Streetsblog San Francisco

Mansell Street, which runs through McLaren Park, is poised to get a two-way bikeway and a walking and jogging path separated from motor traffic under a plan approved by the Recreation and Parks Commission last week.

Mansell is a wide roadway with no dedicated space for walking and biking, and its four traffic lanes are split down the middle by a planted median. Under the new plan, which is combined with a road re-paving, one side of that median will be car-free. On the other side, motor traffic, including Muni’s 29-Sunset line, would run in one lane in each direction.

The project, set to begin construction in summer 2015 and be completed in 2016, should provide a much more inviting connection to walk and bike across McLaren Park, San Francisco’s second-largest city-owned park, which sits between the Visitacion Valley and Excelsior neighborhoods.

The chosen design was favored by the vast majority of attendees at two community meetings, beating out an alternative that would have retained one traffic lane on each side of the median, along with buffered bike lanes separated from cars with stripes only, according to a department presentation [PDF]. Rec and Parks is hoping to fund the project using up to $6.1 million from Prop AA vehicle registration fee revenue and the regional One Bay Area Grant.

See an overview of the route after the jump. Read more…

Hey SF, Aaron is out with a nasty bug today, so to keep your content craving sated I thought I’d share this proto-Streetfilm from 2004, which Clarence Eckerson recently unearthed for a museum exhibit about the history of NYC activism. It’s about the campaign to get cars out of Manhattan’s Central Park. Anyone who lives in a city where cars regularly invade the flagship park can probably relate.

We may never see Clarence work in longform video again, at least until his dream project materializes — a film about the decline of the paperboy. In the meantime, enjoy!

This just in: Clarence and John Hamilton are in the early stages of putting together a Streetfilm on the case for a car-free Golden Gate Park. Stay tuned.

Sunday Streets keeps on growing, with 10 car-free events coming to neighborhoods around the city this year.

This year’s schedule includes four consecutive months of the ever-popular Mission route, a new route in the Excelsior, and a modified route through Golden Gate Park. The Civic Center/Tenderloin route was also taken off the table this year due to logistical challenges, but it is expected to return.

Why so many events in the Mission? Sunday Streets organizer Susan King said planners are using the route to evaluate the potential for a recurring event, with the goal of establishing weekly events like those in Bogotá, Colombia, which originally inspired Sunday Streets.

“Sunday Streets is turning the corner,” said King. “We’ve gone from being a pilot project that turned out to be more successful than any of us really had an idea that it would evolved into a moving event. We’re trying to get a pattern.”

In April, the Great Highway/Golden Gate Park route will be partly moved off of John F. Kennedy Drive onto Middle Drive and Martin Luther King Drive to create a more intuitive route that requires fewer staff to direct traffic, said King. In past events, the middle stretch of JFK west of Transverse Drive has seen few people stopping, she said, and Middle Drive is already off limits to through car traffic. The change would also remove a sharp turn on the western end of the route, making it easier to follow (see the map below).

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It appears the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency has come to similar conclusions to Streetsblog's in its review of the pilot traffic changes on Market Street at 6th and 10th Streets: A big thumbs-up for transit, bike riders, and people on foot, relatively minor impacts on traffic, and some uneven results when it comes to driver compliance with the new configuration.

Judging from a brief update [PDF] on the program produced Friday, the "Required Right Turns on Eastbound Market Street" pilot appears to be meeting the SFMTA's goals on most fronts. Traffic volumes on eastbound Market just east of 10th Street declined by roughly 200 vehicles per hour during rush hour.

Most of that traffic diverted to Mission Street, where it slowed down transit vehicle travel times by three percent -- but that's offset by a five-percent increase in transit travel times on Market. Muni noted in an earlier report that vehicles are traveling down Market an average of 50 seconds faster.

People on bicycles and taxi drivers are continuing to respond well to the changes, and most drivers are at least complying with the required turns at 10th Street (no word from the SFMTA on whether they're grateful for being diverted from hectic Market Street.) As Streetsblog reported last week, the vast majority of drivers are behaving well at 10th Street, but 6th Street, which has much less clear signage for drivers about the required turn, has lower compliance, the report concludes.

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Despite early fog hugging the coast, the sun finally came out to play around 12:30 pm yesterday and blessed the thousands of cyclists, skaters, bladers and walkers who enjoyed the approximately six miles of the car-free Sunday Streets event in Golden Gate Park and along the Great Highway adjacent to Ocean Beach. 

"I have to say I'm astounded and amazed that that many people showed up," said Livable City Sunday Streets organizer Susan King. "One of the things that really pointed to is that people really get what Sunday Streets is. People knew and were there early. We had people lining up for bike rental at 9 am."

Check out this great video from Richmond SF Blog:

We hope you got some great photos and encourage you to upload them to the Streetsblog San Francisco Flickr Group pool here. More pictures after the jump.

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The Music Concourse in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park is living proof of that ancient maxim dating back to the movie Field of Dreams: if you build it, they will come.

In this case, however, it isn’t the spectators to a baseball diamond in an Iowa cornfield, but people traveling in their cars through the Inner Sunset and along MLK Jr. Drive to an 800-car garage below the concourse with two entrances, one in the south near 9th Avenue, Lincoln Way, and MLK Jr. Drive and one in the north near 10th Avenue and Fulton.  The ultimate destinations of many of the occupants are the California Academy of Sciences and the de Young Museum, which sit on either side of a manicured, European-style bowl that is the concourse.  Both attractions have been rebuilt in recent years and seem to be drawing vastly increased numbers of visitors.

“Today is an example of the potential for what could happen when King Tut comes,” Inner Sunset resident and public parks watchdog Chris Duderstadt said Wednesday.

Make no mistake – he wasn’t referring to hordes of people escaping tax collectors by hiding in the park.  Instead, he was referring to academy patrons who descend on the concourse en masse on the third Wednesday of every month.  That’s when the academy waives the $25 entry fee.  Starting June 27th, the de Young will be showcasing the finery of Egyptian boy king, Tutankhamun, and then, suggests Duderstadt, traffic congestion could start to resemble what it was around Woodstock four decades ago – but every day of the summer, not just the third Wednesdays, and certainly not just for one, long bacchanalian weekend.

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The bike scene in Los Angeles is alive and well - and growing every day.

Streetfilms rode along with one of two ArtCycle tours of local studio spaces sponsored by the East Hollywood Neighborhood Council. Afterwards, a block party was joined in progress and we arrived just in time to hear solid words of encouragement and a brighter bicycling future from L.A. City Council President Eric Garcetti, himself a bike rider. Dancing, art, food, and general chillaxing filled the streets until 10 pm.

Sure L.A. has a bigger hill to climb then most major U.S. cities, but it could also benefit the most from a livable streets agenda. Once the seeds are planted, there's no going back.