Using the new credit-card enabled parking meters. Photo: SFMTA

The central principle of San Francisco’s cutting-edge parking management program, SFPark, comes right from Econ 101. If there are more people looking for parking than there are parking spaces (i.e. demand is greater than supply) adjust the price of parking until there is enough turnover on a given street, or roughly one free parking space per block. Sounds simple in theory, right?

On the other hand, implementing the principle in real-world conditions at over 6,000 curbside parking spaces and 11,500 off-street spaces in city-owned garages is very complicated. The federal government, which has paid for most of the program with approximately $20 million in grants, wants proof that San Francisco can meet its stated goals of reducing traffic and speeding up transit with smart parking management. That will require copious data and extensive analysis.

Most importantly for parking managers at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), they want the public to like it. If a driver doesn’t get to a parking space quickly, thus reducing the cruising for spaces that generates up to 40 percent of local traffic in some cities, then the program won’t deliver on its goal. Similarly if drivers aren’t happy with the convenience of the new meters or other payment options, like pay-by-phone.

Jay Primus, SFPark’s manager, understands the significance of his work and has been spending most of his waking hours for the last three years at work or conducting outreach with businesses, politicians and community groups.

As I sat down recently with Primus in his windowless office on the top floor of the SFMTA building at 1 South Van Ness Avenue, I was impressed with the impeccable order he kept. Two rows of more than twenty manila envelopes were lined neatly on a table near his desk, each representing a different part of the project, from a folder bearing the name of the communications consultants he hired, to another for grant obligation deadlines to the US Department of Transportation.

Several enormous maps of San Francisco and the SFPark areas adorned his office walls. One map, approximately 5 feet by 5 feet, showed every publicly available parking space in San Francisco and represented the first census of parking spaces conducted in any city in the world. On another wall, Primus had a scrolling work-flow plan tacked right above a cover story in the tabloid San Francisco Examiner with the inflammatory headline, “Parking Privileges to Be Revoked!”

Primus, a tall man with a studious mien and a quiet voice, worked as a transportation planner for a private firm before joining the SFMTA in 2007 to direct SFPark. He measures most of his words carefully, often stopping mid-sentence to replace technical jargon with more pedestrian language.

Primus tells me the public’s reaction to the new meters that accept credit cards has been “largely positive.” He acknowledges that some have complained that the meters are not easy to read at night, but he says increasing the back-lighting uses more power and shortens battery life.

In addition to the information the SFMTA will gather from the new parking meters about how people choose to pay and how long they pay, the agency has installed occupancy sensors in the pavement in SFPark areas that provide real-time information on how long cars are parking at spaces. When I ask him about the information the agency is already collecting, his eyes light up. “One of the most exciting things about SFpark is the fabulous, unprecedented data set,” he said. “I do believe it’s the first of its kind.”

The Unprecedented Data Set

Primus and his team will cross-reference those parking data from the meters and sensors with citation data; travel demand data from regional and city roadway sensors; transit boardings from BART and Muni; parking tax and sales tax returns; collision statistics from the SFPD and the state; manual data collection such as driver intercept surveys, parking search time surveys, double parking counts, disabled placard use, occupancy information in residential neighborhoods adjacent to SFPark areas; and exogenous statistics like the cost of gasoline, the unemployment rate, the consumer price index and hourly precipitation.

Comparing parking data to transit boardings on Muni is not trivial, Primus explains, because he will have to demonstrate the effect smarter parking management has on transit travel time and transit delays. If there are open spaces at the curb, in theory there should less double-parking and fewer delays to buses. Measuring parking and sales tax returns or gas prices should let the SFMTA know how much of the reduction in traffic is due to SFPark and how much is due to larger economic patterns. He even hopes to show that better parking management reduces traffic collisions and increases safety as drivers cruise less for an elusive space.

The obvious implication about the status quo in San Francisco and every other city that doesn’t collect this information is that policy makers know embarrassingly little about how the standards, prices and regulations they put on parking actually effect traffic, the way people park, or even how people feel about parking (and in civic life, parking is almost as emotive an issue as the crime rate).

Donald Shoup, the UCLA economics professor and author of The High Cost of Free Parking, whose work is the theoretical underpinning of SFPark, has a favorite adage that he quoted to Streetsblog when critiquing how parking policies are currently set nearly everywhere: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.”

SFPark should give San Francisco managers an unparalleled road map whereby they can make educated policy decisions and they can measure the impact those have in real-time.

Improving the Public Perception of Parking

“We’ve done a lot of outreach with SFPark and have talked to a lot of community groups,” said Primus. “People we talk to are sometimes skeptical about the SFMTA’s intentions, that somehow SFPark is meant to gouge drivers for additional parking revenue. That’s just not the case.”

He is actually optimistic the program will become popular with drivers, for numerous reasons. “We hope to earn people’s trust that SFMTA’s parking management can help achieve our goals for the city,” he said.

Click to enlarge this image of the SFPark iPhone App, which will be available soon in the iTunes Store. Image: SFMTA

In addition to the convenience of paying at the meter with credit cards and extending meter limits up to four hours in certain areas, when the SFMTA officially launches the program later this spring, it will provide a map with real-time occupancy and price rates at every meter and parking garage in SFPark. The SFMTA will also release an iPhone app at the launch, with other app formats to follow.

The maps will color-code blocks, with dark blue indicating there are available parking spaces, light blue showing fewer spaces, and red suggesting drivers park elsewhere. Each public garage in the program will be indicated with a large P icon and will be represented with the same color scheme.

Just as drivers look at real-time traffic information on Google Maps, for instance, Primus imagines drivers will check for parking availability at their destination even before they get in the car. What about those drivers who would check their phones while driving? Primus explains that the app uses the phone’s GPS and has an automatic warning if it detects the phone is moving faster than 10 miles per hour. This feature, said Primus, will “remind people that it is illegal to use a cell phone while driving.”

The map and the mobile app will also display pricing information in various shades of green (“for money,” said Primus), with details on parking rates by hour and by location at the tip or one’s fingertips. All real-time data will be made available on an open API for third-party developers as well.

One thing the SFMTA won’t do is give availability by individual parking space, though they have that specificity internally. “We don’t’ want people to race to get to a space or fight over spaces they feel ownership of,” said Primus.

Perhaps the most important part of improving the convenience of parking with SFPark is an option to pay by phone at meters and garages throughout the city. Though the service won’t be activated until later this year, and still needs SFMTA board of directors approval, Primus said they intend to offer the pay-by-phone service at every one of the nearly 27,000 meters citywide.

This would allow anyone who has signed up with a credit card to pay for parking through their phones, to get updates automatically to their phone when time is running out, and to pay for more parking with the touch of a button, so long as they aren’t exceeding time limits. No more leaving a restaurant or a business meeting to feed the meter, said Primus. A similar service is already operational in over 100 cities throughout North America and Europe.

Long-Term Impacts of the Trial

By law, the SFPark meter rates will only change once a month at the most, so drivers shouldn’t expect a price shock. Nor will the rates likely change that dramatically, according to Primus. In some cases, where there are many vacant spaces in an area, the meter rates could come down.

No one will know how it all works before the trial starts, but the SFMTA expects to gain efficiencies in meter maintenance and enforcement. As Primus noted, the meters will instantly communicate with his database when they go out of service, so meter technicians won’t have to guess or do broad sweeps to find malfunctioning meters.

