Concept for Mission and Cesar Chavez intersection redesign. Image: Planning Department

It appears 2010 is the year the stewards of San Francisco's streets have marked to figure out how to cooperate with each other to design and build a better realm. While the much touted Better Streets Plan synthesizes best practice principles and standards for street design, the release of a new City Controller report (weeks early!) outlined how the city family has historically failed to work together to better our streets [PDF], reminding us of the distance each agency has to bridge before the public sees any concrete improvements.

The Controller's report recommended the city shoul "create and institute an efficient and thorough project design process to increase the consistency of proactive outreach by project managers to City experts and public stakeholders during the project concept phase." The report also recommends consolidating streetscape planning and delivery resources to inform developers and community partners.

Perhaps anticipating the Controller's study, project managers from the Planning Department, MTA, Department of Public Works (DPW) and Public Utilities Commission (PUC) yesterday gave a progress report at SPUR's weekly lunchtime forum on the redesign of Cesar Chavez Street between Guerrero and Highway 101, arguing that the past two years of coordination on the project was the new standard for designing, funding, and building a world class street.

"Each agency has its charge and our projects get programmed that way, they get planned that way with that mission in mind," said Kris Opbroek, project manager for the DPW. "One of the things that's shifting is all the agencies are thinking of the public right-of-way as a whole, not just a sewer project, or just a transit project."

Staff reiterated that the process of reconstructing Cesar Chavez, the first phase of which begins later this year with drainage and sewer renovation under the street, had taught the city valuable lessons in cooperation between agencies that seldom look to each other for advice in project design. This coordination, according to the Planning Department's Andres Power, enabled the project to go after more grant funding that each individual agency would have been unable to secure on its own, including a recent $1.2 million grant from the EPA for innovative greenstreet treatments meant to capture runoff at the street level.

That the street is currently a disgrace is beyond question, particularly for pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders. As the MTA's Mike Salaberry said, "If you like barren streetscapes only good at one thing, then you probably have no problem with Cesar Chavez."

The six-lane street moves between 30,000 and 50,000 cars daily and is designed to meet level-of-service capacity during the evening rush hour. Essentially, said Salaberry, Cesar Chavez is optimized for two hours of traffic each weekday, which is roughly 6 percent of a week. This privileging of peak-period traffic over all other users for the rest of the week is a relic of a different era, when traffic engineers expected to convert the street and neighboring Guerrero into freeway feeders.

For pedestrians, the primary issue is crossing Cesar Chavez in the north-south direction, given the width of the street. At Mission and Cesar Chavez, for instance, pedestrians have to cross seven lanes with numerous turning vehicles, many of which don't slow down to make the turn. The new plan for the intersection, paid for in part with developer fees from the 555 Bartlett condo building and Walgreens, will include pedestrian refuges in the new median island and bulbouts that will cut down the crossing distance. Similar treatments will run the length of the proposed reconstruction in an attempt to mitigate the barrier that the street is currently, dividing the neighborhoods on either side of it.

Another concern during the redesign is accommodation of day laborers, who routinely line Cesar Chavez sidewalks waiting for work from passing vehicles exiting Highway 101. One option being considered by the city would move the Day Labor Program office from its current location just off Cesar Chavez to a new building on Bayshore Boulevard, near the Lowes. While the proposal could improve safety for both day laborers and drivers by preventing unsafe stops on the busy Chavez corridor, some neighbors say the new location is not ideal.

Fran Taylor of the community group CC Puede pointed out that the city's plan for the new site by the Lowes would require a shuttle bus from the Mission, where many of the day laborers live, in no small part because it is nearly impossible to walk through the Highway 101 and Cesar Chavez interchange nicknamed the "hairball."

While applauding the agency efforts for the street redesign, Taylor reminded the audience that she and her neighbors had been agitating for changes to the street since 2005, well before the city came around to the prospect of rethinking the street. Taylor noted that they had collected more than 600 signatures in favor of traffic calming and street improvements and that they had conducted numerous outreach meetings to respond to concerns about lane reductions and cut-through traffic on residential streets in the Mission and Precita.

Elevated Transbay Park. Images: Planning Department

The Planning Department's Joshua Switzky, one of the lead authors, said like any draft plan this one will fluctuate based on the public and the Planning Commission's feedback, but the principles espoused in it should remain intact.

"The plan that we put out is clearly the one we think is the best plan. Depending on what the Commission wants to do, we will potentially make changes. It's kind of really open to the process," said Switzky.

Switzky pointed to several key recommendations, ones that could prove contentious several years down the line when more detailed proposals are hammered out. One is assuring the quality of pedestrian accessibility with the objective in the plan to maintain, on average, 21-foot sidewalks, 15 feet for circulation and 6 feet of curbside amenities, such as bike racks, benches, street trees, or news boxes.

"That will mean different things on different streets," said Switzky. "On some streets, the only way to achieve that will be to eliminate on-street parking. Sometimes it might mean eliminating a travel lane." Sometimes, he said, it could be a combination of both. "The future of this area is probably a lot less on-street parking than there is today."

Click to enlarge: A conceptual image of a new San Francisco skyline.

"The Plan's emphasis on creating a pedestrian-oriented Transit Center District is very encouraging. Attention will be paid to making the area safe for people of all ages and mobility challenges to get around on foot," said Whitacker. "The Association will be vigilant about trying mitigate 'dangerous by design' elements that detract from the pedestrian experience along our residential core on Harrison Street."

Manish Champsee, Executive Director of Walk San Francisco, also praised the plan. "The thing that I really like about this plan is that it considers the pedestrian first. Usually when there is a plan to greatly increase the usage of a particular area, the first thought is to create more auto capacity to deal with extra traffic in the area," said Champsee. "This plan takes a completely different approach: it says there will be lots more people in this area, lets increase the sidewalk space to accommodate them. A stark difference."

Another plan objective likely to inspire debate is the proposal to reduce maximum parking allowances in the plan area by half. Currently, said Switzky, commercial space in the downtown core allows 7 percent of gross floor area to be parking, which works out to about one parking space for every 5,000 square feet of office space, or one car for every 20 workers. If the plan's objectives are adopted, the limit of one car for every 40 workers in the plan area would put San Francisco close to the limits set in Manhattan, the strictest anywhere in the country (In Manhattan below 60th Street, commercial developments have to cap the total new parking spaces to 100, no matter the size of the building).

The final plan objectives guaranteed to bring about disagreement are travel demand management proposals, including congestion pricing and other restrictions on personal automobiles into the plan area. In addition to pricing private driving into the downtown, the plan proposes mandating mode-split targets by requiring commercial property owners and managers to keep records of how their employees traveled to work. If the split didn't meet overall travel targets, property owners and businesses would have to provide incentives to employees to reduce overall driving into the area.

Whitaker looked at the long view of the neighborhood. "I believe it is a good reflection of San Francisco's aspirations to continue to be a jobs center, the hub for regional transit, and a model for sustainable urban planning, [while] minimizing air pollution and other negative impacts on our environment," he said.

Click to Enlarge.

Pedestrians and the Public Realm

"To create a public realm worthy of a great city, as well as accommodate the increased number of pedestrians and transit users, the balance of space must shift more toward people on the street. Unavoidably, this step involves certain tradeoffs between pedestrian improvements and space for automobiles.... Giving priority to pedestrians and the Transit Center District’s place in the city means difficult choices in view of space limitations in the rights-of-way."

