Photos: Aaron Bialick

The demand for car-free streets in San Francisco is easy to see at the Sunday Streets events around the city. If there’s no Sunday Street in your neighborhood, though, not to worry: You can bring a car-free event right to your doorstep.

With a little outreach to your neighbors, a permit application, and a fee, it may be easier than you think.

My block in the Inner Sunset did it this Sunday for the tenth year in a row for its annual block party, bringing neighbors together for a potluck, games, and conversation.

Organizer Walter Van Riel said once he put the vehicle barriers in place, the street was transformed in an instant. “Not more than five minutes later, I heard the sound of kids playing in the street,” he said.

Going car-free relieves streets of the noise and danger normally present, which can prevent kids from playing outside and inhibit relationships between neighbors. Mary Deely, who has lived on the block since 1970, said without the block party, she wouldn’t know her neighbors as well. “I wave to people, but I don’t really talk to them until the block party,” she said.

Neighbors from each side of the street compete for the trophy in the "pass the bucket" competition.

Mary Deely (right) enjoys the street with friends and family.

The neighbors on this block, as well as the SFMTA staff who issue the permits, have come to expect the party on the last Sunday before Halloween, making it easier to get everyone together each year and obtain a permit.

Cindy Shamban of the SFMTA Sustainable Streets Division, who oversees the permit program, said 91 block party permits have been issued this year.

The fee for the permit is as low as $150 for applications more than 60 days in advance [PDF], and permits can be obtained within a few days at the maximum rate of $450. Van Riel said the individual cost can be kept to a minimum by pooling contributions between neighbors.

The process requires approval from a committee and posted notification to all neighbors, which isn’t a major impediment to doing something once a year, but what if you want your street to function as a community space every day?

Neighborhood streets can be designed in ways that enable more social activity all year round. Examples can be found in other cities around the world. In the Netherlands, shared streets called “woonerfs” use traffic-calming features to tame motor vehicles and elevate human movement and interaction, allowing children room to play. Just across the border in Van Riel’s hometown of Antwerp, Belgium, he says common gathering spaces are taken for granted.

“Woonerf”-style streets could be common in San Francisco someday, if we have the will. As Donald Appleyard first documented in his 1981 publication “Livable Streets,” streets that prioritize social life over traffic bring real benefits to a city. Check out the Streetfilm on his work, followed by more photos below:

The potluck.

Walter Van Riel (in green) passes the water bucket.

Debi raises the trophy for the champions-to-be in the bucket competition.

The 10/9/11 CicLAvia route. For a poster size version of the route, click on the picture.

By the early afternoon of April 10, it was clear that CicLAvia had outgrown its original seven-and-a-half mile route. In the urban core of Downtown Los Angeles, bikes were packed so thick on the road that entire groups wouldn’t make it through traffic signals and other road users were intimidated from using the street. Something had to change for the amazing car-free party to continue to attract new riders.

CicLAvia staff got to work and announced earlier today that the October 9th 2011 CicLAvia will have an expanded ten and a half mile route with more open streets in the Downtown snaking North and South for a much larger car-free party.

“We’re excited about the three new miles, and we’re looking forward to expanding more,” writes Joe Linton, one of the organizers of CicLAvia. “Bogota started in the 1970s with only 7 miles and now they do 80 miles – every Sunday!”

The CicLAvia Blog shares the details of the expanded routes:

NEW! South Spur: The south spur branches off the route downtown, south on Spring Street, east on 9th Street (which becomes Olympic) and south on Central Avenue to the African American Firefighter Museum on Central at 14th Street. This new mileage includes Downtown Los Angeles’ Fashion District with hundreds of establishments selling colorful rolls of cloth, and a small area informally known as the “piñata district” where huge numbers of colorful piñatas are sold. The hope is to extend this route further south via Central Avenue in the future.