Enforcement will be much more precise as well, though Primus doesn’t expect to see ticket blitzes. Rather, he argued, with longer time limits and easier ways to pay, such as pay-by-phone, he thinks PCOs will write fewer tickets for meter violations. “We want PCOs to have more time available to enforce other issues, such as double parking, sidewalk parking or driveway parking, issues that effect transportation, quality of life and access more generally,” he said.

In fact, Primus expects meter-related citations to drop significantly as people find it easier to pay. Rather than the current “punitive” ratio of $34 million in meter revenue and $30 million in meter-related fine revenue each year, Primus hopes to see most of the revenue coming from proper payment. “People pay for parking one way or another, either at the meter or with parking tickets. For everyone’s benefit we want everyone to pay at the meter to reduce the number of parking-related tickets we have to give,” he said.

Donald Shoup didn’t mask his excitement about the impending start of SFPark, which he characterized as the most significant example of parking reform to come in the six years since he published his 750 page epic (the book has been so popular it will be released in paperback later this year). Shoup said “academics are just drooling about all this data” and he predicted legions of PhD dissertations to result from SFPark.

Most importantly for cities, though, he hoped to see a direct relationship in the data between parking and economic activity. Good parking management “can make the whole transportation system perform better because there is less cruising and it will make the whole economy perform better,” he said. “If this relationship appears in the data, it will show people this is a very powerful tool for economic development in cities.”

Photo: Myleen Hollero/Orange Photography

The California Department of Insurance has approved a pay-as-you-drive insurance program encouraged by environmental advocates and transportation planners because it provides an incentive to drive less by reducing premiums for low-mileage drivers. Widespread adoption of similar insurance policies could reduce driving in the U.S. by as much as eight percent, according to a Brookings Institution study.

“The voluntary pay-as-you-drive initiative is an innovative program that will allow insurers to offer plans based on more accurate mileage, so that people who choose to drive less will pay less for auto insurance,” California Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner said recently when he announced the program with the participation of State Farm Insurance and the Automobile Club of Southern California.

Though other insurance companies, notably Progressive Insurance, have experimented with pay-as-you-drive policies, because of the large number of drivers in California and the scale of the program, it could have national significance.

State Farm — the state’s largest automobile insurance company with 3.3 million policy holders and premiums of $2.5 billion — had previously required mileage to be self-reported by customers, who then got a small discount if they drove less than 7,500 miles in a year. Starting in late February, State Farm will offer an initial 5 percent discount for the first policy term to drivers who opt-in to the Drive Safe and Save program and agree to self-report their odometer readings at the beginning and end of each policy period. Policy holders with an active On Star system, which comes with many vehicles made by General Motors, can agree to allow State Farm to access their mileage data automatically.

Customers who opt-in under the program will have their policies adjusted based on 500-mile segments up to 19,000 miles per year. For those who rarely drive, State Farm expects their premiums will be reduced by up to 45 percent. Assuming State Farm achieves its target of convincing one quarter of its policy holders to switch to pay-as-you-drive, the resulting savings would be $31 million a year.

“From our perspective it’s an opportunity to help our customer have more options when pricing their policy,” said Sevag Sarkissian, a spokesperson for State Farm. “An exciting positive that goes along with this is the potential impact this has on the environment.”

State Farm and OnStar partnered in 2009 for a small pilot in Ohio, though both companies believe Californians will embrace the program in large numbers, given the state’s reputation for environmental advocacy.

“Both OnStar and State Farm are trying to be leaders. We’re trying to work with California consumers to get lower rates,” said Mark DuBois, manager of strategic alliances at OnStar. DuBois said the program is primarily about saving drivers money, but he noted the incentive to drive less would help the environment. “We’re all trying to look at how to make green initiatives and look at ways to reduce that carbon footprint. We look at it as a potential to change consumer behavior.”

The environmental impact would be substantial, as the Brookings Institution study noted. If every driver in the state switched to pay-as-you-drive, the eight percent reduction in driving would translate to 24 billion fewer miles driven, 1.2 billion fewer gallons of gasoline and a seven to nine percent reduction in carbon dioxide.

According to a Victoria Transport Policy Institute study, widespread adoption of pay-as-you-drive would also reduce traffic crashes, lowering medical bills and saving lives. “Mileage reductions reduce traffic density (vehicles per lane-mile), which reduces crash rates,” the study noted.

Another potential benefit of the program is the gradual public acceptance of reporting vehicle miles traveled (VMT). For Robert Atkinson, President of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and former chair of the National Commission on Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing at the U.S. Department of Transportation, this could make it easier to transition to a distance-based VMT tax to pay for roads.

This is particularly important as cars get increasingly better mileage and the gas tax now pays for barely half the cost of highways. Given that raising the gas-tax has been a political third rail, a shift to another funding mechanism will be crucial to pay for infrastructure, according to Atkinson.

“People will get marginally used to the notion of paying by the mile. Then it’s less of a big emotional or intellectual shift,” said Atkinson about moving to a distance-based tax.

“If it works in California, then they talk about it elsewhere. Eventually these innovations will permeate to other states,” he said.

Image: Make BART Trains Run 24 Hours Facebook page

Anyone who has tried to go out on Friday or Saturday night to a concert or a show across the Bay from where they live understands the challenge posed by BART’s relatively early closing hours. Some people try to find a couch to sleep on, some don’t go out as long as they’d like or find themselves rushing to get that 12:15 am train. Still others choose to drive, and if the late-night swerving traffic on the Bay Bridge is any measure, some of them are partially intoxicated.

On the other hand, BART runs trains as long or longer than many systems in the world, with the notable exception of New York City’s subways. The few hours each night that BART isn’t operational provide maintenance staff with invaluable time to do the necessary service on facilities to keep the agency’s excellent safety record in place. If there were fewer hours for fixing the system, the conventional wisdom goes, breakdowns and mechanical problems would compromise service and safety.

BART’s new board president Bob Franklin announced today that he would like to revisit that conventional wisdom and have a public discussion about whether the system could run later on weekends without hurting performance. Franklin, who was elected today to serve a one-year term as president of the board, enumerated his many priorities and said the agency hadn’t seriously examined its service hours policy since it started running 4 am trains following the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989.

“I’m sure people are driving when they shouldn’t be because there isn’t a fast, reliable transit option open late,” Franklin told Streetsblog. He also noted that he gets questions from the public all the time, asking why trains can’t run longer hours. Franklin said the Facebook group “Make BART Trains Run 24 Hours” has over 22,000 fans, though he acknowledged it would be impossible to run trains around the clock and keep the system safe.

One solution, according to Franklin, would be to see if the agency could move the 4 am start time on weekdays to 5 am, applying the extra operating hour from that change to either or both nights on the weekend. He also wanted to see if the agency would consider not running certain late night trains to the terminus stations, if that would improve the feasibility of the concept.

“The only way we could potentially explore that is if we were to start later,” he said, though he admitted pushing the starting time back will impact a different set of riders in the morning.

According to Franklin, there are 2400 people getting on and off BART during 4-5 am hour on weekdays, many of them going from further flung stations to the Financial District to coincide with the opening of the New York stock market (compare that with 78,000 at the 7-8 am peak hour, he said)

“[Our opening hour is] an outlier of the transit industry,” he said.

BART hasn’t done a rigorous study on changing operating times in several decades, but they will convene a meeting of staff and board members to discuss the matter further, said BART spokesperson Linton Johnson.