• Policy 3.8 - Designate Plan Area streets where no curb cuts are allowed or are discouraged. Where curb cuts are necessary, they should be limited in number and designed to avoid maneuvering on sidewalks or in street traffic. When crossing sidewalks, driveways should be only as wide as necessary to accomplish this function.
• Policy 3.14 - Convert the western portion of Natoma Street between First and Second streets on the south side of the Transit Center to a primarily pedestrian-only street.
• Policy 3.13 - Close Shaw Alley permanently to vehicles and design it as a pedestrian-only open space for thru-connection to the Transit Center.
• Objective 3.6 - Enhance the pedestrian network with new linkages to provide direct and varied pathways , to shorten walking distances, and to relieve congestion at major street corners.
• Objective 3.8 - Ensure that new development enhances the pedestrian network and reduces the scale of long blocks by maintaining and improving public access along existing alleys and creating new through-block pedestrian connections where none exist.
  
• Objective 3.9 - Ensure that mid-block crosswalks and through-block passageways are convenient, safe, and inviting.

Encourage Transit and Limit Automobile Congestion

"Data compiled from the 2000 Census by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) for the broader downtown, encompassing the entire C-3 zone and adjacent areas showed that 49 percent of workers took transit, 41 percent of commuters came by auto (including 29 percent who drove alone to work) and about 10 percent took other means (primarily walking and bicycling).... Moreover, vehicle occupancy trends (i.e. number of people per vehicle) also appear counter to the intentions of the Downtown Plan.... Evidence reviewed in the 2004 Downtown Monitoring Report indicate that vehicle occupancy on both major bridges into the City have declined since 1985."

• Policy 4.11 - Study the feasibility of and implement, as feasibility and necessity determines, congestion pricing of roadways as a primary tool to reduce overall traffic levels in the Plan area, particularly peak-hour bridge and freeway queues.
• Objective 4.1 - The district’s transportation system will prioritize and incentivize the use of transit. Public transportation will be the main, non-pedestrian mode for moving into and between destinations in the transit center district.
• Objective 4.2 - The district’s transportation system will implement and require transportation demand management strategies to minimize growth in auto trips and reduce volumes as necessary. Actively manage the transportation system to optimize person-carrying capacity. 
• Objective 4.4 - The district’s transportation system will prioritize pedestrian amenity and safety. Invest in circulation modifications and urban design measures that support the creation of an attractive and memorable public realm.
• Objective 4.5 - The district’s transportation system will build on successful traffic and parking management programs and policies that are in place. Expand and strengthen existing adopted policies (e.g. Downtown Plan, C-3 parking controls) and current planning initiatives (e.g. Transit Effectiveness Project, SFPark).
• Objective 4.6 - The district’s transportation system will require management of bay bridge queues to reduce and mitigate impacts of regional traffic on transit circulation and the public realm in the district.
• Objective 4.9 - Prioritize transit movements through and within the district over all other transportation modes.

The San Francisco Planning Department will release the Draft Plan for the new Transbay Terminal and development project after the Planning Commission meeting tonight at 5:30 p.m. According to Planning's Joshua Switzky, the plan will be presented to the commission but there will not be extensive discussion about its details until future public hearings.

In a press release sent out moments ago, Mayor Gavin Newsom called the project a lynchpin of the city's future growth, "one that is based in sustainability and channeling growth around major investments in public  transit.” 

“This plan takes a very comprehensive approach to sustainability, looking at everything from land use to transportation patterns to energy systems in order to reduce the ecological footprint of growth,” Newsom said in the release.

John Rahaim, the Planning Director, said San Francisco's downtown has added "over 20 million square feet of office space, hotels and thousands of housing units since the 1985 Downtown Plan. This growth was possible due to excellent transit, resulting in little appreciable increase in auto congestion on downtown streets."

This plan will continue this tradition of success, creating a dynamic district appropriate to the multi-billion dollar public infrastructure  investment  of the Transit Center Project. We look forward to hearing comments from the Planning Commission and the public in the coming months.”

The Draft Plan intends to meet the following objectives, according to the Planning Department release:

• Increase capacity to help accommodate San Francisco’s share of job growth for the next 25 years by eliminating density caps and increasing some height limits above the current 550-foot maximum in the area around the new Transbay Transit Center.
• Create gracious public spaces and accommodate higher pedestrian volumes by widening sidewalks and adding substantial amenities and infrastructure, such as seating, landscaping, kiosks, and bicycle parking.
• Create a new plaza at the northeast corner of Howard and 2nd Streets and support the creation of a park on the 5.5-acre roof of the Transit Center.
• Manage  travel demand and reduce auto traffic to facilitate growth by limiting increases in parking, providing incentives, and pursing congestion pricing if necessary.
• Expand  the  existing New Montgomery-2nd Street Conservation District to preserve numerous historic resources, as well as recommend protection of many additional individual buildings.
  
• Pursue the creation of district-based resource systems to reduce consumption of energy and water by new development.
• Consider the implementation of multiple new funding mechanisms to generate funds from new development for the Transit Center and other necessary infrastructure and improvements to support growth, including a Mello-Roos special tax district and new impact fees.

Click image to enlarge: Leland Avenue intersection overview.

The Planning Department's Andres Power lauded the Leland Avenue improvements, and said the reconstruction of the street was the first step in a process the city hopes will become codified in every street redesign moving forward through the Better Streets Plan. He pointed to a new project, however, in neighboring Bayview as the benchmark for how San Francisco is innovating street design. Power is the project manager for the Model Block pilot on Newcomb Avenue in the Bayview, a project designed around stormwater treatment. The Newcomb project is situated on the 1700 block, just off of 3rd Street between Newhall and Phelps, and will employ a cocktail of street treatments, including stormwater planters and bulbouts, planted traffic calming chicanes, permeable pavement at on-street parking spaces, landscaped sidewalks that absorb runoff, raised crosswalks, and new street trees.

"Newcomb will be the first true green street in San Francisco," said Power, who noted that over the last few years movement from within the city on these matters has been quite positive. "From a policy and design perspective, there has been a sea change; it is infinitely easier to be able to talk about this stuff. Good design feels much less like an impossibility."

The cost to remake the Newcomb is $1,251,421, half of which comes from the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, nearly $500,000 from the U.S. EPA, and the remainder from San Francisco Mayor's Office of Housing Community Challenge Grants. The Redevelopment Agency, as part of the expansion of its Model Block single-family home rehabilitation program, will provide financial assistance to low-income families on Newcomb in conjunction with the renovation to refurbish their dwellings.

Click image to enlarge: Newcomb Avenue overhead with stormwater and traffic calming treatments

"Our drivers are different," said Jencks, referring to the Clean Water Act lawsuit that compelled Portland to clean up the Willamette River. "We don't have rivers with Salmon in them and we addressed the Clean Water Act with storage facilities.  We're in full regulatory compliance."

Jencks said the storage facilities brought raw sewage overflows into the bay and ocean down from an average of more than 80 per year before adding the tanks to fewer than 10 a year currently, most of those small. But, she acknowledged, "The public is not happy with combined sewage overflows any time," so her agency is working with Planning, the Department of Public Works, and the MTA to address upstream storm water through street design. Jencks noted that any reduction in storm water entering their facilities saves the city money by reducing pumping and processing volumes.