NEW! North Spur: The north spur branches off the route at L.A. City Hall, heading north on Main Street, crossing the 101 Freeway into the historic El Pueblo plaza area, including Olvera Street. It continues on Paseo Olivares, Spring Street, New High Street, Ord Street and into the heart of L.A.’s Chinatown on North Broadway, ending at Chinatown’s Central Plaza. Both El Pueblo and Chinatown offer CicLAvia participants lots of great places to eat! The new spur also makes a much easier connection with Union Station and with the Metro Gold Line Chinatown Station.

While the lion’s share of the credit for the expanded route, and for CicLAvia in general, goes to the volunteers who work so tirelessly to make the event happen, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention the support of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and his staff. The Mayor has backed CicLAvia both behind the microphone and in public meetings. One month after the April CicLAvia, he promised an extended route at the May Blessing of the Bicycles, and that doubtless helped keep city staff focused on CicLAvia expansion.

CicLAvia is also hoping to raise another $10,500 through a Kickstarter Campaign over the next month. While L.A. Streetsblog and CicLAvia aren’t officially partners, we’re proud to see the Streetfilm on the April event featured as part of their campaign.

A rare sight in the Tenderloin: children playing ball in the streets. Photos by Bryan Goebel.

Mary San George was sitting outside her neighborhood flower store yesterday, facing the historic residential high-rise building on O’Farrell Street where she has lived for 27 years, and was marveling at something she very rarely gets to experience in her Tenderloin neighborhood: a street full of people instead of cars.

“People use this street like a raceway,” said the 75-year-old San George, who was anxious to point out the everyday dangers of a neighborhood where streets prioritize auto throughput. “We have signs in different areas that say this is a drug-free zone, but I think we should have a no-speed zone, and make it very expensive for drivers.”

For its 25th event, Sunday Streets, now a San Francisco institution, brought car-free zones filled with healthy activities to the Tenderloin, one of the densest neighborhoods on the West Coast, where most residents don’t own automobiles. Last year’s Tenderloin event was rained out, but this year, under beautiful blue skies, between 5,000 and 7,000 people turned out to play in the streets.

While the event didn’t attract the huge crowds that the Mission’s Sunday Streets draws — there was a little music festival competing — it was nevertheless an exciting day, and an important moment for the Tenderloin and the livable streets movement.

Mom and daughter enjoy a bike ride on a car-free Golden Gate Avenue.

“It feels good. It’s great,” said Joel, a nearly 30-year Tenderloin resident who was sitting next to San George, listening to the Hyde Street Band belt out “Whole Lotta Love.” “At 4:30 it turns into a highway, and there are people literally flying through here.”

“What is this?” a sprightly man in a shiny suit and fedora asked me, as I was pedaling slowly down Jones Street, which was free of cars and buzzing with people activity.

“Sunday Streets,” I responded. “They close the streets to cars and open them up to people.”

“Really? How cool!”

I got that question many times as I explored the route in the early part of the day. The event seemed to grow on the neighborhood because more residents spilled into the streets as the day wore on. It was the first time in many years (and some I spoke to couldn’t remember it ever happening), that Tenderloin residents got a taste of what it’s like to have calm, quiet streets instead of high-capacity one-way arterials that are typically noisy, congested and threatening to the health and safety of the people who live there.

Rapping in the streets, in front of the YMCA, which was handing out fruit-kebabs and fresh watermelon.

A dancer shows the crowd how it's done during B-Boys Break Dance Lessons in Civic Center Plaza.

More than a dozen blocks of O’Farrell, Jones and Ellis Streets were closed to cars, along with a stretch of Golden Gate Avenue and two blocks of Polk Street. The car-free zone looped through the heart of the Tenderloin and Civic Center area, offering live music, kid zones, Tai Chi, break dance lessons, roller disco and many more activities.

