Streetsblog San Francisco

She's back! Veronica Moss, D.C. lobbyist for the Automobile User Trade Organization (A.U.T.O.), recently returned to New York to get her first look at the new, pedestrian-friendly Times Square. Her views may rankle some in the livable streets camp, but we think it's important to note that some influential people out there just abhor walking, socializing, and the freedom to safely enjoy public spaces.

Oregon Congressman Earl Blumenauer is one of Capitol Hill's strongest voices for walking, biking and transit. Soon after arriving in Congress in 1996, he started the Congressional Bike Caucus, now more than 160 members strong, and he's the founding chairman of the House's new "Livable Communities Task Force," which he announced two weeks ago here on Streetsblog.

Blumenauer's bike commute to the Capitol has become as much a personal hallmark as his predilection for bowties. So when he went to New York City over the weekend to stump for a progressive federal transportation bill, the congressman didn't pass up the chance to tour the city's evolving bike infrastructure with bicycle and pedestrian advocacy group Transportation Alternatives. Clarence Eckerson and his camera were there too, of course.

Watch this Streetfilm to hear Blumenauer's thoughts on the big federal transportation bill, the emergence of a national movement for safe biking and walking, and the difference between protected bike lanes and regular old Class 2 facilities. Then ask yourself: When will we get to see a congressperson or senator from California walk, bike, or ride the bus with Clarence?

Also, a reminder that Streetsblog San Francisco Editor Bryan Goebel and Reporter Matthew Roth will be in Portland, Oregon, this week, reporting on Congress for the New Urbanism's Project on Transportation Reform. Catch them on our Twitter feed and look for posts starting tomorrow.

When Tim Tompkins took over as President of the Times Square Alliance, one of New York City's largest Business Improvement Districts (BIDs), the primary concerns were the security and cleanliness of the most iconic, if chaotic, public space in the world. Despite incessant traffic and pedestrian gridlock ("pedlock" to borrow Tompkin's phrase), his Board of Directors and city officials on the whole weren't initially interested in Tompkins' vision for transforming Times Square into a world-class public space, with less traffic and higher design concepts.

As Tompkins explained to a standing-room audience in the auditorium at the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research (SPUR) building last week, his Board was content that there weren't regular stabbings and violent crime. The quality of public space seemed too esoteric.  Gradually, Tompkins built public support for dramatic changes, starting with the re-design of Father Duffy Square, the site of the TKTS Broadway ticket office. Working with New York City's Department of Transportation (NYCDOT), Tompkins began chipping away at the space allocated to cars and opening it up to pedestrians. Shortly after the completion of Duffy Square in October, 2008, said Tompkins, NYCDOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan approached him with the idea of closing down a portion of Broadway to vehicles to create public plazas.

The Times Square plazas have received acclaim from New Yorkers, tourists, and the often cynical press in New York City (The NY Post still hates the plazas, but what can one expect from a Rupert Murdoch rag?). Now, cities around the country are looking to the "Capitol of the World" for leadership in transforming their own under-utilized or overcrowded streets into quality pedestrian space. After meeting with San Francisco city leaders and officials (Great Streets Project Director Kit Hodge, who organized Tompkin's visit to San Francisco, said the meetings were very productive), Tomkins sat down with Streetsblog for an interview. Tompkins was very familiar with the Bay Area and had excellent advice for city policy makers and businesses.

Read interview highlights after the jump.

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The new head of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Jay Walder, is considering a novel approach to attracting more transit riders: lowering fares during off-peak hours. In an interview with the New York Times he outlined his ambition to get more out of a system designed for peak capacity, even late at nights and on weekends.

"We might imagine that we offer discounts at later times, or we offer weekend discounts," Mr. Walder said in an interview on Wednesday. "Time-of-day pricing might be very attractive."

The goal would be to encourage use of buses and subways during traditionally quieter hours. And it would bring New York's subway system in line with local commuter rails, which charge a range of fares.

"We have an infrastructure that is set for the capacity of the peak," Mr. Walder said. "What we really want to do is use that infrastructure all the time."

The chairman ruled out charging higher prices for longer trips, a system used in cities like Washington and London, saying such a move in New York "would be a mistake."

That approach to encouraging off-peak ridership would be a marked departure from BART's proposed solution to peak-hour overcrowding a year ago. BART would have raised peak fares, in an attempt to more-evenly distribute ridership. Overcrowding has eased somewhat since the economic collapse, making the proposal more or less moot for now. But when riders do return en mass, BART director and Livable City Executive Director Tom Radulovich thinks an incentive to off-peak riding, instead of a disincentive to peak riding, might make sense.

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In some cities people are so desperate for bike lanes they'll mark their own. Elizabeth Press of Streetfilms in New York City, on the other hand, had this to say about the work the NYC Department of Transportation has been doing in her city: "It feels like every time I get on my bike there is a new bike lane -- sometimes on the left, sometimes buffered, and sometimes completely separated from automobile traffic."

For those of us who live in cities that haven't caught the bicycle infrastructure fever or have been prevented from such by a bicycle injunction, perhaps the best we can do is tag along with her as she rides the streets with NYC DOT bicycle infrastructure staff as they show off the many classes of bike lanes and inventive facilities they have added in the past few years.

Behold and be bicycle-lane green with envy!

IBM's Smarter Planet project, which uses technology (and sometimes plain old polling) in an effort to revamp urban infrastructure, today signed deals with transit agencies based in Oakland, New York City, and Washington D.C. to "smartly" manage the ins and outs of keeping trains and buses running.

BART, New York's LIRR, and Washington D.C.'s Metro plan to install the Maximo software, a program that anticipates and schedules preventive maintenance on rail cars, tracks, buses, and other equipment.