Johnson reiterated Franklin’s assumption that the early morning riders were primarily financial sector workers, who he noted are some of BART’s most loyal riders.

“There’s no question there are lots of people who would love to see all-night BART, me included, but as somebody who works for the agency, I know why we don’t have it,” said Johnson. As for the shift in early morning trains, Johnson said, “It would jeopardize our bread and butter commuters. We have to get our commuters to work so that they can be at work when the New York Stock Exchange opens.”

Johnson also noted a list of other complications for changing the start and end times, including maintenance schedules, coordination with Muni to staff shared San Francisco stations for longer hours, changes to connecting bus service, union contracts and whether the late-night ridership numbers would compensate for the early morning loss.

Johnson also questioned the early morning numbers Franklin provided to Streetsblog, suggesting that they don’t capture all the people who benefit from the early service.

Both Franklin and Johnson agreed that much more data is needed and the planning meetings will help resolve some of the outstanding questions.

For Franklin, there is value just in the process of debating the merits of the schedule in a public format.

“I’d like to see if we can make some minor changes,” he said. “If we can, I think it will be a winner for BART. If we can’t, I think it will be an opportunity to explain to the public why not.”

Photos: Matthew Roth

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) announced today that it has installed the 100th new transit shelter, representing a new aesthetic for one of the more iconic pieces of street furniture in the city.

The shelters began on a trial basis in May 2009 when Mayor Gavin Newsom showcased a solar-powered shelter on Geary and Arguello Boulevards in the Richmond. The shelters feature a new wave pattern on the roof meant to reflect both the hills of the city and the Golden Gate Bridge, according to designer Olle Lundberg of Lundberg Design.

The installations follow a two-year process to develop, design and fabricate the new shelters, which were created with the SFMTA’s transit shelter advertising and maintenance contractor, Clear Channel Outdoor.

The contract with Clear Channel requires the company to provide the new shelters and replace the existing 1,100 shelters no later than the end of 2013, in exchange for the majority of advertising rights. The SFMTA will get some of the revenue, which the agency expects to top $300 million over the 20-year term of the contract.

“San Francisco has a strong history of environmental sustainability and we pride ourselves on being a city of inclusion,” Mayor Gavin Newsom said in a statement. “The new Muni shelters reflect those values and will make getting around this beautiful city easier and greener.”

The roof of the solar-enabled shelter at Arguello and Geary

The original shelter pioneered a polycarbonate roof structure designed by 3form Materials Solutions, with photovoltaic laminates by Konarka Power Plastic.  According to the SFMTA, the new shelters feature steel with high-recycled content as well as energy-efficient light-emitting diodes. For comparison, the florescent lights in the current shelters use 336 watts, while the new LED panels use only 74.4 watts. Though none of the other 99 shelters has been outfitted with the solar laminate, SFMTA spokesperson Paul Rose said the agency was working with Pacific Gas and Electric to install solar capability on shelters where appropriate.

Rose said the installation has been prioritized in areas of where Muni has heavy passenger traffic, particularly downtown. The shelters also provide better information for the riding public, with two maps and a large space for transit information. As NextMuni signs become available, each shelter that has a usable power source will have both the NextMuni display as well as the accompanying Push-to-Talk system to read the NextMuni information for those who are visually impaired.

“Over the past several months, it’s been exciting to see more and more of these smart new shelters in place,” said SFMTA CEO Nat Ford. “These are shelters that provide more information for our customers and better accessibility. The use of environmentally sustainable features such as photovoltaics and LEDs, where feasible, ensure that their contribution goes beyond assisting our customers to benefiting the entire City.”

Flickr photo: Michaelangelo van Dam

The study analyzing numerous options for congestion pricing in San Francisco touched off such a political furor in San Mateo County, you’d have thought San Francisco was about to moat up and charge a fee for admission. Politicians and planners from Daly City and San Mateo spoke about the plan today as though they were jilted lovers getting a mandate from the beautiful city to their north without being allowed to get a word in edgewise.

“It hasn’t been a conversation with San Mateo County, it has been a monologue with San Mateo County,” said State Assemblymember Jerry Hill, who testified with numerous San Mateo officials at the board meeting of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority (SFCTA), which conducted the study. Hill said he and others from San Mateo County were supportive of efforts to reduce congestion and deal with climate impacts, but not if it included charging drivers to cross the county line.

In case San Francisco didn’t move affirmatively to drop the Southern Gateway option from the study, said Hill, he was prepared to introduce legislation that would make it illegal for one county charge other counties “punitive measures” like pricing.

“I am a professional supporter of appropriate congestion pricing,” said Richard Napier, executive director of the City/County Association of Governments of San Mateo County (C/CAG). But Napier warned that congestion pricing worked in cities like London and Stockholm because the charging areas were dense and transit was good, much like the northeast portion of San Francisco. Of the southern gateway option, Napier said, “I don’t think it would meet the criteria” for significantly reducing traffic.

Following San Francisco Supervisor Sean Elsbernd’s lead, the Board of Supervisors, in their capacity as SFCTA directors, voted 9-2 to strip the San Mateo option from the study. The board then voted 8-3 to give the SFCTA staff permission to seek federal funding to continue studying the two Northeast Cordon options and to enter into environmental review. SFCTA executive director Jose Luis Moscovich explained to Streetsblog that he would submit a grant for up to $2 million in federal funding for the next phase of the study, at which point the city would be expected to match with about $400,000 in local funds.

The two remaining pricing options would establish a London-style cordon that would use FasTrak and camera technology to charge drivers during peak periods for crossing into the zone, which would be bordered by 18th Street to the south, Guerrero/Laguna Street to the west and the Bay to the north and east.

One of the cordon scenarios would charge $3 (with a maximum of $6 daily) from 6-9 am and from 3-7 pm, raising an estimated $80 million net for transit and non-driving mobility options like bicycling and pedestrian improvements. This option would also reduce traffic up to 12 percent, emissions up to 16 percent, and would be expected to improve transit times by up to 20 percent.

The other cordon fee proposal would target the driving commuter by charging $6 for trips leaving the northeast cordon from 3-7 p.m. in the outbound direction only, an option studied after evening business interests worried the charge would discourage downtown visitors for dinner and shows. This would raise $70 million annually for transit and would have fewer traffic and emissions reductions benefits than the morning and evening scenario.

Michaela Alioto-Pier, Carmen Chu, and Bevan Dufty, the three dissenting supervisors who voted against even studying pricing further, all said the current economic situation made them reluctant to add a further fee for driving into certain parts of the city. Chu noted the city has numerous other options for pricing, including better parking management, such as the SFPark trial and other scenarios.

Alioto-Pier was particularly insistent in her opposition to the study, saying until the ramification of the new fee and tax measure Proposition 26 was clearer, she didn’t think the city should move ahead with spending money on something that might never pass.

She also said the impact to small businesses would be too great to bear and that the current study didn’t demonstrate those impacts sufficiently. Of the southern gateway, she said the lack of regional support was disconcerting and that pricing sent the wrong signal to people outside the zone. “To me it looks like a fee to enter San Francisco,” she said.

After the vote, SFCTA chair Ross Mirkarimi lauded his fellow directors for the decision, though he said he wasn’t surprised by the outcome. “This is the natural course of how a conversation and a potential study would unfold. I’m not surprised,” he said. “We have been effective in stimulating the larger discussion.”

