Streetsblog San Francisco

It may look like a forgotten military landscape, decaying beneath an elevated freeway and overgrown with weeds, but hidden beneath the abandoned buildings and broken pavement, Presidio planners see the potential to regenerate a wetland.

Quartermaster Reach is currently so neglected, most people don't even know it exists. Floating between Lucasfilm's Letterman complex and the Presidio Post Office, some sections have been abandoned for decades. A disused power plant sits at one end and piles of dirt and construction debris mark the northern edge. Once home to Yelamu Ohlone, Mexican settlers commandeered the area's flow of fresh water in the 1700s, the military established a shooting range on the site in the 1800s and paving for Doyle Drive had erased the site's history by the 1930s.

But Doyle Drive may hold the key to the 9.5-acre site's restoration. Nearing the century-mark, the elevated freeway is currently being replaced with a slightly-lower-impact Presidio Parkway. When construction is complete, the landscape underneath the freeway may transform from asphalt to wetland.

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Drive north from San Francisco for a few hours, and the 101 will gradually melt into a slim road between giant sequoia trees. You've found your way to Richardson Grove State Park, where you can see thousand-year-old redwoods, the South Fork Eel River, and lots of campgrounds, but you won't see any big box stores.

That's thanks, at least in part, to the narrowness of the 101. With a speed limit of 35 miles per hour, most tractor-trailers are banned from the park. This has helped keep sprawl to a minimum, but some Humboldt officials have long complained that it isolates the county and limits commerce.

In response to the politicians, Caltrans spent about a decade working on the Richardson Grove Improvement Project, which culminated this May in a Final Environmental Impact Report.

As described, Caltrans' project would widen the highway and eliminate detours for trucks, shortening the trip from Oakland to Eureka from 725 miles to 279.

And that's where things get controversial.

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San Franciscans don't often spend their days contriving ways to spend more time near freeway off-ramps, especially when proximity to freeways can be a risk to your health, but the city's newest park along the I-280 exit at Sixth and Brannan Streets may make you think twice about it.

City leaders officially launched the park with an opening ceremony this afternoon, and with the success of the Pavement to Parks program, which reclaimed underused street space for public parks and plazas, the Department of Public Works and Caltrans have now embarked on a series of upgrades across the city on what we'll unofficially dub, "Off-Ramps to Parks."

"Creating beautiful, livable, vibrant, and sustainable spaces is an important part of our work, however, we cannot do it alone," said DPW Director Ed Reiskin. "These types of partnerships are critical in an era when we are seeking the most efficient way to clean and beautify the city."

On this sunny Wednesday afternoon, it appeared the demand for green space was strong -- even along a freeway off-ramp. Several groups of people lounged along the paths, and the hum of the exiting cars could almost be mistaken for the babbling of a creek (the exhaust of the cars was less mistakable, though a strong breeze and the trees helped mitigate that.) The park includes walking paths, new trees, flowers, and other landscaping upgrades like boulders, which serve as the only seating at present.

"Before, it didn't have all the greenery. All it had was a bum," said Megan Bluxome, an art student who used to live nearby, but hadn't returned to the area recently. "It looks like it's not part of the city, a very short natural walk -- right next to the freeway."

"It's an escape," she added.

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Despite a stated Transit First policy, the Transbay Joint Powers Authority (TJPA) and the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) are encouraging solo drivers to bring their cars into San Francisco's downtown and park all day at low prices, according to a parking union who has been picketing in front of a temporary 250-space parking lot at 80 Natoma/81 Minna Street, the site of the future Transbay Transit Center.

Teamsters Local 665, which represents city parking workers and some private sector parking workers, has been picketing this week in front of a parking lot administered by ABC Parking, a non-union company, demanding that TJPA and Caltrans shut the parking lots down and use the property for open space.

"If you are going to drive into San Francisco, it’s the premium way to get into town and [it should] not be subsidized by Caltrans," said Local 665 President Mark Gleason, who asserted that Caltrans and TJPA lots were half the price of nearby municipal parking facilities. Gleason argued the MTA, which runs Muni, could be getting a lot more money from parking if those facilities were not in business and drivers had to park in municipal lots. Even if they chose to park in private facilities, said Gleason, they would pay more money and the city could collect more parking tax revenue.

"The service they are providing should dovetail with the Transit First Policy and should not be adversarial to it," said Gleason. The union estimates there are at least 7,000 parking spaces in more than 15 Caltrans easements that could be closed.

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The tax tricks known as SILOs
– in which major banks snapped up rail cars and other pieces of public
infrastructure from cash-strapped localities, only to lease them back
and claim a tax write-off — has prompted an outcry from the Hill as Wall Street’s biggest players invoked obscure claims to wring money from local transit agencies.

Congress
formally banned SILOs (short for "sale in, lease outs") in 2004, but
some banks are so intent protecting their deals that a court battle is
needed to settle the cases.

And in one such dispute, Wells Fargo has lost a $115 million SILO lawsuit against the same federal government that gave the bank a $25 billion bailout last year. From the opinion released by federal claims court Judge Thomas Wheeler:

Although well disguised in a sea of paper and complexity,
the SILO transactions essentially amount to Wells Fargo’s
purchase of tax benefits for a fee from a tax-exempt entity that
cannot use the deductions.

Wells Fargo had taken on the government over a passel of 26 SILOs,
including several signed with transit agencies in New Jersey,
Washington D.C., California, and Harris County, Texas. A Belgian
telecom company was also party to one of the tax shelters at issue in
the suit.

In
some of the deals, beleaguered insurance company AIG had agreed to
underwrite the SILOs. The precipitous fall of AIG’s credit rating last
year as it headed for an $80 billion bailout triggered some of the major banks’ claims to SILO payments from transit agencies.

