Streetsblog San Francisco

Fixing streets more frequently keeps them in better shape and saves money in the long run. Source: San Francisco Department of Public Works

Last week San Francisco voters approved a $248 million bond to fix streets, which means the city will soon begin the largest repaving expenditure in its history. For the next three years, San Francisco will spend more than three times the amount it has normally budgeted for street repairs. Ninety million dollars will go to bicycle, pedestrian, transit, and infrastructure improvements (we’ll have more on those projects next week).

“There’s a lot of pride from folks in the bike coalition in getting this passed,” said Kit Hodge, deputy director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. SFBC helped draft the proposition, went door to door, and sent out 42,000 mailers on the issue. This support may have been crucial: The proposition exceeded the required two-thirds majority by just under 3,000 votes.

The bond can only do so much, however. It pays for only three years of work and is insufficient to complete the backlog of repaving projects. “This won’t totally fix all the deferred maintenance,” said Department of Public Works spokesperson Gloria Chan. “We still need to find a permanent funding source.”

The problem is that San Francisco has neglected its streets, failing to pay for preventive care since the early 1990’s. Putting things off until later — deferred maintenance — comes at a steep price. It’s actually cheaper to do maintenance more often and keep roads smooth. Engineers have estimated that it costs about three times as much to let streets deteriorate to a broken-down, pothole-scarred state.

Maintaining streets is one of those basic good-government policies that pretty much everyone agrees with. But it’s not sexy. Slurry seals never won fame for a politician. And so far, no one has stepped up to make a permanent solution to this problem.

Read more…

Crews perform sewer work on Cesar Chavez, a prelude to streetscape changes scheduled for completion in 2013. Photos: Aaron Bialick

Construction on the Cesar Chavez Sewer and Streetscape Improvement Project will be completed a few months behind schedule in summer 2013, according to the SF Department of Public Works.

DPW’s Kris Opbroek said the streetscape portion will begin in the spring as completion of the sewer work moves west. When finished, the project will transform Cesar Chavez Street, from Hampshire to Guerrero Streets, with a wide planted median, bicycle lanes, and pedestrian safety improvements.

City staff and construction crews showcased the site last Friday as Mayor Ed Lee, who formerly headed the DPW, paid a visit to the project. It’s the largest yet under the city’s Great Streets Program, which has completed six streetscape projects since it began in 2005 and has another nine in the pipeline or under construction, according to a press release from the mayor’s office. Cesar Chavez, budgeted at $35.2 million, is the biggest project funded by the Great Streets Program to date.

The SFMTA is also developing plans for bike lanes on the eastern side of Cesar Chavez, just across “The Hairball”, after the mayor’s office pressured the agency into dropping a previous iteration of the plan in June.

Read more…

Photo: ejbSF

Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of occasional stories on the “2011 Road Repaving and Street Safety Bond.”

A $248 million streets bond measure being pushed by San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and other electeds is on its way to the November ballot after being approved this week in a 9-2 vote by the Board of Supervisors. The “2011 Road Repaving and Street Safety Bond” would provide funds over three years to repave the city’s crumbling streets and fix cracked and buckling sidewalks. Streets with high volumes of transit, bicycle and pedestrian traffic would be prioritized.

“With more than half of our 850 miles of roadways deteriorating, we must confront the crisis in the condition of our streets now or we will face even greater costs and threats to public health and safety later,” Lee said in a statement released yesterday.

The San Francisco Department of Public Works (SFDPW) recently posted maps online that give a citywide breakdown of which streets stand to benefit from the bond money. The final list of streets would be “geographically equitable” and the SFDPW would “ensure that projects are evenly distributed to all parts of the city” without raising property taxes.

The agency’s outgoing director, Ed Reiskin, recently appointed to head the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, said funding sources to improve street conditions have gradually declined over the years, and the measure is urgently needed to rebuild a growing backlog of streets in poor condition.

“We have a huge need. That backlog is maybe three quarters of a billion dollars, and there’s just no way that we can dig out of that hole using the operating dollars that are funding police and firefighters and library services and health and human services,” Reiskin told Streetsblog in a recent interview.

Read more…

A staffer for State Senator Leland Yee presents signatures to the SFMTA Board opposing Nat Ford's severance package.

In a unanimous vote, the SFMTA Board of Directors this afternoon approved a $384,000 severance package for outgoing Executive Director/CEO Nat Ford, and announced that the agency will accept applications for the top job until July 1, when he is scheduled to depart.

The vote came without any discussion among board members. The only person to testify against the payout was a staffer for State Senator and mayoral candidate Leland Yee, who said he was presenting 1,200 signatures to the board from San Francisco voters opposing what the campaign has been calling a golden parachute.

