmus. The Clippers employed a dizzying array of sails that made up as much as an acre and a half of canvas, known as spanker sails, spencer sails, jibs, topsails, skysails, royal studdingsails, and moonsails and more. Thanks to rapidly advancing hull designs they were able to shorten travel time between the northeast and San Francisco to less than 100 days, while carrying heavy equipment, machinery, houses, large quantities of furniture, and bulk merchandise. In the first year of use a typical Clipper would make up to $50,000 above their building cost, and a speedy captain could make $3000 for a trip, with a bonus up to $5000 if he made it in under 100 days.

The Flying Cloud was one of the record-breaking Clipper ships that made the journey from the east coast to San Francisco in 89 days.

The "extreme clipper" Fearless was launched in Boston 1853. Small, elegant, and fast, it averaged 125 days from Boston to SF.

The 1850s was also the era in which steam ships were emerging to supplant the long dependence on wind and sail, but for the rest of the 19th century, sail power remained an important component of ocean-going travel. Passengers leaving New York or Boston on Clipper ships hoped for a quick journey, meaning they would make it safely to the far-off port of San Francisco in 4 months or less. Others made their way on east coast steam ships or a panoply of forgotten vehicles -- scows, schooners, whaleboats, and other floating craft -- along the coast into the Caribbean and to New Orleans. From there they proceeded to the port city of Aspinwall (now Colón), for the difficult trans-isthmus journey through Panama (then part of Colombia, or as it was known at the time, the Republic of New Granada). A railroad across the isthmus was under construction already in 1850 in response to the surge of demand to travel to California for the Gold Rush. But after disembarking at the port travelers depended mostly on native dugout boats to take them up the wild Chagres River, and then after crossing the Continental Divide, they finished the journey on foot or by mule for the last 20 miles over old, decrepit Spanish trails.

Water-based travel had many decades to go before giving way fully to rail, and then truck and automobile. But the lore of the sea still holds our imaginations, romantically for some, horrifying for others. Herman Melville's incredible classic "Moby Dick" is imposed on many of us in our high school years, and that's a pity because it's a book better digested at an older age. In it he describes a remarkable multiracial onboard culture of sailing life, the hellish brutality and barbarism of life at sea, and the conditions of the sailors (workers) on the floating industrial processing plants that were whaling ships in the 19th century. There's a rich lore of stories that imbue waterfront dives and creaking timbers with salty memories that today we can only consume vicariously. The questions of historiography, how we know what we know about the past, are raised by the largely anecdotal accounts of sea passage from that long-ago era.

In her essay "About that Blood in the Scuppers" (in Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture; City Lights Books, San Francisco: 1998) Georgia Smith takes this issue head-on with some compelling examples:

Much of the waterfront's past is revealed only in anecdotes, or more broadly, anecdotal sources, by which I mean accounts that make a particular moment vivid by telling a funny story (or an outrageous or a grotesque one), or revealing an evocative detail, or indulging in an emotional outburst. One afternoon in the 1890s, Hiram Bailey and his friend Ben (neither one a sailor) went into a dive down on the waterfront:

"Looking round we found ourselves in a rather coarse, and certainly common Battery Point saloon, kept by one Calico Jim, a Chilean as I subsequently learned. (This same gentleman some years later shanghaied six San Francisco policemen sent to arrest him; and was eventually relentlessly followed and shot dead by one of them on the streets of Callao in Chile, South America.) We were about to return outside, not liking the general atmosphere of the place, when a tallish, high-cheeked, square-jawed adder-eyed, raw type of man arrested us with his silvery-toned voice:

Say, yoo two, ef yer want a lonesome conversassy, jest vamoos inter thet er room there. (He indicated a door at the opposite end.) Yooll sure be all possum in there . . . out of the bar-room heat and thet. . . . Jest ring fur yer poisons.

We sat down in that chair-spangled fatal room. Really it proved refreshingly cool; and through the window overlooking the harbour I noticed in the fading evening light several large and graceful sailing-ships: some deeply laden and at rest as if cut in cameo, whilst others, quite light, with their yards already cock-billed, were evidently preparing to proceed immediately up the Sacramento River to Crockett or Port Costa to obtain their grain cargoes for Europe."

Did someone really dupe (or dope) six cops, all at once, put them on a ship, and get away with it? Was the man who spoke to Bailey really high-cheeked, square-jawed, and adder-eyed? A rich vein of unreliable history is mined by guys sitting around getting drunk, telling each other lies—which, however, are slathered onto a base of truth. Calico Jim figures in shanghaiing lore, and though his authenticity is disputed, his profession was real:He was a crimp, one who made a living by delivering men—via persuasion, trickery, or force—to sailing ships in need of crew.

The infamously difficult passage around the Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America, a journey that could take a month or more just to go from the Atlantic to the Pacific into the teeth of howling icy winds, is far removed from our contemporary ability to cross half the planet in less than a day. Spending four or more months at sea, stuffed into stinking fo'c'sle's full of rotting food, human waste, vomit, and disease, all to reach a new life in a new land, is hard to imagine in its minute-by-minute misery.

Or working on ships for years at a time, climbing masts in gale force winds, prying at ropes and sails caked in thick ice, while trying not to fall to your death in violent seas.  But people did it—almost routinely—for decades. Those who survived those perilous journeys often stayed and became the early Californians who shaped the culture at the edge of the continent, freed from the expectations and burdens and cultural norms that they'd left behind, for better and worse.

(Editor's note: this is the latest installment from contributor Chris Carlsson, The Nowtopian)

At least once a week all of us in San Francisco schlep our garbage to the curb to be picked up by our local scavenger services, long known as Sunset Scavenger or Golden Gate Disposal, and recently renamed Recology. The familiar blue, black, and green bins clutter the curbs for a night and sometimes a day, blow around in the wind, are rummaged through by the hard-working legions of homeless seeking a way to supplement their meager resources, and are a ubiquitous presence to any urban explorer.

Who hasn't woken to the screeching roar of passing garbage trucks in pre-dawn San Francisco? This is our contemporary system of trash removal, not quite like (perhaps) apocryphal accounts of the old days when Italian scavengers went through the streets in top hats picking up the garbage while singing opera! 

Waste has been a burgeoning issue for decades, as capitalist economies have radically expanded production and distribution, relying heavily on a consumerist mentality that is continually discarding used products in favor of new ones. Not to mention that so much of what is produced is made crappily, engineered to last just a few months or years at best (when it could be designed to last 25-75 years or longer, and be easily repaired to extend its life once broken or damaged). Instead of paying more for quality durable products, we throw away everything to go and buy anew. 

Free tours of the Recology Transfer and Sorting Stations are held on the last Wednesday of the month. Here we get a short presentation on how E-waste picked up by our local garbage service is NOT shipped intact to China, but is dismantled and recycled at facilities in Hayward.