Moscovich pledged to do significant work to demonstrate the impacts pricing would have on small businesses and said the SFCTA has about one month to submit its application to the federal government. As to whether or not the city would eventually adopt pricing to meet greenhouse gas reduction targets, he responded affirmatively.

“I think it’s inescapable. We don’t’ have that many strategies, we’ve already done everything else,” said Moscovich. “We already are a large transit-oriented development, this city. We’re already putting people next to their jobs. The next frontier is pricing.”

San Francisco traffic planners will study congestion pricing further, following the vote of approval today by the Board of Supervisors in their capacity as directors of the SFCTA. The action puts the debate to bed for a couple more years, but expect the turmoil to begin anew when the SFCTA completes the required environmental review and the region debates the merits of pricing driving in congested areas. KALW asked me to be on Crosscurrents to discuss the issue further. You can listen here.

Photo: Myleen Hollero/Orange Photography

Two and a half years ago, I was hired by Aaron Naparstek, then Editor-in-Chief of Streetsblog and its affiliates, to interview regional transportation advocates and professionals and write a prospectus gauging the market for starting a Streetsblog in San Francisco. I’m sure you can figure out what the verdict was in the paper I presented to him.

With start-up grants from a local entrepreneur and several foundations, Streetsblog San Francisco launched in January, 2009, and quickly became the most important source of reporting on sustainable transportation and livable cities issues in the Bay Area, filling a void that traditional media outlets mostly ignored.

Aaron hired our wonderful editor Bryan Goebel and had a small dividend of funding left over. He asked me if I would be willing to work for Streetsblog San Francisco as a reporter on a temporary basis, and after some initial hesitation, I agreed to give it a shot. Now, after two years of daily reporting on transit, pedestrian and bicycle issues in the Bay Area, I’m going to transition to a new role as an occasional contributor to Streetsblog, while I pursue other writing projects that I put on hold.

My first story for Streetsblog was coverage of an event at Fisherman’s Wharf where Danish architect and planner Jan Gehl presented an initial assessment of the challenges and opportunities for improving the public realm and waterfront. Gehl said that if San Francisco wants to be a “lively, attractive, safe and sustainable city [it must] be sweet to its pedestrians, sweet to its cyclists.” Although the city has taken some strides in this direction, I think there are many obstacles to transcend before we can consider ourselves a world-class city in this regard (not least of which is to build out some of the recommendations Gehl has made for Fisherman’s Wharf).

I think the value of Streetsblog is evident in the stories we’ve written and the attention it has given to topics that otherwise wouldn’t be on the radar at mainstream newsrooms, such as pedestrian safety improvements, reforms to transportation metrics like vehicle LOS that prejudice transit, bicycle and pedestrian projects, traffic calming, road diets, neighborhood improvements, and regional funding and greenhouse gas reduction targets. Other stories I’ve loved writing: the new law allowing personal car-sharing,  the interminable saga of the Oakland Airport Connector, the congestion pricing study, parking, parking, parking and more parking, the amazing work done by the Chinatown Community Development Center, TransForm and Greenbelt Alliance, the Pavement to Parks Plazas and parklets and other innovative approaches to improving underutilized city streets and spaces.

Writing for Streetsblog has given me a tremendous education, teaching me how to be a beat reporter and essentially providing me with a J-school’s worth of knowledge on the fly. I couldn’t have asked for a better environment for personal development and it is with some sadness and a bit of trepidation that I’ve decided to move on to explore other topics and likely other media.

I’m incredibly grateful to the readers who have made this community such a pleasure to work with and for all the sage commentary that you’ve provided to the blog. I believe the discourse around sustainable transportation has been elevated and will continue to improve as the blog evolves in the years to come.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to go back, research and up my game because I know our readership is often smarter and more experienced with the issues than we are. Having such a demanding audience has been a tremendous asset, even if I can expect some pretty intense feedback at times (Drunk Engineer, Richard Mlynarik: I hope you know I’m talking about you!).

This coming year is going to be very exciting for transportation and land-use issues in the Bay Area and I’m excited to participate in the discussion here on Streetsblog as a regular commenter.

I look forward to seeing you around the way at the next Streetsblog street party.

Thank you,

Matthew

There will be an actor in a bear suit at San Francisco City Hall tomorrow, along with the Leaf. Image: Nissan

The all-electric Nissan Leaf will make its debut tomorrow in San Francisco after the company delivers its first production vehicle to Olivier Chalouhi in Petaluma. Chalouhi was the first customer to order a Leaf online and the company intends to reward him for his early adoption. Chalouhi will pick up his vehicle at the Nissan dealership in Petaluma in the morning and drive it to the city for a 1:30 pm event at Civic Center in San Francisco.

At the press event, Chalouhi will be joined by Nissan America Chairman Carlos Tavares, Melanie Nutter from Mayor Gavin Newsom’s office, Bay Area Air Quality Management District CEO Jack Broadbent and Rafael Reyes of the Bay Area Climate Collaborative. A large polar bear (or at least an actor in a bear suit) will also attend, re-enacting the scene in a Leaf commercial where a polar bear hugs a man to thank him for embracing electric vehicle technology.

“Tomorrow’s event is a landmark in advancing clean transportation, not just for the region, but worldwide,” said BACC’s Rafael Reyes. “The mayors of San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose set a target to make the Bay Area the EV capitol of the United States and that is coming to fruition in large measure because of the extraordinary collaboration around the region.”

Given the great deal of hype around the first all-electric mass-produced vehicle to hit land stateside, there have been 20,000 reservations for the Leaf, though Nissan representatives said those won’t necessarily translate into 20,000 orders. Worldwide, the company has initial production capacity for 50,000 of the vehicles.

The Leaf was recently rated by the Environmental Protection Agency to get the gasoline equivalent of 99 miles per gallon combined (102 city, 96 highway) and a battery charge range of between 60 and 140 miles, depending on conditions. The Leaf is technically a zero-emission vehicle, though this classification fails to take into account how that electricity was produced. In regions like the Bay Area, where electricity generation includes significant amounts renewable energy, the overall impact of the Leaf on greenhouse gas production will be superior to gasoline vehicles.

Even in the worst case scenario, says BAAQMD representative Karen Schkolnick, electric vehicles will produce lower emissions than the internal combustion standard. The BAAQMD has been a strong supporter of adding electric vehicle infrastructure and has spent $1.3 million in the last 12 months installing vehicle charging stations throughout the region.

Though Schkolnick acknowledged there is a threshold point where converting every vehicle in the Bay Area to electric, for example, would likely burden the grid, she was hopeful technological and efficiency improvements for generation and charging would improve the overall air-quality and health impacts of driving. She also noted that the gradual addition of vehicles, especially if they are charged at night, will use excess energy that otherwise currently gets wasted.

“We obviously don’t want to try to solve one problem by creating others. We do not see that this is a concern given the number of vehicles that are going to be available in the next 5 to 10 years,” said Schkolnick.

“Through incentives and financing models,” she said, the region can “incentivize and price-structure the ability to make sure there is not a negative impact on the grid.”

The event will start tomorrow at 1:30 pm in front of San Francisco City Hall. Look for the white bear suit.

Source: California Energy Commission

The SFBC's rendering of what a protected bike lane on Fell Street could look like.