Yee showed up at City Hall after the meeting to tell reporters he was disappointed with the vote.

“This is not really about Nat Ford. It’s about the MTA commission,” Yee said. “The fact that they arranged this particular deal whereby someone who is now going to get this humongous amount of money, and at the same time, we’re looking at not enough money to provide for the basic services for many riders throughout San Francisco. It’s rather disheartening.”

Yee has been claiming that with $384,000 “the entire city of San Francisco could park free of charge for 3 days. Or MUNI could be entirely free for a whole day. Or we could stripe 7 miles of new bike lanes.”

Yee’s figures might resonate with some voters, but they don’t exactly add up. Considering Muni has 700,000 daily boardings, $384,000 would not cover a free day of Muni, nor would it cover 3 days of free parking considering the SFMTA generates about $200 million in annual parking revenue.

Numbers aside, Yee’s press releases mention free parking before free transit, a troubling sign that he thinks good public relations is pandering to drivers, despite the city’s Transit First policy. Yee has also voted with state legislators to cut funding for Muni, and other Bay Area transit agencies.

Read more…

One proposal for re-purposing Mason Street as a park between the new North Beach Branch Public Library and Joe DiMaggio Playground. Courtesy Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects

Nearly two years after San Francisco reclaimed a short block of Mason Street in North Beach as a trial plaza, the SF Board of Supervisors yesterday approved the environmental impact report for the planned expansion of the North Beach Public Library.

The unanimous vote came as a relief to the majority of neighbors and some city supervisors who were eager to see the project come to fruition after being stalled by a handful of opponents.

“The tortured path of this project is in many ways symbolic of the dysfunctionality in land use in San Francisco,” said Supervisor Scott Wiener. ”We have a highly popular, beautifully designed project to replace an outdated and inaccessible structure with a beautiful, usable and accessible new library; to create additional, much-needed open space in a densely populated neighborhood.”

Read more…

Photo: Myleen Hollero/Orange Photography

San Franciscans are dreaming big as Market Street’s transformation approaches in 2015, when the city’s most important street is scheduled to be redesigned and repaved. City planners are engaging with citizens to answer a century-old question: How can we make Market Street the glorious thoroughfare that it needs to be?

Better Market Street, a collaborative project of five city agencies, has held public meetings and webinars the past two weeks to field input from people who walk, bike, ride transit, and even drive along the street. The effort is being informed by a large swath of research brought to the table by city staffers, which is now available on the Better Market Street website.

“Market Street is San Francisco’s civic backbone, connecting water to hills, businesses to neighborhoods, cultural centers to recreational opportunities,” the site’s about page states. “The movement of people and goods, from the very earliest times, has dominated its design and use. But Market Street needs to be more than a transportation route. It needs to be the city’s most vibrant public space and many San Franciscans feel it falls far short of this ideal.”

Block-by-block, hour-by-hour data documenting the urban environment were collected by researchers to help inform input from attendees at recent workshops. Researchers note everything from fluctuations in pedestrian and bicycle traffic along the street, to the conditions plaguing its extremely high volume of transit trips, to the placement of trees and how the usage of plazas is impacted by the sun and wind. Comparisons and best practices from major streets abroad help put it all in perspective.

Read more…

Mayor Ed Lee speaks at the groundbreaking. Photo: Aaron Bialick

Construction began on a model for sustainable streets in San Francisco today when Mayor Ed Lee and city officials broke ground on a block of Newcomb Avenue in the Bayview District, promising a much friendlier streetscape for residents and the environment.

“You see a vision right in front of your door,” Mayor Lee told an audience of residents and agency officials who collaborated on the project. “A vision that’s going to bring about slowing the traffic, trees, permeable landscaping – all kinds of things that you see other neighborhoods get.”

The treatments in the Model Block project [pdf], such as greener sidewalks and bulbouts, over twenty trees, raised crosswalks, and chicaned street parking with permeable pavement, aim to treat stormwater as it falls, enhance the public realm, and create a safer street by calming motor traffic.

“This is one block of our many streets of San Francisco that altogether cover 25 percent of our city,” said Department of Works Director Ed Reiskin. “But they were designed more for people to drive through than to be on, and to cover up the environment rather than to work with its natural processes.”

The innovative practice of treating stormwater with streetscape plantings, known as greenstreet treatments, has been commonly used in Portland, Oregon. That city lacks more expensive infrastructure like San Francisco’s rainwater storage facilities and controlled combined sewage system, which are not always able to handle loads of rainwater that fall on the streets.

Read more…