Campaigns against littering started in the 1960s, sponsored by the same corporations that were busy filling our world with non-recyclable cans and plastic bottles, plastic packaging and more. The idea of "sanitary landfill" emerged as a "solution," but filling waterways or dumps with garbage only hid the problem while creating new ones. (One of the great ironies of local ecological history is that our much-treasured San Bruno Mountain was saved from rampant mid-20th century development in part by the stench of San Francisco’s garbage, which was dumped into Brisbane Lagoon for almost 50 years.) Heather Rogers did a great documentary and book on this called Gone Tomorrow, where you can learn a lot about the history of how various companies deliberately engineered a world of waste for its enormous profitability.

News occasionally reaches us from faraway cities where garbage strikes are underway: Naples in southern Italy is probably the most famous, undergoing a decade-long crisis of “waste management,” leading to 200,000 tons of garbage piling up in city streets while all nearby landfills were overflowing. A recent film, Gomorrah, did a good job of showing the role of organized crime in illegal waste dumping in Italy, but it’s not unique to there by any means.

The view from the Sorting Center at Pier 96... not your everyday sourdough-and-cable car view!

We tend to take curbside recycling for granted. It seems like common sense, and these days the ubiquitous three bins are everywhere: black for landfill, blue for recyclables, and most recently green for compost. But only a few decades ago it was "crazy hippie activists" who started the process of bringing our trash out of the dark and into the light of day.

In the early 1970s Richmond Environmental Action started a recycling center below Lone Mountain (and sold t-shirts with an image of Rodin’s The Thinker, with the slogan “Cogito Ergo Reciclo”, I Think Therefore I Recycle), and the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council sponsored a collection center in the small parking lot alongside Kezar Stadium off Frederick Street, which is still going today. Activists working with the Berkeley Ecology Center began a recycling program. Karen Pickett joined the effort a few years later and recalls what it was like as recently as 1980:

Back around 1980 or so, recycling was not institutionalized the way that it is now, and it was actually a pretty radical concept to think that garbage was something good. So the public education that was going on around solid waste issues, recycling issues, really felt cutting edge… What sucked me in was the recycling program that the Berkeley Ecology Center started. I [worked on] the curbside program, only picking up newspapers. There was no formal contract with the City of Berkeley, it was a nonprofit running around throwing newspapers into the back of a truck, and we took them down to Ashby and San Pablo, to the Packaging Company of America. They turned the newspapers into egg cartons and fruit dividers. It was a terrific example of local industry because at the end of the day we’d go a mile or less.

"You reduce, reuse, recycle. But you ALWAYS reduce first, because it has to do with consumption habits. We have to recycle because we’ve used up the raw materials, the resources, to produce these products… I hate to say this, but in a lot of ways it’s a failure. That’s not to say that all of people’s efforts all of these years has failed, because all these municipalities, county entities, are recycling. By and large, people across the country can do curbside recycling in a convenient way which most people see as a success. To ignore [that] would be foolish. Nonetheless, where does it get us if we’re recycling all this stuff but we haven’t reduced how much we consume? We’re still on a suicidal path.

"We worked for so very long at getting people to see the value in touching their garbage and separating things, and the whole idea that if they participated in that process in that way, then things would be re-used in the highest and best use kind of way. And that was the whole reason we separated colors of glass, never mind the glass from cans. And now the irony is, now that it has been institutionalized and it’s so acceptable that everybody is recycling, everything is thrown into the same bin. It breaks my heart every time I do my own recycling and dump my stuff into a recycling bin and see what else is in there, because I know that things are lost in the process.

Here's all the stuff you carefully put in the blue bin, dumped into huge piles to be sorted at Pier 96.

Last Wednesday I took the free monthly tour at Recology. It starts on Tunnel Road at the “the dump,” or the Transfer Station as they prefer to call it. This is the location where all the garbage in the black bins goes, where it is culled and gleaned for useful objects and materials before being bulldozed into large trucks that carry it to the Altamont landfill site.

An ongoing Artist-in-Residence program gives 24-hour access to clever artists who make remarkable sculptures, machines, gardens and more (May 15-16 is the next Open House Art Party on Tunnel Road). The gravel path that runs through the sculpture garden is made up of crushed cement from the old Embarcadero Freeway, in what I thought was one of the more resonant demonstrations of re-use at the Recology center.

This path through the sculpture garden above the Transfer Station is made up of crushed cement from the old Embarcadero Freeway.

A picnic table from another dimension?

Floral scrap iron...

You really can do ANYTHING with plastic bottles!

But the tour got even more interesting when we drove back to Pier 96 on the bay shore to the Sorting Center. Here is the place where all the recyclables jumbled together in the blue bins goes, and dozens of Teamster union members work to separate the different streams of materials. As Karen Pickett noted above, the retreat from source separation that our curbside blue bin system embodies is quite disappointing for all of us 1970s veterans who spent so much time trying to inculcate in ourselves and our culture a new, finely tuned sensibility about waste. When you see how chaotic the flowing conveyor belts are, with so much paper, plastic, cans and more going by, much of which was missed by the workers standing at workstations that we could see, it’s hard to imagine that the quality of San Francisco’s recyclables is very high.

Our tour guide explained how Japanese citizens routinely separate their trash into seven different containers, but Recology discovered that when source separation expectations were reduced by introducing “single stream recycling,” “recycling” increased by 25 percent or more. San Francisco has nearly reached its target of a 75 percent diversion of solid waste, and ostensibly is trying to eventually reach “zero waste,” a target that is impossible in the absence of systematic changes at the federal level, not to mention at every level of economic activity.

Technically photography was not allowed here, and I can start to see why. This facility was essentially built to comply with a statewide mandate that 50 percent of the refuse stream be diverted to recycling. In order to hit that aggressive target, the city implemented mixed stream recycling, hoping it would encourage more people to recycle more of their garbage. By single stream recycling, a household does not need to separate glass, metal, and plastic into individual bins. Instead, workers are paid to do this sorting after the fact. It's debatable whether having the consumer or a professional sort recycling is more efficient. What is clear is what the city has made up in diversion rates, it has lost in quality of recyclable materials. The city sells its recyclable materials as low grade goods because it typically contains about 5% foreign content, either through sorting errors or, because one recyclable (for example paper) has been contaminated by a second recyclable such as a dirty can of tuna. (photo and caption by John Hovell)

In any case, few remember that only a generation ago the San Francisco Board of Supervisors had signed off on a quite different approach to solid waste. In the late 1980s the plan was to build a big electricity-generating incinerator in Brisbane, between the old bayfill dump and San Bruno Mountain. Ruth Gravanis worked with San Francisco Tomorrow to oppose that plan and tells the story:

I was very involved in fighting the trash burner that was proposed for Brisbane, that was going to take all of San Francisco’s garbage. San Francisco Tomorrow tried to educate people about how it would be much better to have a curbside pickup program than to commit all of San Francisco’s garbage to being burned. [If it had been built] we could never have had a curbside recycling program because we would be obliged by our contract to produce as much garbage as possible to burn as much as possible to generate electricity to sell to PG&E to pay for the trash burner. That was a huge battle. It passed SF’s Board of Supervisors, it went to Brisbane, Brisbane’s Planning Commission supported it, Brisbane City Council supported it.

