Streetsblog San Francisco

Trader Joe’s announced last week that it is moving into a new location on Nob Hill, at the southwest corner of California and Hyde streets, where the lease for Cala Foods expires in late December. It’s a dense, transit-rich neighborhood that sits along the California cable car line. Given the popularity of TJ’s four other San Francisco locations, which cater largely to motoring shoppers, will it bring more cars and congestion to the neighborhood?

“The plan is to keep the parking configured exactly as it is right now. There will be about 80 spaces total after we’ve re-striped the garage and complete the work,” said Dan Safier, the president of the Prado Group, the developer. “Plus, you have a lot of people who live in the area who just don’t live with cars, so shoppers will be using public transportation or arriving on foot.”

Trader Joe’s recently abandoned plans for a Castro location because neighborhood groups courageously pushed for no parking. The chain ultimately pulled out, according to Supervisor Scott Wiener, because “the location was not going to work for its business model, one that is fairly reliant on automobile visits.”

Safier said Trader Joe’s plans to occupy a little over half of the 25,000 square foot building on Hyde and will begin construction in early 2012. Because the change in tenancy doesn’t require a change of use, it doesn’t trigger a Planning Department review, similar to the process for the Whole Foods that recently replaced another Cala Foods location in the Haight. (Update: According to the SF Planning Department, because Trader Joe’s is formula retail, it will actually require a conditional use permit. It’s possible the Planning Department could require that Trader Joe’s take measures to prevent a vehicle queue and address pedestrian circulation at this location).

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As developers bring more residents and employees to the South of Market (SoMa) district, the number of parking lots and garages they build for automobiles will largely determine how much the new tenants and commuters will drive.

But even in a downtown area like SoMa, developers are bound by antiquated planning codes to provide a minimum number of off-street parking spots.

Transit advocates are looking to reverse those restrictions with a piece of legislation [pdf] approved by the SF Board of Supervisors Land Use and Economic Development Committee yesterday. The ordinance would shed the city’s planning code of car parking minimums in SoMa and replace them with parking maximums in some areas. It’s expected to be confirmed by the full Board of Supervisors in the next few weeks.

“This is the next step in comprehensive parking reform in San Francisco,” said Tom Radulovich, the executive director of Livable City, who drafted the legislation along with former D6 Supervisor Chris Daly when he was in office last year. Daly’s successor, Supervisor Jane Kim, took over the legislation as its sponsor.

Among a host of progressive parking reforms, the proposal would bring consistent maximums to the SoMa district, which planning ordinances passed over the years have set differently within individual sections. It would also prohibit office parking garages closest to the downtown job center from structuring parking prices in a way that lures driving commuters.

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Chinatown and North Beach, the “densest neighborhoods west of the Mississippi,” are set to be graced by Sunday Streets for the first time this year, Mayor Ed Lee announced today. City leaders and advocates said they’re eager for the opportunity to let residents experience Grant Avenue and California Street free of car traffic.

“Sunday Streets will be different from a street fair. It will allow residents to explore all uses of the streets,” said Mayor Lee. “This is about working with all of the elements of the community and breaking down bureaucratic walls to make things happen.”

The growing demand from neighborhood and merchants associations had initially put Sunday Streets on the horizon for next year, but a 2011 date is being chosen at the insistence of Mayor Lee, said Livable City Director Tom Radulovich.

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Transit advocates have joined a broad coalition of opponents mounting a fight against California Pacific Medical Center’s (CPMC) long range development plan for its San Francisco facilities, decrying the significant increase in parking being proposed, and the attendant impact that will have on traffic, transit and pedestrian safety. They argue the increase in parking supply will induce more driving to already crowded streets and will deteriorate Muni service and cause conflicts with pedestrians and bicycle riders.

They also say the DEIR fails to adequately address those concerns, in no small part because the Planning Department’s guidelines still don’t explicitly correlate parking supply with driving demand, the same argument brought against the City Place mall project on Market Street. Whether the advocates who appealed and are considering a lawsuit against City Place will do the same with CPMC is uncertain, though more will likely be known after the first Planning Commission public hearing on the project today.

Of the five CPMC locations studied in the DEIR, the most significant net increase in parking will also be at the facility located in one of the most transit-rich and congested parts of the city. The enormous new Cathedral Hill complex will occupy two blocks of Geary Boulevard on either side of Van Ness Avenue, the future crossing point for the city’s two planned bus rapid transit (BRT) corridors. During the first phase of construction between 2011 and 2015, when Cathedral Hill will open, CPMC plans to build a 555 bed hospital and a large medical office building (MOB) to complement an existing MOB it owns at 1375 Sutter.