On any given weekday, many of these streets see large volumes of traffic that carry drivers to the Bay Bridge and Financial District. Sadly, the Tenderloin has one of the city’s highest rates of pedestrian fatalities and injuries. Giving the neighborhood a one-day dose of car-free streets helped residents imagine what it could look and sound like without roaring automobile traffic.

“Between 70 percent and 90 percent of the people who live in the Civic Center and Tenderloin neighborhoods do not own cars, yet this neighborhood is the one that’s the most heavily impacted by personal vehicles,” said Sunday Streets coordinator Susan King of the non-profit Livable City. “We have large volumes of traffic moving through on wide streets without that neighborhood getting any of the benefit of those visitors, they’re just passing through as quickly as possible.”

The utopia that Mona Caron envisioned in her now-famous “Windows into the Tenderloin” mural on the corner of Golden Gate and Jones might seem years away, but it’s part of a community discussion that has been going on for a while now. Supervisor Jane Kim, who represents the neighborhood, has made pedestrian safety her top priority.

Taking a stroll on Ellis Street east of Hyde Photo: geekstinkbreath

The Tenderloin has had a difficult time shaking off its bad rep, but what many drivers who pass through may not realize from behind their windshields is that the neighborhood’s population is one of the city’s most diverse, and includes many seniors and working-class families and children, some of whom could be seen playing ball in the streets yesterday.

“We have to understand who lives in the community, who is building the community and who really wants to contribute back to the community. That’s the only way to really get involved in changing or rearranging what’s part of the system right now,” said Joenell Molina of the Vietnamese Youth Development Center, which set up a table for Sunday Streets next to the YMCA on Golden Gate Avenue.

“It’s a fascinating neighborhood,” said King. “This is one of the most densely populated neighborhoods for families. Children live here, families live here.”

Similar to how Sunday Streets evolved in the Mission, King said it will probably take a few Sunday Streets before the Tenderloin events realize their full potential, but she called yesterday’s event a success, and looks forward to bringing it back next year.

“We know where we need to tighten up and improve,” said King. “It’s a priority that we will get back to these neighborhoods next year.”

For more photos of Sunday Streets, check our Flickr pool, and more offerings from geekstinkbreath.

What a great day to be in drag on a bike.

Cruising down Ellis Street on his electric bike.

Learning how to ride a bike on Golden Gate Avenue in front of the Federal Building.

SF Bike Coalition Policy Director Andy Thornley on the Great Highway. Photo: Bryan Goebel

Sunday Streets returns to Golden Gate Park and the Great Highway this Sunday, extending the park’s regular weekend street openings all the way to the beach and beyond. Thousands of San Franciscans of all ages are expected to pedal, play and relax along the car-free route running all the way from the Panhandle along John F. Kennedy Drive to the windmill and down the Great Highway along Ocean Beach with lots of fun activites along the way.

There will be free performances from some talented groups throughout the route, including the San Francisco Symphony and Circus Bella in the park as well as two shows from local musical child prodigies. Of course, there will also be lots of family-friendly activities to participate in like skate rentals and dancing, RollerSoccer demonstrations, a Climate Change Education Mobile Climate Science Lab, free bike rentals, and the SF Bike Coalition’s Freedom From Training Wheels program.

Get out and make the most of the beautiful weather forecast and a car-free Golden Gate Park!

Flickr photo: geekstinkbreath

Thousands of people took to the car-free streets of the Bayview, Dogpatch and Potrero Hill yesterday for a sunny Sunday Streets.  Did you go? Please share your stories in the comments section, and see more photos below the break. The next Sunday Streets is July 12th on the Great Highway.

22nd Street. Flickr photo: geekstinkbreath

Photo: Bryan Goebel

Photo: Bryan Goebel

Flickr photo: geekstinkbreath

Flickr photo: geekstinkbreath

Flickr photo: sfbike

Many a cycling tot will get another chance to graduate from training wheels this Sunday on safe, car-free streets by the Bay. Sunday Streets returns to Bayview with a tweaked route this year to include the Lower Potero Hill and Dogpatch neighborhoods in the plethora of family-friendly activities.