Thanks to the good citizens of Brisbane, who put a proposition on the ballot that stopped it, we didn’t get an incinerator. What a lot of people don’t know who talk about San Francisco’s “zero waste” was that it was the NIMBY’s of Brisbane who made it possible for us to have a curbside recycling program. Now everybody wants to take credit for it, especially Sunset Scavenger, for the curbside pickup program we have. But it was Leonard Steffenelli [head of Sunset Scavenger in that era] who said "maybe Davis, maybe Palo Alto, but we know our customer, and our customer will not recycle."

The Pier 96 sorting center from inside the front door--an impressive system of conveyor belts and materials flows...

One-ton bales of aluminum cans await shipment to be reused.

So kudos to our local garbage company for the transition they've made, and the work they've done to promote waste diversion and reduction. But for most of us, garbage is still something we throw away without thinking about it much. To really make a difference at the end of the cycle, we'll have to challenge not just what is made and how it's designed, but how our own work is a crucial consideration.

How does what we do all day contribute to a general disconnection between creative input and destructive output? Because after all, that logic permeates our economic lives.

Gaining conscious control of what we do, why, and for what purpose is as important as learning how to better handle the endless piles of garbage and junk our society has deemed the centerpiece of "economic health". In the meantime you can get fully informed on which materials can be recycled and which cannot, which bins get what, and how it all works from your very own San Francisco Department of the Environment right here.

Let's just say right away that Critical Mass is a bike party, and the San Jose Bike Party has a lot more similarities to Critical Mass than differences. A half-dozen San Francisco and Berkeley Critical Mass veterans took a field trip to join the San Jose Bike Party on Friday night as it cruised through the heart of Silicon Valley. We piled onto a "Baby Bullet" Caltrain that got us into downtown Sunnyvale well before the 8 p.m. starting time. (Along the way we pondered how many cyclists it takes to make a Critical Mass and concluded that it takes enough to break into different factions that don't like each other!)

After leaving the train, we soon came upon a couple with a big couch on a bike trailer, their two dogs occupying the seats of honor, and a sound system ready to pump some tunes from within. As we approached the gathering point, not really sure how to distinguish one intersection from another along the sprawling avenues of the South Bay, we were excited to see feeder rides streaming in from all directions, numbering anywhere from a dozen to nearly 100. Riders gathering in a big parking lot, hanging with friends, energy and anticipation rising.

By the time we got rolling there were over 1,000 riders, and possibly twice that many. Unlike San Francisco, there weren't too many white hipsters in this ride. Most of the crowd was Latino and Asian youth on all manner of bikes from beaters to chrome low-riders, and a smaller number of "properly" garbed older white cyclists in yellow reflective clothing with helmets -- classic bike nerds, in other words.

A lot of folks come in groups and hang together throughout the ride.

We talked about how different it felt in terms of the demographics of the riders, refreshing for us old-time San Francisco cyclists. And given the relatively short life of this ride, and the fact that it's clearly growing fast, some of the most compelling reasons that we've remained enthusiastic Critical Mass riders for so many years were reaffirmed by the event. The hundreds of kids on this ride, ages 12-22, were all experiencing their environment in a new way. The material experience of a mass bike ride changes imaginations, changes how one conceives of urban (and in this case, surburban) space.

The origins of the Bike Party go back to a "get out the vote" ride in 2004, and then during the following year, individuals from the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition and other cycling activists discussed with each other how to stimulate a larger South Bay ride. Some folks had been tending the flames of a fledgling Critical Mass, but it sputtered out during the dark, rainy winter. On their website they explain how the San Jose Bike Party got started:

"Many conversations among involved riders led to the common conclusion that a ride styled after San Francisco's confrontational and controversial Critical Mass would not work well in the car-centric South Bay, but we never arrived at a full consensus of what a "San Jose Bike Party" should look like. All sat quiet and calm for a few years until a wonderful meeting of minds happened. In the summer of 2007, one of the original organizers of the 2004 and 2005 "Bike Party" Halloween rides met a new roommate who had helped organize a bike gang in San Diego and had ridden with LA's "Midnite Ridazz." Together, they determined to re-start the San Jose Bike Party idea..."

They decided to start it at 8:30 p.m. on the third Friday of the month, well after work and dinner, to pick a theme for each ride, and to have planned routes. This is quite similar to our approach in the early years of San Francisco's Critical Mass, except the starting time, which has always been at 6 here. The Bike Party has a tight coterie of volunteer organizers, and they appoint themselves and others to be "Birds." My main experience of them Friday night was the two or three times I had a yellow-vest clad monitor running past me flashing their bike light in people's eyes, yelling "stop! stop!" at a red light.

The San Jose ride's main difference from San Francisco's, besides having a self-designated organizing group who maintains close contact with police, is that it tends to stop at most intersections, and when the light turns red, not very many cyclists are inclined to keep streaming through. This is in contrast to our approach in SF, which was always premised on maintaining a dense Mass to preserve maximum safety for cyclists.

In Sunnyvale and Mountain View, the ride was pushed into the right lane of three northbound lanes on El Camino Real, with many police squad cars and some motorcycles riding herd on the cyclists. We split ourselves into dozens of small clots of cyclists, usually 10-50 riders each, and it was increasingly difficult to catch up with the riders ahead. After almost an hour of this odd experience, we did some turning and twisting before being herded by organizers into a mid-point parking lot for a regrouping stop.

Bean Powered at the San Jose Bike Party, here at the regrouping stop.

The organizers are anti-alcohol, but plenty of folks were nursing beers and flasks along the way. The folks with the Beaners wagon above had a cooler full of beers on their trailer. But no one was as inebriated as the drunk guy who spends each and every San Francisco Critical Mass bellowing at the top of his lungs.

Overall, the Bike Party captured a lot of the magic that Critical Mass does. I found it frustrating and self-defeating to not hold intersections long enough for larger groups of cyclists to pass through, but one of the characteristics of mass bike rides is how they each find their own comfort level and culture. At least a half dozen sound systems were on the ride, pumping funk, hip-hop and other popular tunes.