Looking forward, Planning's Power highlighted the Cesar Chavez Street redesign, which is slated to begin construction in 2010. Power said Caltrans awarded a $250,000 grant to the Planning Department to begin planning charettes for the Highway 101 interchange at Cesar Chavez, commonly known as the "Hairball," and the portion of Cesar Chavez that stretches from 101 east to 3rd Street. Furthermore, the U.S. EPA just awarded the $6 million project an additional $1.2 million for greenstreet treatments from the Hairball west to Guerrero Street. The EPA grant doubled the funding that had been planned for greenstreet facilities and gives the project leaders the opportunity to make the street the showcase for green design citywide.

"From a planning perspective we're moving to make sure all street projects have these treatments," said Power. "It hasn't been part of the standard approach in the city, but the Better Streets Plan will change that."

UPDATED: 11/19, 9:43 a.m.

City planners have been on the hook for some of the last century's greatest metropolitan mishaps: urban freeways and "slum clearance," arbitrary minimum parking requirements, and land use laws that have left little room for the mingling of uses. Understandably, today's planners are a bit humbled. But when planning directors from some of North America's most progressive cities spoke at City Hall this week about the political challenges that face urban planners, several of them said the field needs to move beyond worrying about past mistakes.

"Because of the failure of the planning profession in the past, we've gotten quiet, we've gotten a little too meek," said Brent Toderian, Vancouver's planning director. "We serve at the will of politicians, and are often unwilling to speak truth to power loudly and persuasively and in public. I think that's really been an absolving of our leadership responsibilities in the profession."

SPUR and the San Francisco Planning Department hosted the discussion with planning heads from SF, New York, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, Minneapolis and San Diego, who were all in town for the Urban Land Institute's annual expo.

Minneapolis planning chief Barbara Sporlein echoed that concern. "So much of planning is making up for past mistakes," she said. "It just feels like every time something happens, [we say,] 'That can't happen again.'"

In Vancouver, planning directors do not serve at the will of the mayor, and are appointed through a selection committee process and approved by the city council. As a result, said Toderian, the discussion about planning is much more vigorous and productive.

"In the absence of that willingness to have those kinds of tough, tense conversations, sometimes the best answers, the best options, are never put on the table," he said. "If Planning's not putting those options and issues on the table, then it's our fault that politicians aren't making better decisions."

From left to right: SPUR Executive Director Gabriel Metcalf (standing), and planning directors from San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Vancouver, San Diego, Minneapolis, and Portland. Photo: Michael Rhodes

San Francisco's planning director, John Rahaim, said he thinks planning staff should be more up front with the public about their objectives. "We have to build some civility. I think the way to do that is, frankly, brutal honesty," said Rahaim. "We have to be absolutely up front and honest about what we're doing and what we're not doing."

Rahaim also described a vision to greatly expand the number of open spaces in the city.

New York's planning director, Amanda Burden, also argued strongly for expanding open spaces. "Great public open spaces - and that means public open spaces that are used intensively and are magnets for people - are the great mixing chambers of cities," said Burden. "It's where all classes, all ethnicities, all economic strata, come together and really create energy that makes the cities we want to be in."

"When you have a small amount of public resources, put them in great public open spaces, because they will trigger private investment."

Many of the directors cited Portland as their model for increasing bicycling (which, as Streetsblog's CNU summit coverage mentioned, is itself still dealing with the effects of Robert Moses-era planning.) Portland planning head Susan Anderson said the origin of her city's success extends beyond infrastructure. "In Portland now, seven to eight percent of the people are biking all the time to work, everywhere," she said. "That happened partly because of infrastructure, all of the good planning stuff, but what really made it jump in the last two years is because it became cool. It became cool because we did all of these different things about press, about working with kids and biking to school."

A highly conceptual image from the SFCTA of what a re-visioned Market Street could look like.

Starting at the end of September, officials will begin restricting traffic on Market Street with forced right-turns, similar to the recommendations in the 2004 Market Street study conducted by the San Francisco County Transportation Authority (SFCTA) (PDF).

From the new Better Market Street Project website:

Beginning Tuesday, September 29, private vehicles on eastbound Market Street will be required to turn right at 8th and 6th Streets. The purpose of the trial is to determine if discouraging through traffic on Market Street can improve transit and pedestrian conditions along the corridor. Signs will be installed along eastbound Market Street starting at Van Ness Avenue encouraging drivers to turn off of Market on 10th Street in advance of reaching 8th Street, where the right turn will be required.

• This trial will be effective all day, seven days a week.
• Pedestrian, cyclists, public transit vehicles, taxis, emergency vehicles and delivery vehicles will still have full access to Market Street.

This pilot program is the first of several pilot projects designed to determine how best to improve transportation conditions on the Market Street corridor. The City will closely monitor the changes to determine its impacts and will be refined as needed.

Details of the plan are just being made available tonight. We'll have more coverage tomorrow. 

Lower Potrero plaza.

The bamboo trees at Guerrero Park were sold at cost by Bamboo Sourcery, Martin said, which made it possible for the plaza's planners to afford them. Without the bamboo, the plaza would hardly be the same place, Martin added.

At the Lower Potrero plaza site, large debris boxes have been converted to planters. In fitting with the plaza's location near the California College of the Arts, each box will be painted with a different design by a graffiti artist. "We have a graffiti artist who's putting that design treatment on the planters on the larger debris boxes," said the Planning Department's Andres Power, "both to add a little bit of color to the space, and also to discourage tagging."

Power, who was coordinating work on the site of the Lower Potrero plaza this afternoon, said the plaza's ground surface would also have a touch of aesthetic flair to it. Similar to "the double-yellow stripes that demarcate opposing traffic in the center of the roadway," said Power, "we're going to be taking a single line, the width of one of those lines, and creating a pattern across the surface with it."

Lower Potrero plaza.

The community response has been very positive so far, said Power, though there was some initial confusion about the logs at the Guerrero Park site when they first arrived. "Now that they've all come together and you can see what they're intended to be, we've got a lot of positive comments on that," said Power.

One neighbor who passed by said she's ecstatic about the new park. "Who cares about parking," she said. "I take that back - I spend too much of my life looking for parking. But I'd much rather have a park."

In addition to the community planting on Sunday, members of the Planning Department planted native and drought tolerant plants at Guerrero Park on Friday. Photo credit: Jane Martin

Guerrero Park.

These steel planters at Guerrero Park will soon have soil and plants.

Guerrero Park.

Lower Potrero plaza.

These salvaged sewer pipes at the Lower Potrero plaza will be planted in the next couple days. In addition to serving as planters, they provide a giant barrier between the park and the street.

Despite the new plants, this stop sign at the Lower Potrero plaza is still in use.

Painted logs at Guerrero Park.

Barricades are up at the site of the Lower Potrero plaza. Photo: Michael Rhodes

Crews put up barricades yesterday at the intersection of San Jose Avenue and Guerrero Street and at the intersection of 16th Street and 8th Street in Lower Potrero, the first step in construction of the two new plazas at those locations. The Lower Potrero plaza is on target to open in time for Labor Day weekend, and the San Jose/Guerrero plaza will open by Labor Day weekend or a couple of days after.

Both plazas have enjoyed strong support from neighbors, businesses and politicians. "I personally am very excited and I think the city is very excited, all the way up to the mayor," said Andres Power of the Planning Department. "He's been briefed and is excited to see these spaces open up."

