Phil Ginsburg and Mayor Lee lead a convoy of Parkwide bicycles. Photo: Aaron Bialick

San Franciscans hungry for the arrival of a public bike-share system next spring can now get an appetizer with the launch of a new park-to-park bike rental concession linking popular recreational destinations throughout the city.

“Parkwide,” a new bike rental company developed in collaboration with the Recreation and Parks Department, today announced the launch of five sites throughout the city where users can pick up and drop off rented bicycles.

“This is the launch of what will eventually blossom into a park-to-park, and maybe someday a street-corner-to-street-corner network of bike rentals,” said SF Recreation and Parks General Manager Phil Ginsburg.

The service may be most suited to the needs of tourists, but it is expected to provide easy access to bicycle rentals for residents and visitors alike without the need to return the bikes to their original location. Parkwide is not bike-share by any stretch, but the multiple pick-up and drop-off locations lend it a bike-share-esque quality.

Parkwide bikes at the Golden Gate Park Music Concourse. Photo: Aaron Bialick

“You can just drop it off and not worry about it, everything is taken care of,” said Mayor Ed Lee. ”You have today the first semblance of bike sharing in the city.”

“If you have a bicycle in a park, you can easily get across the whole park in one day and even continue on to the next park,” said Parkwide’s Jeanne Orellana. ”You can ride from Golden Gate Park to the Marina Green and still go to the museums.”

Three Parkwide locations opened for business on September 24: Justin “Pee Wee” Herman Plaza at the foot of Market Street, the Golden Gate Park Music Concourse (behind the bandshell), and the nearby intersection of John F. Kennedy Drive and Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive on the weekends. Two more locations at the Marina Green and Union Square are expected to open in November and December, respectively.

The program is a collaboration between the Rec and Parks Department and San Francisco bike rental companies Bay City Bike, Blazing Saddles, and Bike and Roll — normally competitors.

Orellana, who also manages Bay City Bike, said the idea was proposed by the Recreation and Parks Department as a way to promote biking in and between the city’s parks.

“It was a big deal, because until then, we were just competitors,” she said. “We said, we’re either going to compete and no one’s going to get it because we’re not going to be happy, or we address it together.”

“We’ve been working so long on it that we’ve all gotten to be really good friends,” Orellana added.

Parkwide’s park-centric locale is its main distinction from the more traditional bike rental companies run by the owners, explained Orellana.

A bike share demo station in Golden Gate Park in 2009. Photo: Bryan Goebel

“In that sector, we’re all focusing on getting people over the Golden Gate Bridge,” she said. “[The goal of] the Parkwide platform is to promote the parks and the San Francisco neighborhoods.”

The Rec and Parks Department is expected to collect over $1 million in revenue over the next five years from the program, said Ginsburg.

In spring 2012, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency expects to launch a public bike-share pilot program featuring 500 bikes at 50 stations throughout the city’s downtown core. The system will also launch in cities along the Caltrain corridor: Mountain View, Palo Alto, Redwood City and San Jose.

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.”

“Any community would embrace and celebrate this project. Instead, a small group of opponents has stymied the broad community every step of the way,” he added.

The project involves creating a permanent open space on a 200-foot block of Mason Street that lies between the library’s current location and the triangle of land where it is expected to be moved. Doomsday traffic jam scenarios predicted by the persistent opponents were effectively debunked when traffic managers studied the impacts of the “closure” with a two-month long plaza trial in 2009.

“It not only helped to validate the analysis of the traffic impact, but really supported the notion that there was significant positive impact for the public for the increased open space,” said Ed Reiskin, the director of the Department of Public Works.

Wiener railed against attempts by the opponents to get the library nominated as a landmark, calling it a “disservice to historic preservation.”

“At some point, you come to the end of the road. We’re at the end of the road.”

A rendering of the JFK Drive bikeway. Image: SFBC

The expected construction of a physically-separated bikeway along a stretch of John F. Kennedy (JFK) Drive in Golden Gate Park will now come no sooner than December, according to a report from the San Francisco County Transportation Authority (SFCTA).

