Streetsblog San Francisco

The study area for the Cesar Chavez East Community Design Plan. Image: SF Planning Dept.

The San Francisco Planning Department, the SFMTA and other city officials will present the new designs for Eastern Cesar Chavez Street to the community tonight, and a strong attendance is key. You’re encouraged to show up tonight and speak out in support of improvements that will transform the street environment for pedestrians and bicyclists.

For more details, check out this Streesblog story from last week.

The workshop begins at 6 p.m. in the community room of the Good Samaritan Family Resource Center at 1294 Potrero Avenue. Download the flyer here [pdf].

The current Cala Foods on Hyde Street is fronted by a parking lot. Photo: Bryan Goebel

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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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.

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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.

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Installation of the track that the builder will use to attach the pavers. Photos: Matthew Roth

Construction of the two newest parklets in San Francisco began today with the installation of a sidewalk extension on 24th Street between Sanchez Street and Vicksburg Street, with another to follow shortly on 24th near Noe Street.

The new spaces were designed by Riyad Ghannam, who designed and built the first parklet in the city in front of the Mojo Bicycle Cafe on Divisadero street. The parklets will replace a total of four parking spaces and cost $37,000, the entirety of which came from Mayor Gavin Newsom’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development as part of their commercial revitalization budget. The Noe Valley Association, which represents merchants in the area, is the permit holder and will oversee the maintenance of the facilities.

Learning from the Mojo parklet, the Planning Department’s Andres Power said they will be using pre-cast concrete pavers for the decking surface and steel planters, instead of wood and fiberglass at Mojo.

Referring to the public outreach process in Noe Valley, where a vociferous group opposed closing Noe Street to create a trial plaza, Power struck a diplomatic tone and said the parklets provided some of the public space amenities without the controversy. “It was definitely a challenging public outreach process in Noe Valley. The vast majority of people who participated in the process came to consensus that there was a desire for public amenities,” said Power. “We wanted to be building community, not dividing people.”

Though Power was kind in his characterization of the process, the anti-plaza crowd got downright vicious, as demonstrated in this near Tea-Party reaction to proposals to close a street. What doesn’t appear on the video is the after effect, where several in the audience infected with The Rage charged the stage trying to bite Andres, which led to a full-scale quarantine of Noe Valley for a week.

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The parklet in front of Mojo Bicycle Cafe. Photo: Matthew Roth

In a city with an appetite for experimentation, San Francisco’s parklets are particularly fascinating. What began as a guerrilla arts intervention meant to demonstrate the need for more public open space has now become a fully permitted procedure for extending sidewalks into the street and has the small business community, which routinely opposes removing parking or charging more for it, aflutter with interest.

During the 5th annual Park(ing) Day in September this year, the Planning Department announced it had opened a request for proposals (RFP) period seeking applications from interested parties who wanted to re-purpose the parking in front of their buildings to build and manage parklets.

The RFP encouraged community benefit districts, businesses and non-profits to submit preliminary designs for parklets, which would be reviewed by a select committee representing various departments in the city, including the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), which manages parking and runs Muni and the Department of Public Works (DPW).

Applicants were encouraged to view parklets as sidewalk furniture meant to enhance public space. From the RFP: “Parklets are intended to provide space for people to sit, relax and enjoy the city around them, especially where narrow sidewalks would otherwise preclude such activities. They are intended to be seen as pieces of street furniture, providing aesthetic enhancements to the overall streetscape.”

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