Neighbors have been especially vocal in their support, said Power. "There was an email campaign right before the ISCOTT hearing," the committee where street closures are approved, "and we received, maybe, I would say, a good 50-60 emails from people in the neighborhood urging the approval of the closure permit. It's definitely going to be a project that's well received in the neighborhood."

Barricades are also up at the San Jose/Guerrero plaza site. Photo: Michael Rhodes

The lighting at the San Jose/Guerrero plaza has already been upgraded from a yellow sodium roadway light to an LED light, which gives off a more pedestrian-friendly white light, and is more energy efficient.

At the Lower Potrero plaza site, the major institutional presence, the California College of the Arts, is also very excited about the plaza, and has plans to use it for outdoor classroom space. Some space in the plaza will also be reserved for students to exhibit their sculpture work on a rotating basis. Axis Cafe and Wolfe Cafe, which both front onto the site, have also been strongly supportive throughout the process.

Though the plazas won't be open for another two weeks, both sites are officially car-free as of yesterday. One passerby at the Lower Potrero location already appreciated the change. "They should do something here," he said. "Cars drive through there too fast."

The San Jose/Guerrero plaza site. Photo: Michael Rhodes

The Lower Potrero plaza will open up a large expanse of asphalt to car-free use. In the background, cars make use of newly-created parking spaces along the barricades. Photo: Michael

Staring down San Jose Avenue from the bow of the plaza. Photo: Michael Rhodes

When the 17th Street and Castro Street trial Pavement to Parks plaza was implemented in San Francisco, Mayor Gavin Newsom said at the press conference that he would expedite two more plazas immediately, and if the public used them and clamored for more, he would instruct his agencies to build them. Apparently, he wasn't grandstanding.

The first three plaza locations were selected strategically because they had years of community planning behind them and the city expected there would be little resistance to making the changes. In fact, they hoped to see the exact results they are seeing.

"People are banging down the doors, community groups and professionals are clamoring to make more happen," said Ed Reiskin, Director of the Department of Public Works (DPW) and one of the central catalysts in moving the projects forward. "That to me is a sign of something good. That's a good problem to have."

Reiskin pointed to the Mason Street park as an example of community groups taking advantage of a trial traffic closure to green their neighborhood. "It was just meant to be a street closure, throw up some orange plastic bollards and measure the traffic impacts. But the community rose up and in a few hours turned an otherwise undesirable space into a community space."

There is so much interest in opening up unused street space and turning it into public open space that the city agencies involved in selecting the projects told Streetsblog that they are getting lobbied at City Hall by supervisors and by the general public at community meetings around the city.

"I haven't solicited any design input," said Andres Power, project manager from the Planning Department for the trial plazas at San Jose/Guerrero and 16th Street/8th Street in Lower Potrero. "But I have a list of 25 landscape architects willing to do the next design."

Click to enlarge schematic for plaza. Image: Rebar Arts Collective

"There is a coalescing from the highest levels of city government," said Power. "There is a clear and consistent message from both the mayoral and supervisorial sides of government."

Rebar Arts Collective was one of the designers who approached the city to design a plaza shortly after they heard about the imminent 17th and Castro project from colleagues at Public Architecture, according to Rebar's John Bela. "We've been exploring turning street-space into public space for years. We had been following what was happening in New York and the first pavement to parks project in San Francisco and we called up Planning to see if we could help."

Rebar was chosen for the Lower Potrero project and will donate its time and labor, just as Public Architecture did for 17th and Castro and Shift Design Studio is for San Jose and Guerrero. Rebar has ambitious plans for redefining the user's experience with these new spaces.

"You walk into the space and you recognize that it's not a street anymore but it's not a park either. It's a street park or street plaza," said Bela. "It's a new category of spaces that is being created and we want to create a new language to explain that. One of our interests is taking the vernacular of street markings -- bike lanes, turn arrows, lane markings, crosswalks -- and re-mixing them into the plaza space and street surface."

"The streets represent 25 percent of the city's land area, the biggest component of the public realm. We're only now able to take advantage of that," added Bela. "We call this user generated urbanism, participatory urbanism. People are getting involved in space making, defining the properties of their space."

Along these lines Bela said Rebar intends to provide space in the plaza for user-generated art and sculpture, a nod to the California College of the Arts campus that sits three blocks away. The materials Rebar uses will also be more industrial to reflect the history of the neighborhood, including using old NorCal metal debris boxes as planters, which enables them to be movable should the city want to use them elsewhere.

As far as the next plaza is concerned, both Reiskin and Power indicated they were looking at Naples Green, on the south side of Geneva Avenue at Naples Street in the Excelsior. After that, Reiskin indicated that they hope to add plazas in "every corner of the city, especially those that are underserved by public space."

Reiskin added: "I see this as a spectrum of things. At one end there are full massive street changes, like we're doing on Valencia Street. At the other end is Sunday Streets. I hope that we end up with a wide palette of what we can do. I think we've disproven people's conceptions of what gets done in this city. Good things can happen quickly and at low cost."

A rendering of the Potrero Plaza from 8th Street facing southeast. Note the PARKcycle on the billboard. Image: Rebar Art Collective

Intersection of Guerrero St and San Jose Ave, site of a new 9,000 sf plaza. Photo: Matthew Roth

When Mayor Gavin Newsom dedicated the first of three Pavement to Parks plazas at 17th and Market streets, he promised to push forward with the next two trial plazas in short order, including one at the intersection of Guerrero Street and San Jose Avenue, one of the more precarious corners in the city, where traffic speeds down Guerrero after exiting I-280, the footprint of the now-abandoned Mission Freeway. For community residents like Gillian Gillett, who has been fighting to make the neighborhood more pedestrian friendly and less sick with dangerous traffic for years, the news was thrilling.

"It's a real impediment to rational urban life the way it's existed," said Gillett, a software programmer, who explained that she first became active around traffic and transportation issues when she was pregnant with her daughter in 2001. Before she and her neighbors took a stand, she said her street was the iconic high-traffic artery as explained in Donald Appleyard's seminal study on cars and community, a street that tore the neighborhood apart and kept neighbors from meeting each other or spending any time in public space together.

"I was really pissed off when I was pregnant and couldn't cross the street," said Gillett. "I was offended that the city would operate that way."

Through her community group San Jose/Guerrero Coalition to Save Our Streets, Gillett first tried to calm the intersection of Guerrero and Cesar Chavez, where the city had a triple left-turn lane configuration from westbound Cesar Chavez to southbound Guerrero, followed by three wide traffic lanes and eight unsignalized intersections, which led to rampant speeding and more than a few car-in-house crashes.

Gillian Gillett with her daughter. Photo: MTC

"Of the 12 houses on the 1450 block of Guerrero at Cesar Chavez, 9 of them have been run into by cars, several of them repeatedly," explained Gillett. Like Appleyard's other victims of heavy traffic, she and her neighbors always kept their windows facing Guerrero closed and lived and slept in the back of their houses, where they could find the most serenity.

Unfortunately, she related, one weekday morning at 6:30 am, one of their neighbors was stabbed 10 times on the sidewalk on Guerrero. No one could hear his screams over the noise of traffic and none of the motorists stopped or called the police. The man died there on the sidewalk, just blocks from St. Luke's Hospital.

"I had heard so many horror stories about traffic. These are people who didn't let their kids out on the street because cars were crashing into their houses," Gillett said. The SFPD didn't understand how bad the issue was until she demanded former Ingleside Station Captain Kevin Dillon come down to her home with a speed gun.