"There are thousands of people and parts responsible for making sure that our trains arrive on time and deliver our passengers safely to their destinations,” Randall Franklin, BART Program Director for Business Advancement, said in a statement. "Because we are managing an aging fleet while planning for the future, the efficiency of BART requires visibility across all of our assets to provide safe and uninterrupted railway services to our customers."

The move could prove particularly beneficial for D.C., which was urged by federal safety regulators to phase out the older rail car model that was involved in a fatal accident in June but found itself short of cash to fund a full-cale replacement. In a statement on the IBM deal, Metro's deputy information technology chief said a recent meeting with China's Guangzhou Metro, which also uses Maximo, helped pave the way for the agreement.

Throughout San Francisco's history, from the early street grid to the more recent expansion of freeways, slivers of land that don't fit into the master plans of architects and designers have been cast aside, lumped into a category the Department of Public Works (DPW) refers to as "unaccepted streets." These "paper streets" are mapped but not maintained by any agency. As Chris Carlsson so beautifully chronicled in his Ghost Streets tour, many of these alleys and street stubs are cared for by neighbors and transformed into small gardens or pocket parks.  Many more, however, are forgotten urban scars and latent public space.

Berkeley Professor of Architecture Nicholas de Monchaux estimates that there are 529 acres of unaccepted streets, just over half the land area of Golden Gate Park. In Local Code [PDF], one of six finalists in UCLA's WPA 2.0 design competition ("Whoever rules the sewers, rules the city"), de Monchaux details his vision for replenishing 1514 of these unaccepted streets by linking contemporary geospatial planning tools with existing public processes through the DPW to implement  "a range of local infrastructural gestures, from soil remediation, to victory gardening, to playgrounds and pastures."  

Local Code borrows from the work of  "anarchitect" Gordon Matta-Clark, who in the early 1970s discovered that New York City auctioned off pieces of unusable land that resulted from surveying anomalies and public-works expansion, so called "gutterspaces," fifteen of which he purchased and developed for Fake Estates, an architectural intervention meant to dissect notions of materiality, property ownership, and prestige.

With Local Code, de Monchaux hopes to accelerate the pace of converting streets into green spaces, particularly in the underserved neighborhoods in the shadows of freeways, where unaccepted streets are abundant.  "If you look at the unaccepted streets, it is like heat map of all the areas with health problems, pollution issues, and neglected spaces," he said.

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Now that the New York City Council has approved a Bicycle Access Bill requiring commercial buildings to allow bicyclists entry, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition is ready to push for a San Francisco version of the requirement "by the end of the year." New York's bill, which is limited in its scope and contains some significant loopholes, passed 46-1 and is expected to be signed by Mayor Bloomberg.

Like New York's, San Francisco's zoning code already requires new and significantly renovated commercial buildings to provide a certain number of bicycle parking spaces, depending on the size of the building. Amendments proposed by the Bicycle Plan would strengthen those requirements slightly, removing a loophole that exempted multi-use buildings from the requirement. Marc Caswell of the SFBC said he hopes to further strengthen those codes by increasing the amount of bike parking required and reducing the expenditure threshold when a renovation triggers the requirement.

The requirements are not retroactive, however, so they do not serve almost all workers whose buildings were permitted before 2001. Nearly half, 42 percent, of the cyclists responding to a recent SFBC member survey said they did not have bicycle parking at work. The lack of secure bicycle parking is the "number one reason seasoned bicyclists do not bike to work" in New York, according to surveys by New York's Transportation Alternatives.

San Francisco would surely see an increase in bicycle commuting if a version of New York's law passes here. How might the San Francisco version — and the politics around it — be different?

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When New York City opened up new pedestrian zones in the heart of Midtown this summer, naysayers predicted a traffic nightmare. Nearly two months later, we're still waiting for the much-feared Carmaggedon.

In this video, Streetsblog publisher Mark Gorton takes us on a tour of Broadway's car-free squares and boulevard-style blocks, where conditions have improved dramatically for pedestrians, cyclists, and, yes, delivery truck drivers. As Mark says, the counterintuitive truth is that taking away space for cars can improve traffic while making the city safer and more enjoyable for everyone on foot. There are sound theories that help explain why this happens -- concepts like traffic shrinkage and Braess's paradox which are getting more and more attention thanks to projects like this one. While traffic statistics are still being collected by NYCDOT, there's already a convincing argument that Midtown streets are functioning better than before: To understand it, just take a walk down Broadway.

Zipcar kicked off its second annual Low-Car Diet challenge today in the 13 cities around the country where the company does business. The challenge asks participants to give up their personal cars for one month and walk, ride a bicycle, and take transit in place of driving.

In San Francisco, Zipcar provided each participant with weekly Muni passes and BART tickets as needed. Should participants need to drive at some point throughout the month, they can use a Zipcar.

Michael Uribe, General Manager for San Francisco Zipcar, stressed the economic benefit of not owning a car, saying that 19 percent of household income is spent on auto-related expenses. According to Uribe, Zipcar users spend only six percent of their household income on cars. He also said car-sharing in general is meant to chip away at the idea that owning a car is necessary, or that a family needs two cars when one is rarely used.

"Growing up, owning a car is really a rite in America," said Uribe. "This reverses that paradigm and frees up money to go back into the local economy. Also, for every one Zipcar on the road, we're replacing 15 to 20 vehicles."

Uribe himself is a recent convert to carlessness. "It took me a while to learn to live without a car," he said.  When asked how he finds the lifestyle, he smiled and said it was stress-free. "I don't think I'd ever own a car again. I don't have to pay for parking, I find myself exploring the city more, various neighborhoods. I find I eat better because I'm exploring different neighborhoods and buying locally grown organic foods."

"I eat a lot more," he added, but said he hasn't put on any weight given how much additional walking he is doing.

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