“All parties involved in the project recognize that they underestimated the complexity of the planning and design process…and agree that additional planning and design work is needed to move the project forward,” said a resolution [pdf] adopted by the SFCTA Board today which granted further planning funds to the SFMTA, the agency overseeing the project.

It was originally expected to be completed in December 2010 but the SFCTA now projects a full year of delay in the implementation schedule, with several different timeline and cost scenarios laid out. The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition (SFBC), which has been working with the various city agencies to prioritize the project, had hoped to see the project done by this spring.

One reason for the delay, according the report, is an expansion of the project’s scope. Initially, it only involved the section of JFK Drive from 8th Avenue to Transverse Drive, but it now includes bike facilities along the more complicated stretch east to Stanyan Street at end of the park.

The report says concerns were raised in the planning process including the safety of intersection designs, accommodations for shuttle loading to serve disabled visitors, and the removal of parking spots.

Engineers are also exploring multiple design options, including two one-way cycle tracks on either side of the road. Additional treatment options, including a “slurry” roadway seal and pavement coloring, wouldn’t go in until August and October 2012, respectively. Total construction costs range from $400,000 to $1,000,000.

“The devil’s always in the details,” said Recreation and Parks Department (RPD) Director of Policy and Public Affairs Sarah Ballard, who highlighted the need to develop a bikeway design that could be easily replicated for further expansion.

“The next goal would be to replicate [this project] throughout JFK all the way to the beach, and eventually fill in a more robust vision where you could bike between our 224 neighborhood parks on a separated bike lane on the streets,” said Ballard.

The SFBC has been working with the SFMTA and the RPD to get the cycle track implemented as the first piece of its Connecting the City vision for a network of safe crosstown bikeways. The project aims to create the first section of a “Bay to Beach” route welcoming enough for everyone from ages eight to eighty to ride on.

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!

British Petroleum should be given the death penalty. Oh wait! They don’t have death penalties for corporations. In fact, though they apparently have all the rights of individuals with respect to “free speech” (which they are free to buy at any price they wish), they cannot be held accountable as individuals for overtly criminal behavior. And even if they were, their bottom-line obsessing, litigation-phobic approach to the worst oil spill in history is just an example of normal corporate behavior in 2010. Their efforts to control press access and spin the story to their advantage have been consistent since the original accident, insisting on journalists being embedded on BP boats or planes so they can control what is seen and reported.

Penalizing corporate executives that get “caught” only legitimizes the rest of the criminal class in their everyday destruction of the planet. Maybe BP executives will be held criminally responsible (probably not), but the entity whose logic controls the behavior of anyone who is its executive is virtually immune. Unlike its political competitors in human form, the corporation is also apparently immortal.

The abject obeisance of the Obama government during the first 30 days of the oil geyser is a shame. Government ignorance and inaction, following the routine corruption that granted safety and environmental waivers to BP for this drilling project, should rock its legitimacy as much as Chernobyl did the Soviet government’s in 1986. I hope that blind faith in technology would also suffer a severe blow. Assurances about safe technology, proper safe guards, etc. are made about all our energy sources, from undersea oil drilling to nuclear power to the fictional “clean coal.” (Just last Tuesday I was speaking at a class at UC Santa Cruz where a couple of earnest students tried to argue that nuclear power was the solution to global warming!) This oil geyser resembles nothing so much as an uncontrollable nuclear meltdown. But rather than radiating thousands of square miles of countryside as happened in the Ukraine in 1986, this is filling the Gulf of Mexico with billions of gallons of crude oil. The sea is already dying, which is beginning to cascade into seaside communities and economies. The death of the Gulf will have unknown further effects on weather, ocean ecology, bird migration, and much more, and that’s before the massive underwater oil plume reaches the gulf stream in the Atlantic and does even more damage. It’s an insane, unwanted experiment in a foreseeable and preventable ecological catastrophe of unprecedented scope and severity.

Turns out that BP is closer to us, in a bigger way, than a lot of folks realize. Only a couple of years ago BP and the University of California at Berkeley signed a $500 million deal that will build a new biofuels research institute at the school, to be managed by BP and it is to BP that all patent discoveries will go. Obama’s Energy Secretary Steven Chu was the UC official who made the deal. Now his deputy energy secretary is the former chief scientist for BP! Maybe folks who want to protest this disaster should explore an alliance with the dynamic student movement that has already been in motion since last fall. Protest and obstruction do have their place.