"When I was pregnant I brought Captain Dillon down here and he dutifully brought his radar gun down and measured speeds at 62 miles per hour. He said, 'Oh lady, we could be out here writing tickets all day, but it wouldn't solve your problem. You have an engineering problem.'"

Gillett and the coalition have applied for and received numerous grants to aid their work, including a $75,000 Transportation for Livable Cities (TLC) grant through the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) for a community plan. In early 2005, the community got its first road diet when the MTA narrowed Guerrero from three lanes in each direction to two and added a bicycle lane. As a result of this and other traffic calming measures, dedicated pedestrian enforcement stings from the SFPD, and new traffic signals, Gillett explained, the collision rate for the 11 blocks on Guerrero between Cesar Chavez and Randall St. has been reduced by 53 percent since 2004.

The New Plaza

A sketch of the proposal for a plaza at the intersection of San Jose and Guerrero. One lane at the eastern edge of the plaza (bottom of picture) will receive the same pavement treatment as the plaza, but remain open to local traffic so the seven driveways belonging to residents along the street can be accessed. Copyright 2009 Shift Design Studio

Gillett and other members of the community have long had their eye on the roughly 9,000 square feet of marginally used asphalt on the east side of the awkward intersection of San Jose, Guerrero, and 28th Street. Using the TLC grant from 2005, they hired Project for Public Spaces (PPS) in New York City to help them envision a more humane treatment for the intersection and better use of the public realm.

With Mayor Newsom's apparent new zest for reclaiming under-utilized streets and turning them into public space, the community vision is well on the way to realization.

"The vision of the space is to provide more of a park-like element, provide open space for the neighbors," said Andres Power of the Planning Department, who has been tasked with developing a plaza design and implementing the trial closure by early September so the plaza will be open on Labor Day. Like the plaza at 17th Street, the city is scouring its supply yards for extra supplies.

"The idea is to emphasize greenery and a strong delineation between the roadway and the space," said Power, who expressed concern about the noise and disruption that heavy traffic could continue to have despite their best efforts.

Gillett is working with local property owners around the plaza to try to attract more family-focused businesses. The one active retail use immediately adjacent to the plaza is Cup O' Java on the west side of Guerrero. Mitchell's Creamery, a destination that attracts people from around the city and has notoriously long lines down the sidewalk, is one block south on Guerrero. Immediately on the plaza, there is a vacant retail space that Gillett would love to see rented by a childcare facility.

Gillett said that through community surveys they commissioned with their TLC grant, they discovered that the neighborhood is home to a high proportion of software developers. Two of them who live in the "Peach House" featured in the background of the picture above have taken it upon themselves to be sure the plaza will have a strong WiFi signal.

For the plaza design, architect and landscape designer Jane Martin, founder of Plant SF and principal of Shift Design Studio, who Gillett joked is competing with her and her Greening Guerrero project to see who can de-pave San Francisco faster, is donating her time on the project (Martin on the depaving competition: "She's got a ways to go to catch up with me"). 

"The concept that I have is to take this sea of asphalt and make it somehow habitable," said Martin, who explained that her inspiration is based on a history she read of Golden Gate Park, where engineer William Hammond Hall was tasked with figuring out how get plants to grow out of arid sand dunes. "Hall knew If he could get the bush lupine to grow, he could get shrubs to grow, then trees after that."

Martin said that Hall couldn't get the lupine or anything else to grow until he observed that the barley he fed his draft horses would take root in the sand after a few days. Once he sowed the barley, lupine followed suit, then grasses, and finally the trees that are in the park to this day.

When Martin was granted access to the city's "boneyards" to find supplies for the plaza, she discovered that many of Hall's original trees had fallen or were being taken out and sent to the compost yard. "They are unceremoniously being turned into mulch," she said. 

Martin has taken several of the original Golden Gate Park tree trunks and plans to hollow them out to turn them into planters that will serve as the boundary between the plaza and traffic on Guerrero. "They are a piece of nature that can lay claim to this vast amount of asphalt." In addition, she plans to rip up the cement in the middle of the two islands that currently exist and plant them. Because there are no curb-cuts in the islands, they are already useless for persons with disabilities or parents with strollers.

With so many families in the neighborhood and scant open space, the plaza will have a special focus on children, with elements designed to evoke a playground. "I really want to pay homage to the horse," explained Martin, who plans to install several playground horses on springs facing west, so they appear ready to ride to the ocean.

Assuming the plaza is successful and the city decides to make it permanent, Martin would like to name it after Hall's horse, though she said she couldn't find any record of the horse's name in the Golden Gate Park history she was reading.

"I've got researchers looking into finding out the name of the horse, but we haven't found it yet," she said. "If we can't find it, we'll just call it "Hall's Horse Park."

The PPS sketch the community developed for San Jose and Guerrero. The trial plaza will implement similar treatments for the plaza portion at the right. Gillett and the community hope it will lead to permanent pedestrian treatments, such as high-visibility crosswalks, a traffic signal, and bulb-outs. Courtesy: PPS

San Francisco is renowned for the beauty of its its Victorian homes almost as much as its rugged seaside setting. But with most buildings in the city, the architectural grace starts at the second level. For pedestrians walking down the street, seeing buildings the way most people actually see them, the view is not always so pretty. The main culprits, as the photo above illustrates, are garages and curb cuts.

As we've written about before, curb cuts cost the city dearly in both meter revenue and public parking spaces, and a comprehensive study by Mary Brown showed that barely half of all garages in the Mission District are even used for parking: 49 percent are used for storage. Preservationists have been up in arms about the impact garage additions have on historic homes, pushing to institute stricter requirements for moving additions through the planning approval process. At the same time, most new homes in San Francisco are still required to be built with garages.

Perhaps the greatest cost, however, is not the sum of individual architectural maulings, but the collective impact of an endless garagescape on the pedestrian realm. Buildings new and old in San Francisco are often not designed with the view from the sidewalk in mind, and, collectively, the result is a city of houses best viewed from afar. Perhaps most emblematic of this is the famous "painted ladies" of Steiner Street on Alamo Square, which are nearly always photographed with a row of delicately-placed trees obscuring their garage doors. Walking down Steiner, the immediate view of each house is dominated by their gaping garage cuts more than what is stacked above.

As a consequence, San Francisco's sidewalks often feel hostile to pedestrians even when there aren't any automobiles zipping past. Massive, faceless garage doors, sunken driveway entrances, and neglected remnants of front gardens are the norm.

I went out in search of homes that still have their front gardens intact, and was struck by how humanizing this ground-level landscaping makes the street for the passerby.

Photo: Michael Rhodes

Like the rows of gardens and trees in Park Slope, Brooklyn, I also found that the pedestrian-friendly effect of front gardens and garage-free facades achieves its strongest effect when it's uninterrupted for several houses in a row, or even the whole block. At present, of course, this is almost never the case in San Francisco.