The list of activities this month is so long, in fact, that when organizer Susan King submitted it the San Francisco Examiner for publication, “the copy editors came back to me and said, ‘cut this down by a third’.”

“This is certainly one of the most robust program lists we’ve had,” said King.

The route will run along Third Street from Mendell Plaza to 22nd Street, where it will zig zag west by Espirit Park to the Jackson Playground at 17th and Wisconsin Streets. It was modified to accommodate vehicle traffic needs for a Giants game at the ballpark, but it will also bring the street opening to new doorsteps.

“It gives us a chance to really explore those two neighborhoods that we haven’t done before,” said King. “In Dogpatch, we’re going through the emerging merchant corridor on 22nd Street and tying it to Espirit park, which is a beautiful little park hidden behind the freeway.”

“There’s a new bike path on 17th Street from Mission, so people will have a safe passage to the start of the route,” she added.

The event is being organized by Livable City in coordination with local organizations like The Third Street Corridor Project, the Bayview Merchant Association and the Renaissance Entrepreneur Center.

It will be held in conjunction with the fourth annual Family Health and Wellness Fair hosted by the Bayview Opera House, which will include free health screenings from medical professionals. The Bayview Music Festival will also fill the streets with live outdoor music along with venues all the way from Woods Yard Park to Thee Parkside and Bottom of the Hill.

San Franciscans can get healthy with activities like Zumba dance lessons and a Yoga-thon at the Opera House. As always, the SF Bike Coalition will hold its Freedom from Training Wheels program along with Blazing Saddles’ free bike rentals and the Funky Town Roller Disco. The SF Arts Commission’s Free Wall interactive mural will also make its final appearance.

In light of Sunday Streets’ success, King said officials from the U.S. Center for Disease Control will be assessing this month’s event as a potentially effective obesity intervention program. “They’re looking for programs that will be recommended on a national scale, which is very exciting,” she said.

Visit sundaystreetssf.com for the route map and full list of programs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Bike-and-Roll rental station in front of the Hyatt Regency at Market and Spear.

I’ve been bicycling in San Francisco since the late 1970s so I vividly remember when almost all bicyclists could recognize each other on the streets of the city. There really weren’t that many of us even as recently as the beginning of the 1990s, just two decades ago. We’ve come a long way, and one of the less recognized aspects of this bicycling boom has been the incredible expansion of bike rentals and bicycling tourism.

I wrote a flyer back in 1986 calling for a “City of Panhandles” and one of the arguments I made in that largely unnoticed document was that a systematic effort to provide safe, separate bikeways crisscrossing the City would itself lead to a tourism boom. As it turns out, we’re experiencing a dramatic increase in tourists cycling even before we provide adequate infrastructure. San Francisco is just an incredibly beautiful place, and people come from all over the world to experience its beauty. Growing numbers of those visitors aren’t much interested in seeing it through windshields and are opting instead (or in addition) to rent bicycles.

There are three “big” companies doing bike rentals in SF: Bike and Roll, Blazing Saddles, and Bay City Bikes (a number of smaller places, like the BikeHut at Pier 40, also rent bikes). I recently spoke with Darryll White, owner of Bike and Roll, and he gave me some impressive aggregate numbers. Since 1995 the local bicycle rental business has grown from about $500,000 a year to over $10 million! The remarkable thing about this huge increase in tourist cycling is that about 90 percent of the rentals are heading to the Golden Gate Bridge and to Sausalito, where the City Council has erupted into battles over bike parking vs. car parking, even pondering charging fees to touring bicyclists. The Golden Gate Ferry service keeps at least four of its ferry runs going to accommodate the cycling tourists, which have hit peaks of 2,500 per day during recent summer months.

Blazing Saddles rents bikes and go-carts from its Hyde Street facility near Fisherman's Wharf.