Given the participants in the ride, I doubt if the culture will remain the same for long. The youth culture in San Jose hasn't established its own voice in the Bay Area and it seems like the Bike Party might be a place where it could erupt.

The couch on wheels!

During the mid-point regrouping stop, Jason Meggs, who was the first person to bring a rolling couch on Critical Mass (in Berkeley in the early 1990s) approached the folks with the rolling couch and their dogs. When he mentioned he was a long-time Critical Mass rider, the couch pedalers were visibly dismayed. I spoke to a dozen different cyclists while riding and most of them were curious about our Critical Mass and knew little about it. So even though the webmaster and (perhaps) the main organizers choose to characterize San Francisco Critical Mass as confrontational and controversial, parroting the distorted accounts that have been broadcast far and wide in the mass media, the San Jose Bike Party is clearly influenced by Critical Mass, in spite of deliberate attempts to distance the event from its more notorious predecessor.

Still, they have to make the same disclaimers about real or potential participants that we often make here in San Francisco: "At Bike Party, we welcome all riders. However, the atmosphere can be diverse and chaotic, much like a rock concert. There are people who act badly, as you might see at any large event like a concert at Shoreline. We strongly discourage inappropriate behavior... Still, no one can fully control someone else's actions. Most people are generally respectful, friendly, and helpful."

Just like when we talk to the media and emphasize that they cannot get an interview until they come on a Critical Mass and experience it first-hand, the Bike Party describes itself this way: "We're one-half political party, one-half street party -- made up of all types of bicyclists and human-powered transportation advocates who celebrate and build community in a monthly ride that must be experienced to be understood."

Kindred spirits animate the ride. Describing it online they say:

Everything looks better from the seat of a bike. You can feel the wind on your face, the rhythm of the ground in your legs, you can feel your heart pumping, and the energy of your surroundings encompassing your body. On a bicycle, you can see the city, talk to strangers, escape the insulated bubbles of cars and feel free from the confines of cubicles. A bicycle is freedom, a bicycle is friendly, and a bicycle is life... Bicycling frees people from costly fees, stuffy cars, sedentary lifestyles, and dreadful commutes. Bike Party rides aim to teach riders the street skills and confidence they need to become daily riders on all kinds of roads.

We didn't make the whole ride, but returned to the Caltrain station to catch the last train before it was over. We all agreed it was great fun to join a neighboring ride, and we welcome the San Jose Bike Party as a member of the Critical Mass family of rides. From the huge and nearly city-sponsored Critical Mass that happens twice annually in Budapest, Hungary, to the thousands-strong rides in cities from Vancouver, BC to Rome, Italy, to Sao Paolo, Brazil and San Francisco, every urban area reinvents the idea of mass bike rides for its own context and needs. Congrats to our southern neighbors for opening up a vital space for social transformation. San Jose and the South Bay are part of the worldwide bicycling renaissance. Check it out next month, May 21, 8 p.m.

The Portolá expedition sights the Bay in 1769.

Had you been one of those settlers at the far edges of the Spanish empire, you might have been in the caravan that slowly made its way up from Monterey in 1769, crossing the dense redwood forests along the San Mateo hills to suddenly catch a glimpse of one of the world’s great harbors. Funny to think that a site so rich in maritime history now, once surrounded by the most abundant natural supplies of seafood imaginable, was “discovered” by European settlers who were traveling extremely slowly on foot and horseback.

Sir Francis Drake had passed by the Golden Gate more than 100 years earlier, as had many other seafaring explorers, but no one noticed the entry to San Francisco Bay. It was another few years, 1776 in fact, when Spanish settlers established permanent structures in what is now San Francisco, at the Presidio, and at Mission Dolores (then at the edge of a good-sized freshwater lake fed by a year-round stream gurgling down what is now 18th Street). We’ll start to examine the water-born transportation that really shaped the early city next time. But from the beginning, less than 100 Spanish settlers founded a settlement that, thanks to enslaving the local Indians (those who survived smallpox, chicken pox, and other European diseases), was able to start producing hides and tallow and carry on a modest trade with passing ships from other European powers (Russia, England, Prussia, France, and of course the USA).

They lived in two settlements, and to go from one to the other was mostly done on foot or by horseback. Early in San Francisco’s pre-history, a path was beaten that still exists today: Lover’s Lane in the Presidio, presumably so named because lonely soldiers had to walk it to the Mission to court the few eligible young women in the area. Here’s a photo that shows it from the 1870s:

Lover's Lane has been there since the 1780s but here it is in the 1870s as seen from the Presidio gate.

Few of today’s San Franciscans know the early history of “Yerba Buena.” Most of us have a vague idea that today’s financial district was once the shoreline and that the city grew up in a hurry thanks to the Gold Rush and all the ships and people that “rushed in” during 1848-49. Curious to find out that the very first structure in what became the city of San Francisco was Captain William Richardson’s house, which he called “Casa Grande,” built on what we know now as Grant Street not far from the first landing in the city, at Clark’s Point (today’s Montgomery and Sacramento). Though the peninsula had been under Spanish rule for over 50 years, and Mexican rule for more than a decade, it was only in 1835 that a formal effort began to establish a town. Richardson built his house in 1837 after living in a tent with his wife and three children for months. (At one point he was off conducting his affairs and the family’s hearth fire went out. They waited two days until a Mexican soldier happened to walk by on the long way from the Presidio to the Mission and helped them start a new fire.) Richardson’s daughter remembered a bear reaching under the tent and grabbing one of their roosters, while his son Stephen recounted in his memoir:

One thing about the cove of Yerba Buena, or San Francisco, as it very soon came to be called, was the great number of good-sized fish that swam close in shore and were stranded by the outgoing tide. These were the natural food of all sorts of predacious animals, which existed in enormous numbers and, being little interfered with by man, for that reason were indifferent to his presence. I often used to sit on the veranda of my father’s house and watch bears, wolves and coyotes quarreling over their prey along what is now Montgomery Street.

These dunes stretch across today's Sunset District to the sea in this 1900 shot but once upon a time they ran from the sea all the way to the Bay.

While he was watching the bears and wolves eat the sturgeon and salmon who were stuck in the tidal mud, Nob Hill climbed straight up behind his father’s house. The diagonal geologic formations of Franciscan bedrock and upthrust chert were not yet well understood, but what was plainly apparent from the beginning was the endless sea of sand that covered the peninsula, running from the Pacific Ocean nearly all the way to the Bay at Yerba Buena cove. Dunes had formed over thousands of years and much of what we now experience as the relatively flat parts of San Francisco were themselves once dominated by 100- to 200-foot-tall sand dunes, with swamps and wetlands occupying the low areas between them.