Nature in the City's new proposal for a 10-mile "wild" corridor.

But other things are afoot in San Francisco too of a more affirmative nature. A couple of weeks ago the Public Utilities Committee of the Board of Supervisors held a well-attended public hearing regarding new ways of working with local water supplies from ground water and storm water to rain catchment and graywater. On Wednesday night Nature in the City presented their new campaign for a Bioregional Park (PDF) in the heart of San Francisco, a long-term feature of which is a 10-mile corridor that sweeps from the Presidio in the north down the spine of the City’s major peaks and then angling east across McLaren Park to Bayview Hill and Candlestick Point.  A natural corridor that knits together as many existing open spaces and parks as possible, planted with native plants to restore basic habitat for local critters, bugs and plants, would also help them to migrate through the urban environment. Bikeways, hiking paths, even daylighted creeks could be part of this.

And the SF Bike Coalition just announced their new campaign Connecting the City—San Francisco's Crosstown Bikeways for All (which is not as ambitious—after all these years—as a modest little flyer I put out in 1987 calling for a City of Panhandles). So far it’s a campaign to raise money, but it demonstrates a willingness to finally push for a more serious challenge to the dominance of private cars over our public streets. It’s a campaign that dovetails nicely with the notion of a wild corridor, new ways to think about watersheds and underground creeks, and more. It’s welcome development for the bigger agenda of altering how we live.

Ultimately these small choices are the only way we CAN start to lay a new foundation, technologically and socially, for a real transformation of life that will preclude disasters of the magnitude in the Gulf. A materially comfortable life for all should be the goal of a creative and energetic campaign of social and technological re-invention so that we radically reduce our use of energy, water, and other materials.

Combining the various incipient insurgencies for other uses of public streets, maybe we can start by getting some accurate numbers. What percentage of the land area of San Francisco is covered in public streets? What percentage of that street area is dedicated to cars as opposed to bicycles, pedestrians, or even transit lines (obviously buses use the same streets as cars, but not nearly as many streets as cars; nor do they generally park curbside)? What percentage is open space, parklands, sidewalk gardens, etc.? What are the largest contiguous zones of open lands not built on in some fashion?

I propose that once we get the numbers, which we can only guess at now, it will be possible to raise the demand for a specific percentage of city streets being permanently turned over to new uses, including daylighting subterranean waterways, building city-spanning parkways for crosstown bicycling, walking, and for the critters, scurrying and slithering. What do you think? Five percent of the streets converted to new auto-free uses? 10 percent? 25 percent? How far can we go?

Our era is characterized by a profound impotence in the face of national and global breakdowns. We don’t have a political vision, let alone a movement of movements, ready for prime time. We have to build the capacity to reinvent life one block, one neighborhood, one city at a time. The good news is that thousands of your friends and neighbors are already involved in just these efforts. Paul Hawken in his book “Blessed Unrest” identifies 30 million grassroots environmental organizations around the world! He calls them the immune system for Earth. Let’s hope the immune system will behave like our own bodily immune systems, and start killing the threats to our global health, the corporations that left unchecked will certainly kill us and everything else on the planet.

Cross sections of tree stumps for seating on Mason Street. Photo: SurfaceWork

The Mason Street trial closure is meant to test in real time what the traffic models and transportation engineers predict will result in minimal traffic disruptions should the city decide to close the street permanently. The traffic studies are required for environmental review of the expansion plans of the North Beach Branch Library, with one of the build options compelling the removal of the roadway to transform it into park space.

"Everyone thought there would be a real advantage from moving away from computer models and theories," said Julie Christensen of the Friends of Joe DiMaggio Playground, a public playground that abuts Mason Street here. "We said if you are going to have this road closure for two months, and there is so little public space in the area, why not create a new public space?"

"I think we had three weeks to prepare once they decided on the closure date," said Christensen. "What do you do with a tight deadline, you look to your strengths. Rec and Park and DPW bent over backwards to put their staff at our disposal to get this done."