During routine business at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency Board meeting Tuesday, Director Cheryl Brinkman recounted how enjoyable it was to ride her bicycle on the new physically separated bike lane on Division Street between 9th and 11th Streets. Brinkman said she hoped the SFMTA would consider how it could improve the connection for cyclists between the Wiggle and the Panhandle, including the possibility of adding physical separation to the bike lanes on Fell and Oak Streets between Scott and Baker Streets.

“I think it’s such an important connection and I’ve been riding that stretch more and more recently,” Brinkman told Streetsblog. “I don’t know if it’s the quality of the traffic changing, or if I’m getting older, but riding with the moving traffic so close to my handlebars is very unpleasant. I choose not to ride that section anymore.”

Brinkman added that she had heard from several people living in the Sunset and the Richmond districts that they would ride downtown to work if it weren’t for those three blocks along Oak and Fell. “It seems such a shame to have that great corridor but to have those three blocks that way,” said Brinkman. “It shouldn’t be designed so that only the brave cyclists use it. No one should be dissuaded because they are frightened.”

As it turns out, Mayor Gavin Newsom is open to a study to improve that section of the bicycle network. According to Johanna Partin, a policy adviser to the Mayor, he would be “supportive of anything that would increase bike safety in the city.” Partin said Brinkman’s comments were a catalyst for addressing those blocks of Oak and Fell. She said Newsom was going to encourage the SFMTA to look into the possibility of improving the bicycle facilities and was going to ask them to work with the neighborhood to address concerns that might arise about parking, for instance.

“He’s supportive of beginning the process with the neighbors. Because it’s such a heavily trafficked area, there’s going to need to be some significant community outreach and traffic studies,” said Partin. “He’d be very supportive of that, but he wants to make sure the study was thorough.”

Over the past year and a half the SFMTA has tinkered with various treatments to try to improve the conflict between cyclists and cars trying to enter the Arco gas station on Fell Street at Divisadero, including the recent green lane. A group of neighbors and advocates as part of Fix Fell Now! also held weekly protests at the Arco station.

This is the first time anyone with the power to change the street has spoken seriously about traffic studies and physical separation and the news caught even the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition by surprise. The SFBC recently announced its vision for a network of physically separated bike lanes, “Connecting the City,” which included a bi-directional, physically separated cycle track on Fell Street, but they had not heard from the Mayor or the SFMTA about a study.

“We would love to see a continuous separated bike way along the curb from Scott Street to the park,” said Renee Rivera, acting executive director of the SFBC. Rivera said Connecting the City had called for removing a travel lane and moving the parking off the curb so cyclists could ride without worrying about moving traffic or doors swinging open. According to Rivera, the SFBC would support the removal of parking rather than the travel lane because parking would not trigger environmental review under CEQA.

“The key thing is a buffered bike lane,” said Rivera.

Though Newsom’s term is ending in a few weeks and a traffic study and community outreach would take considerably longer, Brinkman said she was committed to following through with the SFMTA staff to test the feasibility of the protected lanes.

• Bay Bridge Construction Timeline Moved Up a Few Months (SF Gate, CBS)
• Parking Citations Dipped Before Prop B Vote, Cops Feared Angering Voters (SF Examiner)
• Uncertainty Whether Caltrain Fatality in San Mateo a Suicide (Oak Trib, CBS)
• MTC Tightens Security Controls on FastTrak (SF Examiner)
• SFO Commission Says Short Run Cab Incentive Unsafe (CBS)
• CA High Speed Rail Faces Civil Rights Lawsuit (LA Times, Bay Citizen, CoCo Times)
• Obama Requests $1.5 Billion LESS for High Speed Rail in FY 11 (CAHSR Blog)
• Workplace Car Charging Stations Job Perk in Silicon Valley (CoCo Times)
• Debating EVs as Volt and Leaf Get EPA Ratings (Huff Po)
• To Cut Budgets, Will Cities Consider Merging? (Minn Post)
• Detailed Look at a National Infrastructure Bank (Transport Nation)

There is a strange world where up is down, in is out, right is wrong, and black is white. I’m not just talking about the San Francisco Planning Department’s indefensible trip-generation analysis for new parking spaces.

No, I mean the world of old-school traffic engineers, where improving safety on the streets means reducing conflicts with cars (you know, like pesky pedestrians), widening lanes and softening turning radii to allow traffic to move more freely. This is the world of Caltrans, for one, and it’s antithetical to making your city more livable.

Though the state has started to reform its highway and street design guidelines, city planners throughout the Bay Area can attest to the difficulty of adding bus bulbs, traffic calming or bicycle infrastructure in the face of engineers with their traffic bibles telling them there is no such thing as an acceptable green bike lane.

This excellent XtraNormal cartoon, which was produced by Strong Towns, lays out the problem, complete with jargon that will make your head spin.

If you have eight minutes and a wonky sense of humor/indignation, I recommend you watch. If eight minutes seems like a long time, imagine going up against these guys for a decade to reverse the violent upheaval perpetrated on your neighborhood decades prior in the name of progress.

Gives me chills.

A child riding a balance bike during a Sunday Streets in 2009. Photo: Matthew Roth

Balance bikes are getting ever more popular and from most accounts they are an excellent way to help kids learn to be comfortable and get them riding bikes faster than with training wheels. So when we got a press release recently announcing a promotional gimmick between a company called Balance Bikes 4 Tots and Picturoo.com that paired balance bikes with licenses aimed at kids 1-5 years old, you could forgive me for blanching.

From the release:

People all over are finding that a great way to complement a bicycle gift is with a personalized photo ID from Picturoo.com. The Bike Licenses are durable and safe like credit cards. They can be personalized with a child’s photo and name right on the card, just like a driver’s license and can be created directly on Picturoo’s website

‘Kids are so excited when they get a bike as a gift, but nothing beats the proud look on their face when they get a just-for-fun photo license ID card to go with it,” said Yvonne Lee, Balance Bikes 4 Tots owner.

Promoting bike licenses to little kids and comparing it to a driver’s license? Mandatory bicycle licensing is a contentious issue and programs like the one in San Jose have proven so ineffective they have been discontinued. Had Yvette Lee never heard of the debate around bike licenses?

No, in fact, Lee had never thought of that and she didn’t want to give the wrong impression. “These are just fun licenses, not actual licenses,” she said. “They’re not meant to require people to have licenses for bicycle riding. It’s not to advocate licensing, just for fun.”

Lee is a home-based distributor for Strider balance bikes and is based in the Bay Area. She became a convert to the bikes when she bought them for her two and four-year-old sons, who took to them immediately and learned to balance better than her 6-year-old daughter, said Lee. In fact, her four-year-old takes his balance bike to a nearby skate park and BMX dirt bike track and maneuvers the obstacles “just like with the big kids.” She even expected her 2-year-old to graduate to a regular bike by two and a half

“We’re helping evangelize the product, that’s how Strider has been growing,” Lee added.

I guess I can’t fault her for her enthusiasm, I just hope she ditches the licenses, even if they are just for fun.

Photo: Myleen Hollero/Orange Photography

You’d think the Tea Party had descended on San Mateo County, what with the piqued rhetoric in the media over San Francisco’s congestion pricing study. I don’t like to invoke Sarah Palin’s jargon, but I keep coming back to her horrible phrase “lamestream media” when I see yet another story that paints San Francisco transportation planners as greedy car-hating vampires and gets the facts on the pricing study so terribly wrong.