The political battle to stop new garages will be a difficult one, requiring both incentives and restrictions. Even if a new garage is never built again in San Francisco, the city will already have to deal with 200,000 existing garages and curb cuts. So, I also went out in search of houses that have found creative ways to make their existing garages less inimical to pedestrian comfort. While most buildings make no effort at all, and those that do often use ugly, too-tall gates that are generally not closed anyway, I did find one elegant, impressive example that nearly made its garage seem to disappear:

A cleverly obscured garage. Photo: Michael Rhodes

The home pictured above used to have an uncovered gaping garage entrance, but a gate was installed that greatly improves the home's appearance and maintains neighboring houses' row of gardens and gates. It doesn't address the sidewalk curb cut, which still leaves the pedestrian without a barrier from the street and makes it harder to plant trees, but it undoubtedly makes a big difference.

Only by peering over the gates is the home's garage visible. Photo: Michael Rhodes

This treatment might not work for all homes, but for home owners who don't use their garages for parking, or who don't use their vehicles daily, it could provide some guidance. It also has the advantage of providing better protection from water seepage, a common problem for homes with garages that were hastily added in the 1920s and 1930s.

Such an elegant treatment might be too much to ask for from most houses, but at the least, it's important that architects and home owners start thinking of the street level as the real perspective from which most people see houses and apartment buildings. Perhaps then we'll stop seeing new ("green") buildings with such utter disregard for the pedestrian realm.

For now, pedestrians in San Francisco have to enjoy well-loved front gardens, gates, and stoops for the rare commodities that they are.

A once-typical San Francisco sidewalk-scape. Photo: Michael Rhodes

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: geekstinkbreath

At a roundtable discussion convened by the Planning Department two weeks ago, various stakeholders expressed surprise and pleasure at how well the plaza is functioning and how many people flock to it at all hours of the day. The Planning Department's Andres Power, who organized the meeting, said that the groups around the table began a discussion about what kinds of treatments the plaza should receive if it becomes permanent. There was strong support for more heavy granite blocks, more shade structures, and a functional solution to replace the temporary bollards made of heavy cardboard with something that would withstand the rainy season, which should begin near the expiration of the four-month extension.

Power said that even the Hartford Street neighbors had come around from their initial strong opposition to the plaza for fear it would add traffic to their street, which abuts the western end of the plaza, and be a magnet for vagrants.

"We conducted traffic analysis since the plaza started, measuring through volume and average speed on Hartford," said Power. "Both have decreased, so it's become a sort of traffic calming measure as well."

Though the Hartford Street neighbors aren't yet talking about making the plaza permanent, like the Buena Vista Neighborhood Association, the Castro/Upper Market CBD, MUMC, and the various merchants adjacent to the plaza, they were anxious see what happens over the next four months.

When asked whether or not Planning and the MTA had considered the effect the plaza would have on the bicycle network, a debate that has flared in comments here on Streetsblog over the plaza cutting off the bicycle route on 17th Street, Power said that both agencies and the SFBC had discussed the impact to bicycles ahead of implementation and felt the conditions with the plaza were an improvement over the speeding vehicles that used to use it to go eastbound.

"We talked about bicycle access from day one and decided with the SFBC and MTA to maintain the casual intermingling of modes," said Power. "We agreed that we wouldn't provide designated pathways because it would obviate the casualness we were looking for. We've received many comments from SFBC members who are appreciative of the slower traffic speeds on 17th."

The 17th Street plaza is the first of three initial Pavement to Parks trial plazas, with the next two locations in lower Potrero and the outer Mission being fast-tracked to be implemented by the end of the summer. Power said they would have more information on both those plazas shortly, but that they wanted to convene public meetings before going to the press. Assuming the Castro community is pleased with 17th Street, the plaza could become permanent in November.

The entire family of San Francisco city agencies responsible for maintaining its streets made an unconventional decision to close a portion of a street to cars and convert the new space into a simple, yet elegant, public plaza.  The project combines all the important elements of plaza creation that have been successful in New York City and elsewhere: take space from cars, use simple treatments to convert the space into a pedestrian sanctuary, including movable furniture and leftover granite blocks from city salvage yards, and engage commercial interests around the plaza to help maintain and care for the new public realm.

Though some neighborhood constituents voiced skepticism that the plaza would be empty at best, or filled with miscreants and vagabonds at worst, the plaza's success is hard to dispute. In fact, so many people are using the new space and enjoying the tables and chairs, the businesses around the plaza have contemplated leaving the furniture out later than sunset, which was the initial closing time agreed upon between them and the Castro/Upper Market Community Betterment District. 

This film, shot and edited by Paul Jaffe and produced by Streetsblog SF editor Bryan Goebel, takes an in-depth look at the construction of the plaza with some of the agencies responsible for it, and includes some entertaining man-on-the-street interviews.

Shahum said they had 12 supporters present to support the project and that eight people showed up to oppose the certification, several of them there because of the 2nd Street bike lane proposal. Undaunted, Shahum argued that this concern has been present for most bike lane stripings, especially when parking is removed.

"The kind of concern we heard on 2nd Street tonight was the same concern we heard on Valencia Street ten years ago, the same concerns on Arguello St. Time and again we see that concerns about the addition of bike lanes causing irreperable damage have not happened. These projects are well-studied, well analyzed, smart projects that work."

Supporters and opponents of the Bike Plan and the 40-plus priority projects will be back at City Hall in under twelve hours for the MTA Board hearing, which begins at 9 am and could be a marathon. Streetsblog will be blogging updates as they come in and Tweeting. Search for @streetsblogsf on Twitter.

Photo: SFBC

SFBC Executive Director Leah Shahum said, “This will be a win-win for San Francisco. Improving the streets for bicycling is proven to increase the number of people bicycling, and that means a greener, healthier San Francisco.” She cited city counts that show bicycling activity increases 50% on average after a bike lane is added, including the following noteworthy increases where bike lanes have been added in the past: Howard St. (300% increase); Valencia St. (144%); Arguello (67%).

Planning staff appear to agree with this characterization. The Planning Commission will hear recommendations from staff to certify the EIR and to adopt CEQA findings with overriding considerations where LOS fails. From the Planning Commission meeting notice:

The CEQA Findings include a statement of overriding benefits and a mitigation monitoring and reporting program (MMRP) associated with approving the proposed General Plan and Planning Code amendments and implementation of the 2009 Bicycle Plan. They include a rationale for rejecting alternatives identified in the EIR, and a statement of overriding considerations that lists technical, social and economic reasons for adopting the amendments and implementing the 2009 Bicycle Plan despite identified significant, adverse environmental impacts.

Assuming the commission certifies the EIR, the MTA Board tomorrow at 9 am will take its turn to approve the bike plan and vote on the priority 40-plus projects being considered for immediate implementation once the injunction is lifted.

Once the Planning Commission certifies the EIR tonight, the clock starts on a mandatory 20-day appeals process. Given that the litigant promised to appeal just this morning in the Chronicle and the Board of Supervisors must give a 10-day notice for a hearing after the appeals, the earliest possible hearing date is July 27th. Given the various scenarios (see details at the bottom of the article), the earliest the city could go to the judge to ask for the injunction to be lifted is early August. There is also a provision that would allow the supervisors to postpone the hearing until late October; in that case the injunction wouldn't be lifted until November.

Fortunately, the city players involved in this tremendous legal and administrative burden say they are committed to expeditious completion of the process.

"[City Attorney] Dennis Herrera has said no one is going to be happier when the bike injunction is lifted than he is," said City Attorney Press Secretary Matt Dorsey. "It's discouraging that a law that is intended to protect the environment is being used to delay a city's effort to do something to improve the environment."