When city traffic managers settled on closing the street for the trial from August 1st to September 28th, they called on Rebar Art Collective to help them with the design. Rebar is probably best known for starting Park(ing) Day and coordinating the construction of the Civic Center Victory Garden, among other projects.

"I just have to say how enormously grateful we were for Rebar's involvement," Christensen added. "Their familiarity with urban scale, and their understanding of the materials and their ability to assess the assets at their disposal were so important to make this happen."

John Bela of Rebar (left) oversees construction of the plaza on Saturday, August 1. Photo:SurfaceWork

Rebar's John Bela said this was an "opportunity to make a new public space and use it to demonstrate what a permanent space could look and feel like." He also said that the turnaround for the project was remarkably fast, with Rebar's design concept presented to the city agencies only four days before implementation.

"There were 20-30 volunteers with DPW and Rec and Park, all there working together, busting ass and pitching in to make this thing happen," said Bela.

And just as quickly as the plaza went in, it is expected to be taken out by the end of the trial.

"Everything on that street is begged or borrowed," said Christiansen. The rice straw wattle used to contain the saw dust beds will be used on a soil erosion project in October; the plants from Rec and Park will be dispersed at various parks; the trees will go back to the Rec and Park nursery in Golden Gate Park; and the planters demarcating the street boundary will be used by DPW in future Pavement to Parks projects.

Andres Power of the Planning Department said the only way the trial could remain beyond the deadline is if the community asked loudly enough for it. "If the community comes around and asks for it to stay, we can go back to ISCOTT and ask for an extension, but right now the permit terminates at the end of September."

Christensen said there would be light programming, such as musicians and library-sponsored crafts days. The local Gino and Carlo Bar planned to hold its weekly Bocce tournament in the space for several Sundays in August.

"We were standing out there yesterday and the world was not coming to an end. North Beach was not hopelessly snarled in traffic," said Christensen. "People have these Christmas faces on, like it's Christmas day and this present has been dropped on them."

She sounded hopeful that there might be an extension, but said she was thrilled just to see the reactions from the neighborhood no matter how long the trial lasts:

It's not just turning pavement into parks, it's a nexus that creates a place for people to be, to run into each other. It was causing neighbors to talk to each other, and not just between like-minded people. It was the little Chinese kid playing, the homeless guy, the families with kids, the crotchety old neighbors. It caused them to be happy, to be open to each other. It's what the placemaking people tell us will happen when you open up the street this way.

Rice straw wattle used for planters. Photo Rebar Art Collective

Maple trees from Rec and Park in planters. Board of Supervisors' Prez David Chiu with work gloves and a shovel. Photo: SurfaceWork

Moving saw dust into the beds. Photo: Rebar Art Collective

Volunteers and agency staff getting face time with BoS Prez Chiu. Photo Rebar Art Collective

Mason Street triangle will be future home of North Beach Branch Public Library. Photo from corner of Lombard St and Columbus Ave. Courtesy: Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects.

Despite the protestation from a few community members at last week's ISCOTT meeting and concern from Fisherman's Wharf businesses that the timing could be better, the city decided to test the closure at the height of tourist season to measure peak traffic rather than waiting for an off-peak period when results might not represent similar travel demand.

"The whole point of this analysis is to demonstrate the worst-case scenario, traffic at peak periods," said the Planning Department's Andres Power, who was responsible for ushering the trial through the city's maze of agencies responsible for street closures. "Ultimately it would be a disservice to do it in November. If the catastrophic failure [some are predicting] happens now, it would be better to know."

Mason Street trial closure as approved by city traffic managers from August 1st-September 27th. Courtesy Planning Department

"Historically, the playground was there long before the library," said Mindy Linetzky, BLIP Bond Program Administrator for the DPW. "Mayor Christopher in the 1950s put the library on top of a tennis court. We're trying to remedy what was done 50 years ago to take the library out of the park."

The library will be constructed on the triangle regardless of whether or not the city closes Mason Street to traffic permanently, said Linetzky.

Prior to the ISCOTT meeting, the Fisherman's Wharf Community Betterment District (CBD) sent a letter to members saying that Executive Director Kevin Carroll would speak out against the trial because of its impacts to traffic during the busiest period of the year. After discussions with the Planning Department and other agencies to explain that the peak-period closure would give definitive data, Carroll's opposition was blunted.