Take John Horgan, a columnist for the San Mateo County Times, who calls San Francisco the Boondoggle by the Bay and the Duchy of Dysfunction, while lamenting that the poor “plebians” on the other side of the city’s “moat-like pay gate” should boycott San Francisco businesses and frequent those in San Mateo if the pick-pocket plan ever passes..

Running with a similar trope, Mike Sugarman of CBS 5 calls the proposal a “border war,” while erroneously painting a scenario where he drives across the charging zone line, forgets something back in Daly City and ends up paying $12 for crossing the line four times (in each of the four pricing zones being studied, a daily charge to a driver would be capped at $6). Sugarman then sticks his microphone in the face of a bunch of drivers and asks them if they would pay for something they currently get for free. Hmm, can you kids guess what the answer is going to be?

You have to wade through 2:20 of bad reporting to get to the first two factual items in Sugarman’s piece, when he says San Francisco is only studying congestion pricing and it wouldn’t go into effect before 2015 at the earliest.

Ken Garcia at the San Francisco Examiner takes the crusade on factual reporting even further, misrepresenting almost everything about the congestion pricing study, conflating the various options for congestion zones into one big tax-happy, driver hating city of lunatics. And on a stylistic quibble, I don’t think Garcia could have stuffed any more puns into his day-after Thanksgiving report (see Jon Stewart’s recent bit on media abuse of puns), from trotting turkeys to gravy to squash and communal platters. If the Examiner had editors, they could have trimmed several hundred words worth of fat from that holiday bird and left us merely with specious claims about money grubbing supervisors “taxing” the “privilege” and “pleasure” of driving.

A London-style cordon encompassing the northeast section of the city. Cordon boundaries would be at 18th Street to the south and Guerrero and Laguna Streets to the west. Image: SFCTA.

This recent round of press attention started when the San Francisco County Transportation Authority (SFCTA) held a media breakfast on November 10th to update transportation reporters on the agency’s priorities and projects for the coming year.

As we have written before, according to the models run by the SFCTA, without any action, traffic in San Francisco during rush hours will get significantly worse as the region grows, leading to an increase in traffic related costs. The SFCTA predicts a 20 percent increase in traffic delay in San Francisco by 2030, rising to 30 percent by 2040, or the equivalent of adding 40,000 more vehicles per day in the already busy downtown.

In response to this expected traffic growth, the SFCTA has proposed several pricing options, including a London-style cordon that would use transponder (such as FasTrak) and camera technology to charge drivers crossing certain streets during the peak periods. SFCTA staff would prefer a northeast cordon, where the charge boundary would be at 18th Street on the southern border and Guerrero and Laguna Streets on the western edge.

In the cordon scenario with a morning and evening charge of $3 (with a maximum of $6 daily) the SFCTA predicts raising $80 million net for transit and non-driving mobility options like bicycling and pedestrian improvements, with traffic reductions of up to 12 percent, emissions reductions up to 16 percent and transit speed improvements of up to 20 percent.

The day after the November 10th press briefing, the three other reporters present wrote stories on the SFCTA’s plan to present its board of directors, who are the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, with an update on the progress they have made and to ask permission to continue studying further, including the possibility of a pilot.

Cue the madness.

Though none of the stories misrepresented the facts, the Chronicle story led with a first sentence that said congestion pricing could cost drivers $1,560 a year (writer Rachel Gordon presumably multiplied 260 work days per year times $6 to get that figure). Unfortunately, the article posits the four pricing scenarios being studied, but doesn’t make clear that they would not be simultaneously enacted (which Garcia concludes in his op-ed).

Fueled by members of the San Mateo political class taking opportunistic pot-shots at the study, especially Daly City Councilman David Canepa, the salient number has become that $1,560 driving tax.

“It’s making people crazy thinking this is just a money grab,” said Tilly Chang, SFCTA deputy director for planning. Chang said the SFCTA has met many times with San Mateo county officials and staff, explaining the various scenarios under study and emphasizing the benefits. “We really want to have a more thoughtful and informed conversation so that we’re listening to each other and hear each other. They’re missing the point that this is a shared regional problem.”

In my conversations over the past year with the SFCTA planners doing the study, they made it clear that the most effective pricing zone option for reducing downtown traffic, speeding up Muni and raising significant money for improving city streets is the northeast cordon. They noted that the southern boundary option would not have the desired traffic reduction in downtown because 70 percent of the peak period drivers to the northeast cordon are coming from a San Francisco address to begin with. True, San Mateo drivers don’t pay tolls to drive into downtown San Francisco like Marin and East Bay drivers do, but they represent only a small fraction of traffic in the target pricing neighborhoods.

Perhaps the most disappointing piece of disinformation came from Adrienne Tissier’s op-ed in the Examiner yesterday. Tissier is a San Mateo County Supervisor and is about to become the chair of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), the region’s transportation and planning authority. In her op-ed, Tissier plays up the same tax-hungry bogeymen as the columnists, but she also makes the irrational assertion that congestion pricing will increase traffic by encouraging peak-hour commuters to travel at different times.

Um, Ms. Tissier, this is exactly the point of congestion pricing: it reduces peak period traffic and encourages some people to choose a reasonable transit alternative, which according to the SFCTA, includes 80 percent of those currently driving downtown. If this is Tissier’s attitude for San Francisco, I fear for the region, where she will be presiding over the recently announced target of reducing greeenhouse gas emissions 15 percent by 2035. No serious planner believes this can be accomplished without adequate pricing of driving.

“We understand that we’re a culture addicted to our cars,” said the SFCTA’s Chang when asked to explain why this issue has blown up in the press. “We know from any 12-step program, there’s anger, denial and blame and then you get through to acceptance and understanding the issues and the problem and maybe then the acceptance needed to make a change.”

“Doing nothing is just going to relegate us to a region in decline,” she added.

Flickr photo: David Lytle

In its annual Smart Growth awards ceremony, the Environmental Protection Agency awarded San Francisco’s Mint Plaza with its “Civic Spaces” prize, honoring the City and County of San Francisco, as well as developers and architects that transformed the former Jesse Street alley into a busy public realm. The award was announced yesterday in Washington DC, in coordination with the EPAs 40th anniversary festivities, where San Francisco joined New York City and Portland among others receiving commendations.

Mint Plaza was the result of a public-private partnership that used private funding to build a public plaza owned by the city, with relatively little city investment. According to the EPA’s announcement, the project cost $3.2 million to build, of which only $150,000 came from public funds. The balance was raised by Martin Building Company, which created a Community Facilities District (much like a Community Benefit District), levying a 30-year special property tax on certain buildings around the plaza to leverage tax exempt bonds. Martin also established Friends of Mint Plaza, a non-profit organization that raises funds to manage ongoing maintenance and programming at the plaza.

Jason Elliott, policy adviser to Mayor Gavin Newsom, said the EPA award was an honor and said Mint Plaza “represents people taking affirmative ownership in their micro neighborhoods.”

“This is a community coming together to invest in their own public realm,” said Elliott, who highlighted the trial traffic diversions on Market Street and said they can complement destinations in the neighborhood. Without creating destinations like Mint Plaza, he said, the public would have nowhere to bike and walk to, neighborhoods would not be revitalized. “We can do a lot of the things we think we’re good at, but when we have the private sector step up and take the proactive responsibility for reinvigorating their own communities,” it expands on what the city can accomplish.