Board of Supervisors President David Chiu's office said there would be minimal delays within the context of the appeals process. "We intend to hear the EIR promptly, though with enough time to consider the appeals," said Chiu's Legislative Aide, David Noyola. The board would only need six votes to approve the Bike Plan over potential appeals

Wade Crowfoot, Mayor Gavin Newsom's Director of Climate Initiatives, pointed to the Mayor's recent letters of support sent to the Planning Commission and the MTA Board and Chief Nat Ford. Crowfoot said their office would work as quickly and diligently as possible given the appeals procedures laid out by administrative code. He said that they were committed to fast-tracking as many projects as possible within budgetary constraints.

"The projects are going to be started the day after the injunction is lifted," promised Crowfoot.

Two Scenarios for Lifting the Injunction (From City Attorney Herrera's Office)

• Scenario #1 (considered unlikely, given litigant's assertion he will appeal)

The City Attorney could petition the Court to dissolve the injunction on the first business day after the 20th day of appeals process has elapsed. Assuming the EIR is certified on Thursday, June 25th - and assuming no appeal is filed over the next 20 days - the 21st day would be Thursday, July 16, 2009. There could be a small time lapse of a few days for the City Attorney's Office to prepare its motion following the 21st day, due to supporting documentation that would need to be presented for the Court's consideration.

• Scenario #2 (considered more likely)

The Board of Supervisors would hold an appeal hearing after the 20 day appeal cycle. S.F. Admin. Code Sec. 31.16 (b) imposes a notice requirement of "not less than ten (10) days prior to the date of the hearing," establishing the earliest possible hearing date sometime around July 27th. The latest allowable date for the hearing is set by S.F. Admin. Code Sec. 31.16(e), which provides that the "Board shall act on an appeal within thirty (30) days of appeal of the Planning Commission's certification of the EIR."  That same section allows for postponement under certain circumstances of "not more than ninety (90) days from the date of filing the appeal."  Assuming the Board affirms the Commission's EIR certification on appeal, the City Attorney would then petition the Court to dissolve the injunction. As with the first scenario, the lapse of time for the City Attorney to prepare this motion should be within a few days of the Board's action, due to the extensive supporting documentation that would need to be presented for the Court's consideration.

Flickr photo: dustinj

The SFBC has been working to ensure that all 56 projects move forward, with grassroots-style activism in each neighborhood, but at least 11 of the projects have been tabled for now. Several months ago, Streetsblog wrote about nine projects expected to be delayed, and two more were tacked on at a recent administrative hearing: Upper Market between 17th Street and Octavia Boulevard, and the Polk Street contra flow lane. 

Andy Thornley, the SFBC program director, is troubled that those two have been added to the list, which he claims is due mostly to NIMBY and merchant concerns over lost parking. The fuss on Upper Market is over the loss of 14 parking spaces. Thornley said the MTA is pretty confident it can find replacement parking at a garage north of Market Street, but has shelved the project for now until it's able to fully address the concerns.

"Market Street is such an important street for moving people on foot or on bike or on transit, that we really can’t afford to be storing cars in that space. So we’ll keep pushing on that, but the effect is that on June 26 the MTA Board of Directors won’t be deliberating whether to legislate parking conversion on that part of Market Street; we expect to see it come back to them in a second package very soon afterward."

In the case of Polk Street, many bicyclists have long wanted a safe, expedient way to connect to Polk Street from Market, but a project in the Bike Plan to create a contra flow lane that would run northbound on Polk against southbound automobile traffic is being delayed because of concerns from Bill Graham Auditorium officials, who are apparently worried that trucks hauling show equipment would no longer be able to stage and queue up on Polk. 

"Right now there is bike traffic that’s riding up north on Polk on the sidewalk, which is naughty and dangerous for pedestrians," said Thornley. "Or cyclists who are law obeying will overshoot and turn on Larkin and that’s quite an overshoot and then double back on Grove and then go north on Polk Street."

Wade Crowfoot, the Mayor's director of climate protection initiatives, said even though that project is not on the MTA Board's agenda Friday, he believes a solution can be worked out.

Thornley said although "the chickens won't be hatched" until Friday, he is generally pleased that the MTA staff is recommending approval of most of the projects, and felt particularly victorious that the 2nd Street bike lanes -- which represented an internal MTA battle over modes -- were approved at an administrative hearing.

He credits the work to grassroots organizing on the part of SFBC volunteers: "We’ve had hundreds of members talking to thousands of neighbors and merchants and walking around neighborhoods all over the city, not only doing classic old school organizing and canvassing, and very effectively, but some fairly nuanced and sophisticated planning work, if you will."

He added that the projects that are coming to the MTA board "have in many cases really been improved by the on-the-ground experience that we’ve brought with the outreach that our volunteers have done."

Although excitement is building for Thursday's Planning Commission meeting and Friday's MTA Board meeting, it is tempered by uncertainty over when implementation will begin. For starters, bicycle advocates are anticipating that someone will appeal the EIR to the Board of Supervisors, which will drag out the process even further. Judge Busch can't consider lifting the injunction until that issue plays out. 

But when it is lifted, Crowfoot -- who has been working with the MTA and DPW on the implementation schedule -- said the Mayor wants to get all of the projects "done as quickly as possible," at least in the next fiscal year. The MTA has said it could take up to three years to fully implement the Bike Plan.

"The challenge is that some of the funding for the 60 projects is in out year budgets -- TA capital budgets and operational budgets. And so we're exploring whether we can actually front money to do more of the work earlier on," said Crowfoot.

"We don't just want to do the smallest projects so that we can say we're getting like 14 or 15 out of the gate. We want to do meaningful ones," he added.

We’ve been waiting for years now to see some physical changes to accommodate the huge increase in daily bicycling. We did get an odd set of painted bike lanes and green bike route signs, and a significant number of bike racks for parking, before it all came to a halt due to the injunction three years ago. After perusing the much-anticipated Draft Bicycle Plan and its dense bureaucratese, full of overlapping redundant promises, I’m afraid we’ll be waiting a good while longer to see the kinds of changes that we ought to be getting.

It’s really hard to believe that after all this organizing and earnest campaigning we’ll basically end up with a few thousand “sharrows” and another batch of partial, end-in-the-middle-of-nowhere bike lanes, lanes which in any case are horribly inadequate patches on our misallocated and car-centric public streets. How is it that after almost two decades of rapidly expanding bicycling, the city’s transit priorities still treat bicycles as an annoyance that they only grudgingly are willing to accommodate? When will there be a systematic commitment to altering the streets of this city to create dedicated bikeways, separated from cars and pedestrians, comprehensively linked to provide for easy, graceful, convivial bicycling to all parts of the city?

Over at the blog Copenhaganize their basic point is summarized in two short sentences:

Each and every day 500,000 people ride their bicycle to work or school in Copenhagen. This blog highlights who they are, why they do and how it was made possible.

Forty years ago Copenhagen was just as car-clogged as anywhere else but now 36% of the population choose the bicycle. Copehagenizing is possible anywhere.