This past Wednesday I was buying food at the Heart of the City Farmers’ Market in UN Plaza and lo and behold, a mini-mass of 9 cyclists went rolling by on Market, heading westward. All of them were on Bike and Roll bikes, and I stopped to marvel at the sight. Imagine if there was a dedicated bikeway up Market that connected cyclists all the way to the Pacific Ocean? Talk about a tourist attraction! And since it would go right by the Haight-Ashbury, the museums in the park, as well as the Civic Center, imagine how heavily trafficked by cyclists from out of town this will be.

As it happens the SF Bike Coalition is now promoting a plan to Connect The City, a version of crosstown bikeways, including a dedicated bikeway that runs from the Embarcadero to the Pacific Ocean by way of Market Street, the Wiggle, and Golden Gate Park. It’s a wonder that the politically powerful tourism industry hasn’t thrown their weight behind it yet. The bicycle renaissance going on across the world has an important connection to San Francisco (Critical Mass was born here in 1992) and thousands of cyclists come here for the beauty, the food, and the politics. If San Francisco were creating dedicated bikeways, and presenting itself as a bicycling capital, tourism from near and far would only increase that much more.

The big three maintain a fleet of approximately 3500-4000 bikes and employ on average one mechanic per 100 bikes to keep those bikes rolling. New bike shops continue to open around town, showcasing the bicycle as one of the few growing business sectors that doesn’t require its workers to sit in front of computers all day, mining pixels. Commuters, messengers, and recreational riders have already radically expanded the use of our common public space by bicycles during the last twenty years. The challenge now is to really redesign the city’s streets to make safe, horticulturally and artistically designed bikeways as common as thoroughfares for cars. I’m not a big fan of capitalism or business, but it’s pretty obvious that if we build a beautiful system of bike boulevards, bicyclists will come to ride them by the tens of thousands. When they do, they spend a lot of money and keep a lot of our local economy going.

What could be simpler? Transform a citywide network of streets to promote daily bicycling, promote it to the global tourism industry, and get ready for the boom, doubling and tripling the huge expansion we’ve already seen. It would create good, local jobs to remake the streets (design, reconstruction, gardening, maintenance), more to accommodate the increase in local cycling (retail stores, rentals, bikesharing facilities, workshops), and then a further increase as the tourists pour in to cycle across San Francisco’s beautiful landscape (tour guides, rentals, mechanics, restaurants, hotels, cafes)… Whatever diminishing of car and gasoline sales might occur would be more than made up for by an ecologically healthy, economically relocalized, bicycle-centric boom that increases San Francisco’s global profile as a trendsetter and a tourist destination.

Enjoying car-free streets at Redding's first-ever ciclovía-style event, Shasta Living Streets. Photo: Jeff Worthington

Redding, California, with a population of 90,000, is probably best known for its sunshine, breathtaking landscapes and conservative politics. Located 200 miles north of Sacramento in Shasta County, the lush region surrounded by the Trinity and Cascade mountains offers an abundance of recreation, including a growing number of paved multi-use trails that draw large crowds of bicyclists and pedestrians.

The seven-year-old Sundial Bridge, a 700-foot long steel marvel on the Sacramento River designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, has become Redding’s living room.

“It is where everyone hangs out in town, especially when the weather is nice. In a normal community, whatever normal is, you would see that sort of energy in a downtown square, or park, or even a downtown third place, but it happens to be out at the Sundial Bridge,” said Paul Shigley, the senior editor of the California Planning and Development Report (CP&DR), who lives six miles west of Redding near Whiskeytown Lake.

Downtown Redding does not draw a similar convergence of people enjoying public space because like many California cities it was designed for the automobile, and is not a particularly welcoming place for pedestrians and bicyclists.  The city ranks 40th among 103 cities in California “for the number of pedestrian collisions by population,” according to a recent report [pdf]. Just last week, a 16-year-old boy was struck and killed by a driver while walking across a bridge that lacked a sidewalk.