Mint Plaza makes use of movable furniture, set up and maintained by the non-profit Friends of Mint Plaza. Flickr photo: Darwin Bell

“As a resident, Mint Plaza functions as our urban ‘front yard’ and provides a safe and nurturing environment for my son and his friends. As such, the plaza has already created a unique sense of public space ownership in a sometimes impersonal downtown,” William Duncanson, a Mint Plaza neighborhood resident, said in the EPA’s release. “Residents view the plaza as a place for living rather than merely a public park or a conduit to get from here to there.”

In honoring the city and the private representatives, the EPA characterized the space as a “public living room,” noting the transformation of the alley into an 18,000 square foot plaza had attracted new private investment into the surrounding neighborhoods, including four restaurants and cafes.

Joining officials from San Francisco at the awards ceremony in Washington D.C. was Scott Catafa, a principal at CMG Architects, who designed the plaza. “I think it’s a great example for the city for how these things can work for a public-private partnership to maintain public spaces and improve them,” he said.

Catafa said there were great limitations on the design of the plaza because of the intricate public utilities underneath the former alley, which prevented them from adding as many trees as they wanted. Catafa said Bryant Park in New York City was an inspiration for the movable furniture and some of the design elements, and described the arbor in the plaza as a way to provide greenery in place of additional trees.

Noting that the space had previously been used for parking tour buses, Catafa said that the openness of the plaza contributed to the feeling of increased safety. Referring to the “eyes on the street” effect that Jane Jacobs wrote about in her iconic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Catafa said the space worked to change people’s impressions of an area of the city with a previously bad reputation for drug dealing.

Saying that maintenance of the space was equally or more important than the design, Catafa said Mint Plaza would be a model for other projects in San Francisco and beyond. “It’s about a perception too because people take care of spaces that seem to be maintained.”

Photo: Matthew Roth

In the spirit of the holidays, BART will be handing out 120,000 free tickets to commuters tomorrow morning from 6 am to 9 am, what BART calls “an early holiday gift.” Each ticket will be valid for one ride anywhere in the system during the next three weekends, December 4th, 5th, 11th, 12th, 18th and 19th. BART will give pairs of free tickets to 60,000 commuters at the Downtown Berkeley, 12th St./Oakland City Center, Embarcadero, Montgomery, Powell and Civic Center stations, while supplies last.

According to BART spokesperson Linton Johnson, a lot of people forget that BART accesses several of the busiest shopping areas in the region, from downtown San Francisco to Oakland to Walnut Creek. What’s more, said Johnson, “our parking spaces tend to be mostly empty on weekends, and they’re free. People tend to fight for that parking spot during holiday shopping. We’re killing two birds with one stone.”

The promotion will cost BART roughly $386,400 in ticket value (assuming average ride cost of $3.22), but Johnson said the agency believed the increase in ridership from friends and family traveling with the beneficiaries of the promotion would more than make up the expense. “In the end, people don’t make just one shopping trip, if we can increase just a percent or two, then we’ve improved our overall picture,” he said.

The funding for the promotion is part of a board-approved rider development fund. After use, the tickets will be returned by the fare gates but will have no remaining value and may be discarded. Further, after using the free tickets, recipients who visit bart.gov/shop to fill out a survey (available by the first day of the promotion) will be entered to win a Clipper card loaded with $300 worth of value.

What factors do you think led to these numbers? Was it car-share, more biking, more walking, more telecommuting, higher unemployment? Remember to take into account that these numbers are from the 2008 and 2009 census data, respectively.

Tell me what you think in the comments. How do you think this will change next year?

H/T Jason Henderson, SF State Geography Professor

Photos: CCDC

Chinatown’s crowded sidewalks, unsafe crosswalks and poor pedestrian signage are not likely to be among the endearing physical characteristic featured in any tourist brochure. Yet in a recent study — the San Francisco Chinatown Pedestrian Safety Needs Assessment [pdf] and Safety Plan [pdf] conducted by the Chinatown Community Development Center (CCDC) — those issues were identified as several of the highest priority concerns for tenants, merchants and visitors to the popular area.

Chinatown is the densest neighborhood in San Francisco, according to the study, and has the lowest rate of automobile ownership, at 17 percent. The neighborhood is made up of a large percentage of transit users and pedestrians, many of them seniors. From the report:

The 2000 Census reported the median income for the neighborhood as $18,339, with a median age of 50. The proportion of the population living below the poverty level in 2000 was 21 percent versus 11 percent citywide.

Although Chinatown has the lowest rate of car ownership, it has the highest volume of traffic of any San Francisco neighborhood. Seventy eight percent of households live within 150 meters of a truck route. The proportion of Chinatown households living with traffic-related air quality hazards is 100 percent compared to 68 percent citywide.

Image: CCDC

The study analyzed a laundry list of characteristics and data at 142 intersections within the study area, which was bounded by Mason Street, Green Street, Columbus Avenue, Montgomery Street and Sacramento Street. It scored each intersection based on a variety of factors, including SFPD vehicle-pedestrian collision data over a 10-year period, the San Francisco Department of Public Health’s Pedestrian Quality Index (PEQI) and community surveys.

“We’ve gleaned an incredible amount of useful information just by having spontaneous conversations with school cross guards, store owners, and postal workers on their smoke break,” said Deland Chan, a senior planner for CCDC and the author of the study.

After narrowing the list to the top 21 most dangerous intersections, CCDC studied those further, sending staff and volunteers out to collect pedestrian volume counts and observations of pedestrian and vehicle behavior. In addition, every sidewalk within the study area was assessed to determine the quality and condition of the walking surfaces and pedestrian amenities. These 21 most dangerous intersections were then grouped together into eight priority corridors, with the Stockton from Sacramento to Vallejo the highest priority segment, followed by Broadway from Mason to Kearny and Columbus from Jackson to Green.

CCDC has been shopping the study to numerous city agencies and has received a lot of support from the San Francisco Department of Public Health (SFDPH), which provided $20,000 to organize and complete the effort. According to Ana Validzic, a pedestrian safety coordinator at the SFDPH, CCDC’s plan was a model she hoped to see scaled up across the city. Calling CCDC “rock stars in this area,” she said her department had received a large planning grant and was in the early stages of a citywide study.

“It’s a really solid piece of work, we’re excited for the next steps,” said Validzic.

Image: CCDC

Unlike the SFMTA’s recent pedestrian safety study, which pretended to model itself on New York City’s much-heralded Pedestrian Safety Study and Action Plan, but failed to include an action plan, the CCDC Safety Plan has a long menu of interventions the group hopes to see realized in the neighborhood.

Along the Stockton corridor, for instance, the Safety Plan recommends increasing pedestrian space, comfort and mobility by adding pedestrian scramble phases and full intersection crosswalk treatments and curb extensions at intersections. Other suggested improvements include “adding seating, removing old signage and meter posts, and getting rid of newspaper racks to help reduce sidewalk clutter. Strategies to decrease vehicle speeds and turning conflicts include replacing standard ‘No Right on Red’ signs with LED signage, which illuminate to prevent turning movements during pedestrian phases, and adding a dedicated left turn signal phase to the traffic lights.”

Improvements like pedestrian scrambles are relatively cheap and already in effect at certain intersections in the Financial District only a few blocks away from Chinatown (or see Oakland’s Chinatown for a gold-plated scramble). As the report notes, because “low-income communities are disproportionately affected by the lack of walkable neighborhoods” and because of the demographics in Chinatown, “the provision of safe, walkable streets is a social justice issue.”