To go from their home to a small, sunny sand-dune surrounded area called Happy Valley (around today’s 1st and Mission) Richardson had to walk on a treacherous, narrow path on an extremely steep hillside. Happy Valley itself was warm and sunny with some fresh water from a natural spring, protected from the relentless wind and sand of the city by the towering 100-foot tall sand dunes to its west and north. (Early gold rush settlers set up a tent city there and within a year it was wracked with dysentery and cholera, as human waste piled up even while the sand dunes were being brought down.)

This 1851 photo captures the now leveled sand dunes that covered the South of Market area.

In its original state, the full eight blocks south from Market to Townsend were dry land only from Second to Third. Rincon Hill had two 100-foot-high crests, near Second and Townsend, and along Harrison Street between First and Second. Hills eighty feet high stood at Second and Howard, Third and Market, and Second and Market. A salt marsh interrupted Fourth and Fifth streets near Folsom and continued northwest almost to Market. Half of today's South of Market lay under water.

This is an artist's rendering of the northwesterly view from 9th Street and Mission Plank Road, today's 9th and Mission.

The route between the settlement at Yerba Buena cove and the old Franciscan Mission Dolores several miles to the southwest was so sandy that even a load of hay from the Mission's fields was hard to deliver into the town, and usually came by water via Mission Creek and Mission Bay. Col. Charles L. Wilson constructed a plank toll road in 1850 from Kearny Street to Third Street, and out Mission Street to Mission Dolores. It became the first reliable road across the sand and marshes. Long forgotten now is that when engineers were brought out to approve transit on the new toll road, the planks had disappeared into the marsh between 5th and 6th Streets. It took driving piles over 100 feet into the marsh to finally stabilize the wooden byway. (This city's first public transit opened in 1852 along the plank road. The service was the Yellow Line's "omnibuses," an eighteen-passenger variant of the stagecoach, the subject of a future post.)

Walkers and horse riders finally had a reliable way through the relentlessly shifting sands, the ubiquitous marshes, and the deep mud that would plague the city during the rainy season. The extensive redesign of the local landscape was made possible in large part by the arrival of the "steam paddy" or steam shovel. It was used, along with early rail lines that were laid down, to level the hills and dump the sand, soil, rock and debris into the wetlands, marshes, and mudflats along the shorelines. 

Here you can see the Steam Paddy at work at 8th and Harrison in front of San Francisco's first sugar refinery, in the late 1850s, a place that is now relatively flat but was then still dominated by sand ridges.

Here is a photo, taken in the mid-1860s, that captures the sprawling sand of the original landscape.

This is the view westerly across Polk Gulch in the 1860s, but the original terrain is still largely intact.

After this vision of a bleak, sand-swept landscape, it's only appropriate that we remember too the profusion of wild flowers that also have been endemic to this landscape, especially now at the end of our rainy season. Go out and walk among our hilltops and remaining open spaces for a thrilling botanical experience. Such delight was familiar to our 19th and early 20th century predecessors too.

One of our most valuable accounts of the original landscape of San Francisco was provided by a German botanist and doctor who arrived in 1850, Hans Herman Behr. He spent time 40 years later in the 1890s writing his account of what he witnessed during those early tumultuous years, when he walked across the peninsula's dunes and took copious notes on what he discovered. Here he describes the dense botanical riches around 7th and Harrison, where Russ Gardens was established in the 1850s:

Near the formerly well-known Russ Gardens there were extensive marshes abounding especially about their borders in interesting plants. Here grew the large-flowered Cornus nuttallii (dogwood), the Menyanthes trifoliata (buckbean), Epipactis gigantea (stream orchid), the delightfully fragrant white-flowered Habenaria leucostachys (=Platanthera leucostachys, bog-orchid), and Eriophorum gracile (cotton grass). In the same vicinity I found in a single locality five specimens of Botrychium ternatum (=B. multifidum, leather grape-fern); and the Asplenium filix-femina (=Athyrium filix-femina var. cyclosorum, lady-fern), grew luxuriantly, often forming rootstocks two feet high, simulating tree ferns.

Another account from 1902 describes the stunning fields of wildflowers that filled the open lands stretching from the edge of urbanization to Lake Merced and beyond. Lillian E. Purdy wrote about walking through wildflower gardens at the city's edge:

The road into this natural garden of San Francisco, where nearly every species of our flora grows in reckless profusion, is found by taking the San Mateo [street]cars, which carry you out through Sunnyside and on the border of the valley of vegetable gardens. Finally, at Ocean View, you leave the cars behind you and, walking southward along the railroad track for about half a mile, you cut across the field toward the ocean. From this point a most picturesque view spreads out before you. In the foreground are variegated field patches of gold, blue, rich, deep red and cream blended almost into rainbow effect—and beyond the green-carpeted hills, Lake Merced and a bit of ocean.

When you have crossed into the very midst of this sea of flowers you find yourself surrounded by eschscholtzias (Eschscholzia californica), buttercups, wild pansies (Viola pedunculata), wild wallflowers (Erysimum franciscanum), baby-blue-eyes (Nemophila menziesii), mallow (Sidalcea malvaeflora), popcorn flowers (Plagiobothrys sp.) and numerous other varieties of California flora. The grass is fine, clean and beautiful, and, throwing yourself down to rest and enjoy, you feel that you are now in reality near to nature's heart. All these beautiful living things throb with life, glow with color and exhale their fragrance to the breeze. It is an exhilaration and a delight.

Native California flora on the dunes at North Baker Beach.

Wildflowers on Twin Peaks hint at what's been lost in the pellmell urbanization of the peninsula, but also highlight the great efforts of locals to retain and extend remnant native habitat.

The citywide Stand Against Sit Lie campaign Saturday March 27 was a big success by all accounts. The website claims over 100 events took place on San Francisco sidewalks, and over 1000 people participated. That doesn’t sound overwhelming at first glance, but if you recall that this began as a brainstorm in a bar just a couple of weeks ago, and relied heavily on Facebook and personal networking, it is an impressive beginning.

Mayor Gavin Newsom, Police Chief George Gascón, and the S.F. Chronicle suburban-values attack-dog C.W. Nevius have been drumming up an Astroturf grassroots effort to criminalize sitting on sidewalks. The focus has been the Haight-Ashbury, where there are actual homeowners who have been contributing their energy to this effort. The joke at our 24th and Shotwell sit-in was that these same upscale homeowners in the Haight have been trying for over 30 years to “clean up” Haight Street. They had an organization for a while in the 1980s called RAD (Residents Against Druggies) and you could reliably buy pot or acid by looking for them, and then seeking the cluster of dealers who trailed them around the neighborhood!