My mother is from Copenhagen so I’ve visited the Danish city many times. I think it must have influenced my early thinking, because it was back in 1987 when I drew up a little flyer calling for a “City of Panhandles.” San Francisco cyclists all know the Panhandle’s cyclepath as one of the real pleasures around here (granted, it would be better if pedestrians would have their own path to its side!) and the way it links to the Wiggle route between the Mission and the Haight is just icing on the cake. A city with some vision, rather than a plodding traffic planning bureaucracy that is led by a Mayor who is only interested in what is going to facilitate his election to the next office (and always blatantly biased towards car owners and the wealthy), would have already been working on converting key routes across the city to bicycle boulevards… not just car-centric streets with “bike boulevard” signs, but whole thoroughfares that are closed to cars and only open to bicycles and emergency vehicles. Going a couple of steps further, why not open such thoroughfares to horticultural design and public art? Imagine sculpture gardens, curving murals, daylighted creeks, linear food forests, vegetable gardens, benches and fountains… the list goes on. The city would benefit in so many ways through such a comprehensive conversion of space currently sacrificed to the insatiable uses of private automobiles.

It’s self-evident how much better such street spaces would be for neighbors, pedestrians, children, and cyclists. It would open space for a systematic approach to re-localized food security. For those who clamor for “green jobs” (I’m not one of them), such natural ribbons crisscrossing the city would require first a lot of major construction work, and then a great number of gardeners, farmers, bicycle mechanics, bike parking attendants, landscapers, artists, and more. Juxtapose such quality, engaging, meaningful work to the stupid jobs that pass as “important” in the financial district, or the wasted labor producing so many luxury highrises, office buildings and other pointless projects of “economic development”… Let the tourists join us in riding and walking through the garden paths of San Francisco! Let’s think about the work we do and the design of our city as a canvas on which to create something really astonishingly better than what we’re settling for now. The SF Bike Coalition should be a lot more aggressive and push for much more far-reaching and far-sighted transformations than this tepid and uninspiring Bike Plan, in order to live up to its political and social responsibilities!

Photo by Nick Perry.

A portion of 17th Street in the Castro is being closed to cars at Market this weekend, marking the beginning of San Francisco's first trial street closure. The two DPT workers installing the new signs late this afternoon were a little taken aback by my excitement at first, but they happily directed me around. The street will be transformed into a pedestrian plaza by Tuesday afternoon, according to DPW. A press conference with Mayor Gavin Newsom is scheduled for Wednesday morning and a community celebration is planned for next Saturday. It will include a speech by Supervisor Bevan Dufty and a blessing by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

New sign on Castro Street just outside the Castro Theater.

A DPT worker unveils a new sign on Market Street at 17th.

The before picture.

The future site of a pedestrian plaza at 17th and Market Streets

The historic trolley that loads at the proposed location will still operate in the area, but the DPW will put out planters and other moderately heavy stone elements that will serve as seating and tables, much like Gansevoort Plaza in New York City. 

"As we’ve seen what folks in New York City have done in terms of taking excess asphalt and returning it to people, to more diverse uses, we're inspired," said Reiskin.  "The approach we’re taking here is to try it.  If it’s great, it will be great.  If not, we’ll take it out."

Reiskin has been coordinating the effort with the MTA, the Planning Department, Supervisor Bevan Dufty, the Castro Street Community Betterment District (CBD), and the Mayor's Director of Greening, Astrid Haryati.  Public Architecture, a private firm, is working pro bono to create the design for the new public space. 

MTA Executive Director Nat Ford was very upbeat.  "We're really excited about this. We’ve been trying to identify locations around the city to make these quick improvements that help us to green the city and make it more pleasurable for pedestrians or workers who want to have their lunch outside in public space."

The boarding island for historic trolleys on 17th

"I think the citizens of the city want to see these improvements and going through the lengthy process of planning doesn’t always get the project in the ground," said Ford.  "What we’re seeing from other municipalities like NYC is very successful and we want to do similar trials here."

David Alumbaugh, acting Director of Citywide Planning at the Planning Department, was hopeful it would enliven the public realm.  "While cities all over the country and the world are re-imagining their neglected public realms, for some reason doing so has been hard for San Francisco. This exciting temporary installation in the heart of the Castro will inexpensively and quickly demonstrate one small way San Francisco might begin to rethink its public realm."

Reiskin stressed several times the project is temporary, that they are using using salvaged, recycled, or re-purposed materials from city salvage yards, and that it will be easily reversible if it doesn't succeed at activating the space and providing a valued community amenity. 

Acknowledging the impact of meeting Sadik-Khan last November at a luncheon held for various agency directors, Reiskin called her a personal hero.  "She’s a rockstar to me in this realm of effectively and quickly accomplishing things."

John Peterson, founder of Public Architecture, said there were significant obstacles to success in the trial plaza and that they would need to adjust their effort in a fluid and ongoing way when those problems arise.  "Part of the reason this is an interesting project is that we expect to remain active as we see how people will use it.  The challenge is to knit something together that is cohesive, a proper outdoor space and not a collection of bits and pieces.  New York City is doing a great work, but we're trying to one-up the expectations on what is possible for this type of urban space."

Peterson said they are searching for a partner to help draft a "deep evaluation" of the success of the trial.  "We expect this kind of thing to be useful not just for this project but for many other urban projects."

Castro Street CBD Executive Director Andrea Aiello said they had been discussing ways to improve the public space there for nearly a decade and that it was part of both the Castro Street CBD strategic planning and the Upper Market Area Plan done by the Planning Department at Superviser Dufty's behest. She added the CBD was working on ways to create dynamic programming for the space, including music and other types of performances.

"The CBD is very conscious of the need to keep this active so that it doesn’t fail.  We're very excited to work with the agencies to create this very cool gathering space for the neighborhood.  It has been a great collaborative relationship with DPW, the Planning Departent and Supervisor Dufty.  It really feels like all the different agencies have come together to make this experience work."

Two businesses on the street have been particularly involved with the planning, the 24-hour restaurant Orphan Andy's and the Chevron gas station.  Orphan Andy's anticipates setting out tables and movable seating, which it would maintain, possibly in conjunction with the CBD.  Chevron agreed to have one of its curb cuts removed and Peterson believes they will be important partners in the late-night hours, when the plaza might not be otherwise active.

For his part, Supervisor Dufty was hopeful that a trial would be a great success.  "Temporarily closing 17th and Market will allow us to test a number of streetscape improvements while monitoring the changes to traffic flow," he said.  "This is a major step towards creating a new Castro public realm."

"I appreciate the ingenuity and leadership of DPW Director Ed Reiskin, the Castro Community Benefit District and Planning Department.  I'm excited to begin this process," he added.

Peterson said the leadership from Reiskin and other agencies is refreshing. The only reluctance he's heard has been from community stakeholders who are worried about the homeless and vagrants making the plaza less desirable.  

Some people are very skeptical and people don’t want to see change.  We're talking to people who are dedicated to urban life and there is real reluctance to even try it. They are talking about homelessness.  There’s the idea that we don’t want nicer things in our public realm because people may misuse it.  That shouldn’t stop us from having a healthy street life and public realm.  If that’s the case in San Francisco, then we’re done.” 

Though the 17th Street trial will be temporary pending its success, the DPW and MTA are already looking for other areas that might be ripe for pilots (in case they're reading, we'd like to offer up this short film about a street in North Beach).

"The Mayor is interested in doing more than this one, but this one was teed up," Reiskin said.  "We’ve seen it work elsewhere and it’s consistent with many themes the Mayor has put forward as goals."

Said Ford: "We're making very quick improvements and making them reversible.... and if [the process] works, we’ll try it in other areas.  We have a short list of other areas that we’d like to try, so stay tuned, there are more out there."

A planning department rendering of the pilot plaza