The combined facilities will have over 1200 parking spaces, with a net increase of 650 from current conditions. While the 513 spaces at the hospital are significantly more than code would allow (95 spaces), the 542 spaces at the new MOB are less than half the quantity that the planning code for MOBs mandates, so the MOB will “borrow” from the hospital spaces to make the entire facility compliant within a range that’s allowed in code.

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At the heart of the San Francisco Planning Department’s 328-page Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) for CityPlace, sustainable transportation advocates have pinpointed one glaring flaw. In assessing the impacts of new off-street retail parking, the environmental analysis [pdf] concludes that building a 167-space garage will have the same effect on traffic as building no garage at all.

“This environmental analysis has really pitted this project against pedestrian safety and the livability of this neighborhood,” said Tom Radulovich, the executive director of Livable City.

CityPlace is a 250,000 square foot retail project planned for Market Street that the Mayor has trumpeted as essential for the area, “a key pillar in the continuing revitalization of Mid-Market that will bring hundreds of jobs and new revenues to boost our City’s economy and thousands of new pedestrians and shoppers to activate one of the most blighted blocks of Market Street.”

Radulovich along with attorney Arthur Levy and Walk SF had filed an appeal of the Planning Commission’s certification of the DEIR, arguing that it failed to adequately address and mitigate the dangers to pedestrians and bicyclists. Levy was also concerned the St. Francis Theater, designed by architect John Galen Howard, will be demolished and that the glass structure won’t fit in with the visual and historic character of Market Street.

Supporting the appeal seemed politically impossible for the Board of Supervisors. Instead, Supervisor Chris Daly, who represents the area, with help from Judson True, an aide to Supervisor David Chiu, brokered a deal [pdf] before the supervisors meeting Tuesday.  Market Street Holdings LLC (Urban Realty), the project’s sponsor, agreed to charge a 20 cent per vehicle exit fee at the CityPlace garage that would eventually add up to $1.8 million for “bicycle and/or pedestrian and/or transit improvements.” That pleased the supervisors and the DEIR was certified on a 9-0 vote, giving the final clearance.

The rejection of the appeal followed a public hearing in which the advocates laid out their case, and the project’s sponsors were allowed a rebuttal.

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Bond Yee, a veteran traffic engineer who has spent thirty years designing and managing San Francisco's streets, will be named to fill the recently created Sustainable Streets Director position permanently, Streetsblog has learned. Yee was appointed interim director of the Sustainable Streets division eight months ago while the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) conducted a nationwide search for a permanent director.

"He was intimate in merging us toward the Sustainable Streets division over the last 8 or 9 months so he’s been putting the infrastructure there and I think it’s only fair that we give him a shot to bring it home," said SFMTA Chief Nat Ford.

Yee was the city's longest serving traffic engineer before Jack Fleck, who recently retired, and had been the director of the former Department of Parking and Traffic before stepping into his new role. He is greatly respected among many staffers at the SFMTA.

DPT was merged into Sustainable Streets last year as part of a directive passed by voters under Proposition E in 1999 to merge all departments into one agency to better govern the streets. Whether that has been working is something transit advocates have been debating. Some have even called the move a failure.

Many advocates had hoped to bring some fresh blood into the position and wanted the SFMTA to hire someone with a bold vision for streets governance, similar to what has happened in New York City under the leadership of NYC Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan.

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Cheryl Brinkman, one of the original organizers of Sunday Streets who has a strong history of livable streets advocacy, will be nominated today by Mayor Gavin Newsom to serve a four-year term on the SFMTA Board, filling one of two vacancies that have been left empty since May 1, Streetsblog has learned.

"Cheryl Brinkman is exactly the kind of candidate that Mayor Newsom hoped would apply," said Newsom's spokesperson, Tony Winnicker. "She has tremendous experience as a transit rider and is a transit advocate. She will bring great perspective and energy and ideas to the MTA."

The move to nominate a director with such solid credentials was roundly cheered by transit advocates, who applauded the Mayor for choosing such a laudable advocate for sustainable transportation to a board that has been dominated by loyalists who rarely break from Room 200's wishes.

While acknowledging he has a clear bias, Livable City Executive Director Tom Radulovich called Brinkman a transportation superhero. "She is one of the hard workers and has really worked behind the scenes to make Sunday Streets happen," he said. "I think she's going to be a great asset to the MTA."

Radulovich added that Brinkman is someone who really gets the land use and transportation connection along with the complexities of funding transportation improvements.

Brinkman, 45, is the president of the Livable City Board of Directors, and a senior product manager at McKesson Corporation. A 24-year San Francisco resident, she has logged more than a thousand volunteer hours for Sunday Streets, and in addition to Livable City, serves on the Market-Octavia Citizen Advisory Committee and is the former chair of the Pedestrian Safety Advisory Committee. She will resign from those positions once she is confirmed by the Board of Supervisors, which has never rejected any of the Mayor's appointments to the SFMTA Board.

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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!

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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.

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