Anyway, these folks, egged on by the powers-that-be, are clamoring for a new law to give police carte blanche to evict anyone they want to from the neighborhood’s sidewalks. The proposed ordinance is drawn very broadly, allowing for police to accost anyone on any sidewalk in the city and fine them and, if there’s a second offense, have them jailed for 30 days. This is being promoted as a means to enhance public safety, despite the fact that there are already laws against blocking sidewalks and aggressive panhandling. It’s unclear what purpose this new ordinance is supposed to fulfill, other than a new tool of arbitrary power for the police to use against “undesirable” populations.

Our group gathered at 24th and Shotwell as part of the citywide effort to say no to this proposed law. My partner Adriana organized it as a Tea Party, matching similar efforts near Buena Vista Park and elsewhere. We also put out some mats and a beanbag toss game, along with cake and tea. You really can’t imagine how fun it is to connect with passersby and neighbors on a local sidewalk until you try it out. First the Palestinian store owner came out wondering why we were there. He loved our tea since it tasted like ‘Arab tea’!

Adriana and Wolf discuss public life.

Our first “guest” was Wolf, a longtime resident of the Mission, a self-acknowledged dope fiend who had done a couple of long stints in jail. His dark leathery skin confirmed his years of living on the street. His mother was a Mission district Italian and his father a Mexican from New Mexico, and he had the distinction of being an American who was deported from Mexico after six years in Guadalajara. He was quite the beanbag tosser too! A white homeless friend of Wolf’s asked, “Just tell me this. “Why can white people sit on tables in front of cafés without being harassed? I don’t cause any trouble here. I’m just enjoying the street too.”

Adriana invited Spanish speakers to stop for tea, while various friends slowly began to gather. I spoke for a while with a British visitor who was walking his host’s dog. He couldn’t believe anyone would want to curb street life, since that was so much of why he and others wanted to visit San Francisco. A young French woman appeared in overalls a few doors down, emerging from her new gardening effort in the backyard. I hailed her and invited her for tea, explaining what we were doing. She too was aghast at the notion that San Francisco would restrict life on the streets this way. Both of them were quick to emphasize that safe streets are crowded streets.

Beanbagging fun on Shotwell.

Of course, the unspoken argument of the Sit-Lie proponents is that there are normative behaviors that must be conformed to. It’s not a problem to be on the sidewalks as long as you’re moving along in the endless process of shopping. It’s stopping to engage in activities that are economically purposeless, that actually animate a public life, that create the serendipitous and unpredictable moments and connections that give city life its strong appeal—those are the activities that must be “curbed.” There are three acceptable reasons to be in public space: working, commuting, shopping. If you’re not doing those things, go home and watch TV. That’s the American Way of Life. Earlier in the week, Adriana asked a local beat cop his opinion about the Sit/Lie initiative. He responded that it was a terrible idea. “Just another way in which a community avoids dealing with a grave social issue by having police move undesired people out of sight. It doesn’t solve the problem.”

We spoke with several dozen people during the three hours we occupied the sidewalk. A couple of local DPW street workers hung out with us and had some cake, played some beanbag. Part of their job is to shoo street people along, so they were sympathetic to the opposition to the proposed law. Two neighborhood  homies, Little George and Rigo, spend a lot of time on the corner, and they were delighted that we were staking it out as public space. Elderly Latinas were quite supportive. One woman, Carmela, came up to us and became quite animated. She told a long story about losing her son —7 years of duty in the army followed by 17 years of duty as a postal worker—who died after being hit by a car. She had earlier lost her husband, a sibling and her parents, but the loss of her adult son sent her into a tailspin of despair. “The loss of a son is like no other loss.” She would go out to the street day after day, sitting on stoops and sidewalks. She imagined people thought she was insane, but she needed to walk, to sit in the sun, to be on the street to heal her pain. “You don’t know what pain people carry in their hearts, only they know. I went to the streets to carry mine.”

A posse of cyclists stopped by, including Sue King who is one of the coordinators of Sunday Streets. She complained that we were engaging in a somewhat misguided effort since the asphalt-covered streets (as opposed to the limited space of the sidewalks) were a huge common space that we should be working to re-purpose. Of course she’s right, but the deeper problem is that we’ve already been put on the defensive AGAIN. So much of what passes for “progressive” politics in San Francisco is actually opposing pro-privatization, pro-business, pro-police initiatives. A forward agenda of urban transformation, whether motivated by the Transition Town logic driven by peak oil and climate change, or just the desire to make us more self-reliant and resilient, remains absent from the political landscape. Local activists continually fall into the trap of calling for “jobs” without any discussion of what kind of work SHOULD be done. Demanding jobs in the absence of a broad agenda of ecological transformation based on mutual aid and a solidarity economy is to reinforce the logic that trapped us in the first place.

22nd and Valencia.

That’s the beauty of opening a public space, even for just a few hours. Across the city, dozens of conversations took place, new friendships were forged, and political networks that might go a lot further in the future started to find themselves. At 24th and Shotwell, we didn’t hear a negative word from anyone until we were wrapping it up. A half dozen young hipsters were entering the apartment building we had been sitting in front of. I asked them if they knew about the proposed ordinance. They hesitated, and then one said, “you know, I actually would support something like that. I’m sick of these guys out here at 4 a.m. drunk, puking, yelling at each other.” It was a telling moment. Here were 20-somethings who thought another law was somehow going to remove undesirable people from their sidewalk, as opposed to a well-resourced campaign of public housing and social services. I pointed out that there were already laws against public drunkenness and a young woman said, “we call the police but they don’t show up.” So, passing another law is going to change that?

Karaoke erupts at corner of Hill and Valencia.

San Franciscans, like residents of most big cities, are in a continuous process of reshaping public spaces. There are pilot programs for new ways to use Market Street, for pocket parks in areas covered with underutilized asphalt, for Sunday Streets closures, for opening sidewalks to “green sewers,” and even some tentative efforts to launch more public art and/or urban agriculture in empty lots. All of these experiments are welcome departures from the long-simmering biases favoring the total unquestioned domination of private automobiles over public space.

Behind most of the experiments are deeper ideas of an improved life, what some people are quick to dismiss as “utopian.” The anti-utopians apparently consider change impractical or threatening, or have accepted the close-minded meme of the past few decades that any kind of “social engineering,” or public planning to improve human interaction, is inherently totalitarian. This mentality is rooted in a presumption that the way things are is always good enough, or that even if they aren’t, humans are so inherently corrupt or power-mad that any effort to improve things can only make it worse. The dark chapters of mid-20th century totalitarianism (now being regularly conflated to the present by Murdoch’s pompous blowhards) are somehow supposed to be examples of why trying to make life better is impossible. The American Way of Life, with all its poverty, racism, militaristic imperialism, shallow materialism, et al, is somehow the best we can hope for, and anyone who doesn’t accept that at face value is at best a dupe of some future dictator.