"Our original thought would be to try to do the timing outside of the busiest tourist time," said Carroll, who noted that his constituents didn't want to stand in the way of the trial but wanted to be active partners in understanding how the traffic data would be conducted. "We wanted to express our concerns and be involved in how the measurements are done, look at the results."

The trial closure data will be aggregated with other traffic studies in the environmental review (EIR) that the city expects to complete in early 2010. Even if the EIR shows degradation of Vehicular Level of Service with a permanent closure of Mason Street, said Power, the Board of Supervisors could decide to override the concern, arguing that the improved green space trumps the convenience to motorists accessing Fisherman's Wharf.

One proposal among many 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.

Photo: Susan Vaughan

In early April, Caltrans contractors replaced the sidewalk curb ramps along Park Presidio, but left without ensuring a smooth transition between the clean, new curb ramps and the road pavement.  Instead, they filled in the spaces between the curb ramps and the roads with bumpy, uneven black asphalt – or they left unfilled gaps. While a minor difference in grade may not appear to be a problem for most pedestrians, it is a major burden for visually and mobility impaired users trying to access bus stops along Park Presidio and its cross streets. At the least it's an unacceptably sloppy job, though the new curb ramps could be in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

“Accessible routes of travel are required from the new curb ramp through the crosswalk, even if the item is
still under construction," said John Paul Scott of the Mayor’s Office on Disability. "The asphalt should be suitably patched even if the milling and resurfacing of the street is to be done later.”

Park Presidio is a part of California State Route 1, but this particular project is a joint project between Caltrans and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. Estimated to cost $18.4 million, its purpose is to upgrade signalization and curb ramps in order to improve traffic flow and enhance pedestrian safety from Lake Street past San Francisco State University.  It is scheduled for completion by the summer of 2010.

Adding insult to potential injury, Ghilotti Brothers, Inc., the sub-contractor hired by W. Bradley Electric, Inc. to complete that portion of the job, was supposed to only do alternate diagonal corners at each intersection.

“It didn’t happen that way,” said W. Bradley Electric Project Manager Brian Finley.  “There was scolding going on with the contractors.”

At the intersection of Fulton and Park Presidio, for example, Ghilotti Brothers did both the northeast and the northwest corners at the same time. This created the potential for collisions involving pedestrians and vehicles who were trying to cross the boulevard, as there is no crosswalk at the southern end of the intersection.

Finley said that the crumbly black asphalt – known as ‘cold patch’ or ‘cut back’ – is supposed to be temporary. When countdown signals and fresh cement are installed south of Golden Gate Park, the contractors will return to intersections north of the park to lay down ‘hot patch’ – or smoother, more permanent concrete transitions from the curb ramps to the roadways.

When the ‘hot patch’ will be installed is still not clear.

The San Francisco Department of Public Works inspected the intersections between Lake and Golden Gate Park, according to DPW spokesperson Christine Falvey.  "Our street and sidewalk inspectors are contacting Caltrans to restore the curb areas (even temporarily) to provide better access until they can come back and complete the work."

“Caltrans and the MTA are both talking about the possibility of additional corrective asphalt” at the intersections, added Finley, but if representatives of Caltrans and the MTA do not give him instructions soon, he said he'll  "be obligated to proceed.”  Once he receives word from Caltrans, contractors will be able to go back in and complete the curb ramp project.

According to Ghilotti Brothers Project Manager Mike Powers, the correction of the ramps, with hot patch, may happen on Thursday and Friday, June 19th and 20th.  Per the contract, the hot patch will extend 2 to 4 feet into the road pavement at most intersections, but at one corner at California and Park Presidio, it may extend 7 to 8 feet.

W. Bradley Electric and Ghilotti Brothers also disturbed SF Recreation and Park Department work along the pathways between Funston and Park Presidio and 14th Avenue and Park Presidio.  Sprinklers and plants were damaged or removed, according to nearby resident and Recreation and Parks volunteer Patty Phleger.

"We all want them to be accountable and for them to take care of their mistakes," said Phleger.