“The town is set up to conduct motorists fast and to allow them to drive up to 50, 60 miles an hour right through the middle of town,” said Scott Mobley, a reporter for the Record Searchlight, the city’s daily newspaper.

“It’s dangerous,” said Anne Wallach Thomas, a former San Francisco resident and bicyclist who helped found the Shasta Cascade Bicycle Coalition. “Some people are lucky and they can go around some little side streets, and if you’re not lucky like me, I can’t ride my bicycle to my sister’s house, I can’t ride to the grocery store.”

In the late 1970s, the city made a poor planning decision to build a mall in the center of town and designed a network of one-way arterial streets. The mall failed not long after it opened, becoming what CP&DR described as “a glum collection of offices, struggling shops and vacant space.”

“Downtown has been pretty much a dead zone for decades. There are areas that have signs of life but the big problem is very few people live downtown,” said Shigley, who a few years ago in CP&DR named Redding one of California’s most disappointing mid-sized cities. But “check back in 10 years,” the report added.

The Sundial Bridge was designed for pedestrians and bicyclists. Photo: Jeff Worthington

The Demand

Judging from the crowds of bicyclists and walkers who show up to enjoy the region’s vast network of scenic trails, there is an increasing demand for bicycle facilities and better conditions for pedestrians. Like the Sundial Bridge, Shigley said weekend crowds pack the one-mile Dana to Downtown bikeway and walking path recently constructed by Caltrans as part of a Highway 44 bridge improvement and widening project.

“It goes from the Dana Drive big box area over to the convention center area, and it’s proven wildly popular that you can get to those two parts of town on foot and on bike,” said Shigley.

“The reason people live up here primarily is because it’s really beautiful. We have access to amazing recreation opportunities. So lots of people have multiple $1500 bikes in their garages. They put them on the car and drive some miles to get on a trail,” said Wallach Thomas.

Driving to one of the region’s popular riverfront trails might be an easy venture, but try walking and bicycling there and the conditions can be treacherous. The region’s bike network lacks good connectivity to major destinations. That doesn’t mean, however, that bicyclists are staying off the streets. Bicycle traffic counts taken last September by Redding’s Bicycle Advisory Committee and Healthy Shasta showed a dramatic 80 percent increase in riders at major intersections.

“I have no trouble being a cyclist here. I’ve been doing it for 10 years,” said Mobley, the newspaper reporter, who is an everyday bicyclist. He thinks many drivers are beginning to adjust to having more bicyclists on the streets.

“It’s been years since someone’s called me an idiot or flipped me off or gunned their engine as they go by just to intimate me. I mean, that’s happened to me but not in a long time,” said Mobley.

Although he finds it easier to bike, Mobley pointed out that a friend, who is also a regular cyclist, got run off the road last year by a driver who “literally came right up behind him and made damn sure he was in a ditch. He hurt himself. Ripped open his knee and was quite debilitated after that.”

Many cyclists are forced onto the shoulders of roads, if there are any, or the sidewalk, where it is legal to ride in Redding.

“On many days while attending Shasta High School I rode my bike several miles a day to and from school. Redding has always offered so many ways to enjoy the outdoors and now has great bike facilities along the river and so much potential for more,” said Jim Brown of the California Bicycle Coalition.

Bicyclists and other vulnerable users are lucky to get a shoulder. Photo: Jefferson Thomas

Changing Hearts and Minds

Advocates say the popularity of Redding’s biking and walking trails, along with a desire to get healthy are indeed causing more people to second guess their traditional mode of transportation. According to the Shasta Coalition for Activity and Nutrition, 66 percent of adults in Shasta County are overweight, along with 27 percent of teens.