For those of us concerned with transit planning, or urban planning more broadly, this politico-cultural baggage comes with the territory. It shapes the discussion before it starts, and so a lot of folks have learned to think small, so as not to fan the flames of fear.

Paul and Percival Goodman series of plans for cities presented in their 1947 book "Communitas" propose a libertarian-yet-socialistic urbanism, focused on both efficiency and individual choice. "The Community with the Elimination of the Difference Between Production and Consumption" presents a hexagon-shaped plan with multi-use residential, commercial, public and industrial sector in the city center, surrounded by a ring of "diversified farms." From "49 Cities" exhibit at SPUR.

The center of this city is highly dense and irregular. The proximity of the urban core to the farms and countryside allows for easy access from one to the other, and the farms are valued for their educational and aesthetic value in addition to their productive use.

Curiously, SPUR is hosting an exhibit right now called “49 Cities” in which a variety of utopian urban plans are revisited, from the works of Le Corbusier to Owenite cooperative colonies, to Levittown and Brasilia, and even a Buckminster Fuller plan to put a giant Dome over midtown Manhattan. One curiosity of the exhibit is its organization of a “Fear Timeline” which plots various utopian urban visions over a four-century long timeline. Clustered largely in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, most of the visions were concocted to address the dominant “fears” of their era, whether it be military invasion by a foreign army, securing internal security against uprising masses, ensuring access to water or food, controlling disease, etc.

Given the overarching theme of utopia, I expected the exhibit to be more inspiring than it is. The authors of this study have chosen to flatten out the particularities of human culture, political movements, passion and visionary excitement, to instead present the studies as composites of specific statistical comparisons. The end result is a series of odd two-dimensional diagrams (like the one above) which allow plans from across time and space to be compared on total land areas, total housing, distribution of land-uses, population, green spaces in its variations, water use, etc.

Almost as an antidote to this numbing exhibit, Matt Hern came to town recently and gave a few talks. I caught him at the Studio for Urban Projects, an exciting new venue in the Mission on 17th Street near Guerrero. Hern is from Vancouver and has a new book out called Common Ground in a Liquid City: Essays in Defense of an Urban Future. I haven’t had a chance to read it all yet, but his presentation was quite a refreshing alternative to the kind of dry, bureaucratic approaches to which most urban planners tend to succumb. Hern is a fully accredited Urban Studies Ph.D., but standing in front of us in a white t-shirt and jeans, his head shaved, talking about planting community gardens in his East Vancouver neighborhood, and defending the right of the local junkies to hang out in the neighborhood park, he came across as the neighbor you wish you had. (He has small children too, and still says he’d rather have the drug dealing going on in the open in the middle of the park than being busted and pushed into the alleys and doorways of the surrounding neighborhood. That way he can see it and work around it.)

His book refers back to Vancouver, but it’s written from a number of other locales around the world. He has chapters from Thessaloniki, Greece, Istanbul, Turkey, New York City, Diyarbakir, Kurdistan, Portland, Oregon, and others. He explained to us that however you think about your own city, once you go elsewhere, it always develops in interesting ways. The comparisons one can make when far from home are often surprising. Suddenly you notice a sensible bus shelter, or an open streetside marketplace, and realize that an analogous locale in your home city could learn a lot from this new perspective.

Hern is concerned with gentrification, like most of us that live in cities that are rapidly evicting long-time populations of poor and working class people. San Francisco is a quintessential example of this process. Here in the Mission where I live, the process of turning into a mini-Greenwich Village proceeds unabated. You wouldn’t know there’s an economic crisis going on here by glancing in to the many new, crowded, upscale restaurants.

As Hern says:

The market puts us in Faustian bargain: almost any attempts to beautify, improve, develop, or embolden a community inevitably means it will price its most vulnerable/valuable citizens out and undermine all that good work. Capitalism values selfishness and self-interest above all. Progressive planning and social policy try to mitigate this, but are always behind the curve and at a pronounced disadvantage… Cities CAN do something other than smooth the way for capital and/or clean up its messes. It is possible to articulate and develop genuinely democratic and inclusive strategies that are not self-defeating, that don’t reduce “community” to a commodity. There have to be ways to imagine sustainable community development that doesn’t price people out. I think we can carve huge areas out of this economy for non-market life.

I agree. The specific remedy for the housing crisis that is pricing ever more people out of life in San Francisco is the limited equity co-op based on a land trust. We have functioning co-ops here in town, the most forward looking being the San Francisco Community Land Trust. They’ve already managed to acquire one building on Columbus in North Beach where the former elderly Chinese tenants are now owners, paying only slightly more than they used to pay in rent. Removing properties from the market in perpetuity should be the goal of an aggressive social capital fund under democratic public control -- not to make a revolution, but to start the process of wresting our lives from the vicissitudes of raw capitalism when it comes to home, community, and shelter.

Housing is only a small but important part of this larger agenda of radical change. To make San Francisco a city that connects with the needs of its residents requires a very different political structure and very different forms of power to emerge, ones that will allow for a wholly new kind of public planning to take place. The kind of transition to a low-energy, low-water, high quality-of-life future that we must begin to make will depend on a great deal of mutual aid and solidarity. Instead of building infrastructure that could facilitate a more robust common life, this city’s mayors have consistently put the interests of wealthy property owners and large corporations ahead of its working and middle class residents. The quasi-progressive majority on the Board of Supervisors since 2000 has done little to reverse this deep bias in city politics.

Utopian thinking is the only realistic way forward at this point. Leaving our fate in the hands of PG&E, Bechtel, Chevron, and the rest of that lot is to ensure our inability to face a future fraught with radical change.

Matt Hern sums it up nicely:

An ecological and an ethical city is one and the same thing—we can’t have a “green” city without reimagining our social institutions. And that can’t be made to happen by relying on politicians or planners or developers. They can’t lead, they have to get out of the way and allow the neighborhoods, communities, public spaces, and common spaces that make a great city to become the ongoing expression of a constant series of choices made by everyday citizens.

Fighting for our common spaces, our right to what we already DO have, is underway. This Saturday, March 27, from 10-5 all over town, take to the sidewalks. Sidewalks are for people! Use them! Many of us will gather at Castro and Market at 4 pm to dramatize our opposition to a mayor and police chief (and their political supporters) bent on destroying the fabric of San Francisco. Check it out online at www.standagainstsitlie.org.

As San Francisco moves closer to a decision on a new sit-lie ordinance that proponents say would facilitate the SFPD's clearing of unsavory elements off of sidewalks in neighborhoods like the Haight, resistance is building, and several organizers have called for a day of sidewalk action on Saturday March 27, from 10 am to 5 pm. I sat down recently with Nate Miller, one of the people who decided that they weren’t going to watch the City succumb to yet another pandering campaign of fear mongering without standing up to say no.