This message resonates with senior advocates in the neighborhood, who underscored how significant improved safety at crosswalks, improved sidewalk conditions and longer crossing signals at intersections are for an aging population.

“Because Chinatown is so congested, the city should cater to some of the needs of Chinatown, including sometimes the crosswalk phase,” said Wing Hoo Leung, vice president of the Chinatown Tenants Association (CTA). “There aren’t enough accommodations. The street lights should be longer, since there are a lot of people crossing the street and not enough time for them to cross the street safely.”

Chinatown saw seven fatalities on the streets between 1999 and 2009, and CCDC and CTA hope this initial work will prompt action that will significantly reduce these preventable deaths.

“Rather than waiting for another accident to occur before taking action,” said CCDC’s Chan, “we wanted to proactively identify and systemically rank priority areas where the city and community groups can work together to make the neighborhood safer for pedestrians.”

Photo: Myleen Hollero/Orange Photography

I often write stories for Streetsblog as objectively as I can, but after talking with the SFMTA about their pedestrian safety report, I got a little too upset to write dispassionately. Therefore, I’ll call this a “commentary” and you can take it for what it’s worth.

If the footage of 65-year-old Nu Ha Dam getting mowed down in a crosswalk at Leavenworth and Geary by a UCSF shuttle on Wednesday didn’t appall you, the continued failure of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) to improve pedestrian safety should.

San Francisco has the highest rate of pedestrian injuries of any sizeable city in California and is one of the highest in the nation. Pedestrian injuries have stayed steady over the past few years at more than 800. Of total fatal collisions in San Francisco over the past ten years, pedestrians have consistently accounted for 50-60 percent.

So when the city comes out with a report [pdf] modeled on the New York City Department of Transportation’s much heralded Pedestrian Safety Study and Action Plan, you could excuse me for getting excited. The 55-page document is chock full of great data on existing conditions, and at a minimum helps lend some visibility to pedestrians on paper.

Unfortunately, the report has no collision reduction targets, work plans or evaluation metrics that will result in safer streets. All it offers is this bit of drivel:

[While the SFMTA has] an important role to play in improving pedestrian conditions, specific collision trends can be also influenced by demographic, cultural, and economic changes that affect the amount and type of traveling people engage in. For these reasons the SFMTA has in the past not set an exact percentage goal for the reduction of fatal collisions in future decades, though of course it remains our mission to improve roadway safety as rapidly as possible. It is the general goal of the SFMTA both to see reductions in pedestrian injuries every year and to increase the number of pedestrian trips in the City.

Important role? You have a charter mandate to improve pedestrian conditions as part of the Transit First policy (“5. Pedestrian areas shall be enhanced wherever possible to improve the safety and comfort of pedestrians and to encourage travel by foot”).

You’ve had that mandate since the 1970s.

“They’re not setting any goals and that is something the MTA needs to do to show they are serious about pedestrian safety,” Elizabeth Stampe, the executive director of Walk SF, told me in reference to the report. While she was happy it presented the baseline data, she said it didn’t go far enough. “They need to set targets about how they plan to make the streets safer.”

When asked why there was no action plan, Bridget Smith of the SFMTA’s Sustainable Streets Division said: “The report we put together was really what New York City put together and we wanted to look at our work through that lens. It’s a professional to professional look at what they presented and how our city compares to New York City.”

Except for the action plan, which is nearly half of the volume of words in NYC’s report and arguably the most significant part of the whole endeavor. Without a plan that can be executed and proper metrics to measure the impact of changes, conditions won’t change.

For example, New York City has committed to reduce pedestrian fatalities by 50 percent by 2030, incorporating engineering, enforcement, public communication campaigns and a hefty legislative policy change framework that would make any advocate or public health official blush with excitement. They will dramatically ramp up Safe Routes to School improvements; they will expand their Safe Routes for Seniors program; they will re-engineer 60 miles of streets, 20 miles of them with “intensive safety redesign;” they will daylight corners to improve visibility; they will pilot slower speed zones across neighborhoods through engineering for calmed traffic; they will coordinate enforcement with the NYPD to target the riskiest driver behavior to pedestrians; they will push legislation for more red light cameras, speed cameras, mandatory truck crossover mirrors, and increased penalties for unlicensed drivers; and they will update they NYC Pedestrian Safety Act, which requires the NYC DOT to improve the top 20 most dangerous locations for pedestrians.

And what about San Francisco? If you’d like to follow along for yourself, scroll down to the bottom of page 50 [pdf].

San Francisco will continue to do a litany of things (but given the data, those things apparently aren’t working to make the city much safer for pedestrians). More countdown timers will be added, which the report spends a page telling you we helped pioneer, and we’ll continue our analysis of higher collision corridors, areas, and intersections, continue our expansion of audible pedestrian signal locations, continue the installation of traffic calming measures to slow vehicle speeds, continue the removal parking at corners to improve pedestrian sight distances, continue the expansion of the use of “continental” or “ladder” type crosswalks.

When I pushed SFMTA’s Smith on why they didn’t set targets for reducing the number or rate of collisions, she said there were “a couple of things in development” and that they were considering a “pedestrian master plan.” Smith also pointed to their work with other agencies on the Better Streets Plan as instructive and ripe for possible future collaboration.

When I questioned how the Better Sidewalk Plan (to steal Livable City executive director Tom Radulovich’s derisive sobriquette) would address dangerous speeds, illegal turning in occupied crosswalks or other driver behavior, Smith acknowledged its shortcomings. “We all recognize that we’d like to expand the work,” she said. “It was always intended to be the ‘Pedestrian Realm Plan.”

In a previous Streetsblog article, Dr. Rajiv Bhatia of the San Francisco Department of Public Health blasted the city’s efforts to date on pedestrian safety, calling the failure to add known safety improvements “transportation malpractice.”

When I asked Smith about the criticism by Bhatia, she said: “Rajiv could take the leadership role on it.”

Unfortunately, that’s probably not going to be effective. The SFMTA is the implementing agency with responsibility for controlling our streets and improving pedestrian safety. The SFDPH has zero input on whether or not Leavenworth and Geary will get a “continental’ crosswalk, bulbouts or other treatments, nor whether or not that would have done anything to save Nu Ha Dam.

About the only thing the SFDPH can do about that is add her to the statistics they keep on pedestrian injuries and fatalities.

I know I shouldn’t just pick on Bridget Smith here. SFMTA Executive Director Nat Ford and Mayor Gavin Newsom, neither of whom have said boo about targets for improving pedestrian conditions, deserve at least as much credit, if not much more. Without bold leadership and a clear mandate, there is probably little Smith or any other well-meaning planner could accomplish at the agency.

While I was heartened to hear SFMTA’s newest board director, Cheryl Brinkman, discuss the importance of improving pedestrian safety (Brinkman, in the board meeting on Tuesday: “I think there is a lot more we can do including lowering speed limits to make sure that any interactions between pedestrians and cars are not fatal”), the real work has yet to begin.

Smith did say they had priced out an action plan and they just need to find the money to complete it. Maybe Brinkman and Chair Tom Nolan can show some leadership in securing this funding.

Compared to the hundreds of millions they’re going to be asked to issue in municipal bond debt to fund the Central Subway next year, what’s a few hundred thousand to keep more pedestrians from being run over in the crosswalk?