As
lawmakers continue to weigh legislation that would slap a 100 percent
excise tax on banks’ SILO proceeds, however, it’s important to note
that local transit agencies weren’t necessarily innocent victims in
some of the deals. When Congress moved to outlaw SILOs four years ago,
transit officials were seen lobbying alongside banks to preserve the shelters.

One
former lawyer for Caltrans, California’s state DOT, even bragged last
fall that he had put one over on Wells Fargo by structuring the deal to
shield his employers from liability. "I sold [the bank] the Brooklyn
Bridge," he told BusinessWeek.

A Wells Fargo spokeswoman told Bloomberg today that the bank is weighing whether to pursue an appeal.

Stephen O'Brien has been coaxing an oasis out of a most unlikely environment for a long time: the small green patches at either end of the ground level Mission Street frontage of the Transbay Terminal. He started back in 1958, when the old Key System train tracks that used to bring East Bay electric streetcars to the Transbay Terminal were being torn out. The Transbay Terminal in those days was a crucial commuter hub, bringing passengers from all over the East Bay. If you've ever ridden the F bus from Berkeley to San Francisco, you've ridden on the descendant of the same-lettered streetcar that once transported you from downtown Berkeley to downtown San Francisco just a minute longer than BART does today!

O'Brien is having his last day working his gardens at the Transbay Terminal today. His company's contract with Caltrans has ended, and he has been transferred to the State Building or the PUC building grounds. He's almost 80 years old and if he doesn't like his new posting, he'll probably retire soon. It'll be hard to match the half century he's spent cultivating the quiet, almost invisible oases at the Transbay Terminal. I heard about O'Brien from my friend Susanne Zago:

"Every morning I step out of the Transbay Terminal, one of the ugliest places I've ever been, and I notice this small green space as I leave. Sometimes it was completely trashed, but the next day I'd look in and it would be restored to its pristine condition. I looked at the trees, surprisingly mature, wondering what was planned for them as they build the new Transbay Center. I started asking around, and no one knew. One day I met this man who was in the space and it turned out to be Stephen."

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Caltrans and the Capitol Corridor Joint Powers Authority (CCJPA) have announced an increase in bicycle capacity on the nation's third-busiest Amtrak line, which serves 16 stations spanning eight Northern California counties, after a survey of riders found that nearly nine percent, or 150,000, of its estimated 1.7 million annual rail passengers rides bicycles.

From the press release:

"Due to a dramatic increase in the use of bicycles on the Capitol Corridor trains, all 14 of the original 1995-era cab cars have been retrofitted to accommodate an additional four bicycles on the lower level," CCJPA Chair Jim Holmes said. "These new bike racks are in addition to the three bicycle racks that already exist on the cab cars. When we combine the retrofit cabs with the five newer, 2002-era cab cars, which utilize wall-mounted storage racks to accommodate 13 bicycles, it provides about 130 more racks each weekday to help accommodate the hundreds of cyclists who bring their bikes on board."

Once funding is secured and a retrofit is complete, Holmes said at least one cab car on each train should be able to accommodate up to 13 bicycles "plus an additional three on all coach cars." All in all, bicycle capacity will increase by 34 percent.

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When Joshua David formed Friends of the High Line in 1999 and started raising money to transform abandoned train tracks in mid-Manhattan into an elevated urban park, more than a few people thought him nuts. With the opening of the High Line in June and the warm reception it has received by the public, however, planners who have their eyes on other abandoned rail infrastructure are feeling emboldened and hopeful their projects will receive more serious consideration, including a new proposal to preserve the existing east span of the Bay Bridge for a park and development.

Ronald Rael, Principal at Rael San Fratello Architects and Professor of Architecture at UC Berkeley's graduate program, has developed a plan that would preserve the existing cantilever and truss section of the Bay Bridge and transform the span into a park and mixed-use development. In homage to the High Line, Rael's project is dubbed The Bay Line (PDF).

Rael and Berkeley have submitted their proposal to a design competition sponsored by UCLA, but have not made a formal proposal to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) or Caltrans, both of which are not likely to support any more changes to construction of the Bay Bridge.

Though MTC spokesperson Randy Rentschler hadn't seen the proposal, he called any attempt to preserve the old span a "pipe dream." "We won't leave it up for the same reason we are taking it down. That is, there is a real chance this bridge segment won't stand up in a quake. Also, keeping it maintained is cost prohibitive."

He added, joking, "Past that, it would be a great permanent location of the Summer X Games."

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With BART's operators' union declaring an imminent strike that will shut down the entire system starting this Monday, Bay Area commuters are scrambling to find other options for getting to work, particularly from the East Bay, where BART and the Bay Bridge are the two primary transportation links across the water.

Despite gridlock expected on the roads as hundreds of thousands of BART riders move to other transit operators or their cars, Caltrans doesn't plan to alter its traffic management across the Bay Bridge.

"At this point we're going to operate within our standard traffic management. We're going to adjust metering lights as is necessary," said Caltrans District 4 spokesperson Lauren Wonder. She noted that Caltrans engineers would be out monitoring traffic throughout the day starting on Monday and for the duration of the strike in order to gauge the traffic impacts as they arise. "We are looking at possibly changing hours on HOV lanes, but if you make it too restrictive, you might alienate a portion of the community and make those other mixed flow lanes even more crowded."

While she didn't rule out the possibility of converting a mixed-flow lane into a transit-only lane if deemed appropriate by Caltrans engineers, that option is not expected, said Wonder, in part because AC Transit and other transit operators are running at near-capacity conditions and don't have that many more buses to put into service.

"You have to look at the big picture and if a transit-only lane would result in more overall traffic," she said.

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