The sit-lie campaign has been orchestrated from behind the scenes for the past few months, trying to appear as a spontaneous grassroots effort by residents of the Haight-Ashbury. But as Miller tells it, there is strong evidence of coordination between “grassroots activists,” the Chronicle’s resident suburban attack dog C.W. Nevius, Mayor Newsom and Chief of Police Gascon. Together, they are using the decades-long presence of impoverished and annoying “gutter punks” on Haight Street to push a law criminalizing anyone who is sitting or lying on a sidewalk anywhere in San Francisco. Gabriel Haaland wrote an intelligent editorial in last week's Bay Guardian calling for a new approach to actual conflicts (greatly exaggerated in this case), rather than expanding the definition of so-called criminal behavior.

Here’s Nate in his own words: 

I grew up in San Francisco and lived here my whole life. For the past few months the Chronicle has been publishing really inflammatory articles talking about “thugs and bullies” in the Haight who are making it a living hell for residents, shoppers, and business people to exist there. The police have been talking about how this is a grassroots effort of the neighborhood, but the timing shows that is false. First the Chronicle starts drumming up all this stuff. Then they have the Mayor walk down the street when he’s supposedly undecided about this. He walks down the street with his baby, and supposedly sees a man sitting on the sidewalk smoking crack. Obviously it’s already illegal to smoke crack (and you can do it standing up!). He uses this to announce that we need to make it illegal to have people sitting on the sidewalk. Two days later he introduces legislation to the Board of Supervisors, already vetted by the City Attorney. He proposes two separate pieces of legislation. If you do anything in politics, you know that’s impossible [to get this done so quickly]. The Mayor must have been working on this since a long time ago.

The same day the Chamber of Commerce/Committee on Jobs does a poll that they claim shows there’s 71% support for a law outlawing sitting on the sidewalks. The question that they asked was not simply if you support a law that will make it illegal to sit or lie down on a sidewalk. It asked if you support a law that would arrest people who were harassing you. I’d support a law like that! I don’t want to be harassed. There are already laws against that. There’re laws against aggressive panhandling, against panhandling, against blocking the sidewalk, against smoking crack.

They say this is “a tool.” Supposedly “the police will use their discretion to use it appropriately.” Public Defender Jeff Adachi pointed out in a hearing that there were a lot of people that could be subjected to this law—tourists sitting on their luggage, students sitting on a sidewalk, homeless people—and all these people would be subject to $100 fine the first time, while repeat offenders could do 30 days in jail. The Chronicle’s Nevius said “that’s ridiculous, the cops would never arrest a tourist for sitting on their bag,” but the law states that it would be illegal to do that.

The argument made by Nevius and other Sit-Lie Law supporters is that the police can be trusted to implement this sweeping legal mandate in a reasonable manner. But the law defines a normal behavior, sitting on a sidewalk, as a crime!

Here’s Nate again:

Obviously the law will be used against the most vulnerable people. It’s a biological fact that some time during the day you’re going to need to rest. If you don’t have a home to do that in and you’re homeless you’ll have to sit on the sidewalk. I like sitting on the sidewalk! I just went to Vietnam and Cambodia to experience the vibrant, amazing things that go on in the streets. People are out there all day and it’s just a much better feeling. I feel a lot safer with a lot of people on the streets.

I think it’s a two-pronged approach. One is to scare people when they’re on Haight Street—just go shopping, minimize engagement with other people … (forget about people watching or anything else). This is also a serious effort by the Chamber of Commerce and conservative politicians to create a wedge issue for the November elections. That’s already playing out. You see people like Scott Weiner who is running for Supervisor in the Castro campaigning by saying “I support Sit and Lie because I care about public safety.” He can now run, playing to people’s fears that have been created by the Chronicle through all this fabrication, and make them feel safe.

There’s a lot of routes you can go besides this idea of “pre-crime,” that you can just make totally normal behavior illegal and then give the cops the discretion to punish people based on how they look or anything. Because if they’re not doing anything else illegal you are just arresting someone for sitting on the ground.

A few other people started talking about the broader implications of this law, that it is going to make it illegal to sit anywhere on the sidewalk. The first response was a very defensive one: hey, we’re under attack. But then we started talking about what we could do with this. What kind of conversations can we have?

Dangerous use of public space! Let's do it! (Photo: Kurt Bank)

Public space is important. On one hand there’s all these greening initiatives going on, but at the same time we’re trying to make it illegal to exist in public space, setting a really horrible precedent. We thought about Park(ing) Days, where people voluntarily occupy parking places and make them parks for a day, and people really enjoy it. We thought, why don’t we bring that on to the sidewalks for a day? We need to be encouraging more people to enjoy public space, to talk to each other, enjoying our vibrant and exciting city. Through talking about that we decided we were going to reach out to people who were interested in that. The basic idea is that anyone can bring out a table, or lawn chairs, or a mat, and do whatever you want, because it’s completely normal.

Bring yourselves and anything you like out to the street, and just relax. You can do whatever you want, argue with your family, party with your friends, make coffee for people. Some people are reclaiming the tea party idea and having a huge tea party. There’s going to be all kinds of fun things for people to go and see and engage with. We want people to contact us through the website we’re developing, or FB or email. Send us a location, a street corner where you will be situated. What time you’re going to be there, and a couple of sentences about what you think you’ll be doing. Afterward, we’re asking everyone to document it with a photo or a video, even a cellphone picture, and send it back to us. We’re creating a Google Map and hopefully there will be dozens or hundreds of locations where people were doing things. It will be a lot more cohesive after that.

Later on Saturday, March 27, everyone is going to Market and Castro to the new plaza there. By going there we want to connect to a bit of local history. In the 1970s Castro, they passed a similar law to target hippies that were laying around smoking pot or staring at the wall on acid or whatever, but what they really used it for was to target gay men who were flocking to the city to see this exciting new scene that was growing. There was this group called the Castro 14, guys who got put in jail for sitting on the streets. Harvey Milk was a huge opponent of this, and it eventually got repealed after he died because it was totally ridiculous and unfair and it was destroying part of the culture of the Castro.

It’s important that people contact us because we want to provide them with some basic infrastructure to make it a bit more focus and pointed. It’s unusual to do this kind of street activism when something is just being voted on at the Board of Supervisors. It’s going to go on the ballot this November regardless of how it’s voted on by the Board. We have this problem with Ross Mirikarimi and David Chiu who are basically bending to political pressure. They haven’t committed either way, but we’re going to send documents to everyone who contacts us with fact sheets and contact information to organize our opposition. Write us at info@standagainstsitlie.org and you’ll be getting good information, not spam, from us.

Another activity on the way to criminalization? (Photo: Kurt Bank)