“You start off maybe riding your bike for entertainment on the river trail and then you think, ‘wow, maybe I could ride my bike to work,’ ‘maybe I could ride to the store, ‘maybe I could ride my kids to school everyday,’” said Francie Sullivan, a member of the Redding City Council who is a recreational cyclist.

The five-member council recently began working on a Complete Streets policy and decided to make completing it “our number one priority,” said Sullivan, adding that Redding, like other California cities, is grappling with budget woes and 17 percent unemployment. “But the good news about the economy is that more people are walking and riding bikes out of necessity.”

Sullivan, a Democrat who has served in public office for more than 20 years, said Shasta County is a “conservative community” but the issue transcends party lines.

“If you go to the river trail I would venture a guess that a majority of the people who cross you on roller blades and their bikes and who are walking and running are conservative Republicans. Everybody wants to be fit and everybody gets the same mood elevation from being outside,” said Sullivan.

Father and son enjoy Shasta Living Streets. Photo: Jeff Worthington

Challenges

For the first time, Redding has hired a full-time bicycle and pedestrian coordinator who is working on improving the city’s bikeway plan, which until recently had not been updated since 1998. Realizing the increasing demand for bicycle facilities, the Bikeway Action Plan [pdf] envisions increasing the current bikeway network from 124 miles to 162 miles to “improve the connections for cyclists to prime destinations.”

Changing the culture of old-school traffic engineers who are primarily concerned with moving automobile traffic and adhering to Level of Service (LOS) standards remains a difficult challenge in Redding, like a lot of California cities. Road and highway widenings are popular, while road diets are practically unheard of.

“You feel like you’re fighting an uphill battle every time,” said Zachary Bonnin, the city’s new bike/ped coordinator. “It’s a challenge to implement bike stuff.”

Bonnin, who grew up in Phoenix and got an environmental science degree at Northwestern Arizona University, also manages the city’s transportation system, the Redding Area Bus Authority (RABA), which sees anywhere from 2,000 to 2,400 daily passengers.

“They put me on board to challenge the engineers and to look at every project and to say ‘why are we doing it this way’ or ‘why can’t we do it this way’ or ‘what about bike and ped’ access and ‘where’s our bike lane’ and ‘why can’t we add a sidewalk here?’” he said.

The one-way arterials in downtown Redding are like freeways. Photo: City of Redding

The drafting of the city’s Complete Streets policy is also making some of Bonnin’s old-school transportation colleagues rethink the way they’ve designed the streets. The National Association of City Transportation Officials’ recent update of its bikeway design standards is also helping.

“They see these things and say ‘well, it would cost us more money not to do that now, then to have to deal with it later,’” said Bonnin.

The city is also hoping to incorporate improvements to the pedestrian realm in its Complete Streets policy, including strengthening its Safe Routes to Schools program, developing a pedestrian safety program and Pedestrian Master Plan to implement capital and maintenance projects. A pedestrian safety assessment prepared by transportation consultants Fehr & Peers and Oakland-based Dowling Associates recommends road diets on some downtown streets, along with bulbouts and median refuge islands.

The city’s efforts are also being bolstered by a burgeoning group of living streets advocates with ties to San Francisco’s bicycle and transit advocacy community who are working to help transform Redding into a more bikeable, walkable community.

Wallach Thomas and some longtime members of the Norcal Bicycle Partnership, Shasta Wheelmen, the Redding Mountain Biking club and some other bicyclists recently formed the Shasta Cascade Bicycle Coalition to lobby for better conditions and help educate city planners and the public. The group meets once a month.

“The safe and inviting part is important,” Wallach Thomas told the Record Searchlight. “We have world-class facilities for mountain bikes and incredible park trails. What we can’t do is leave the house and safely get anywhere.”

The reaction to Shasta Living Streets was overwhelmingly positive and even skeptics praised it. "One mother said to me, 'Anne, I want to thank you. My kids are in heaven. They're having so much fun,'" said Wallach Thomas. Photo: Jeff Worthington

Shasta Living Streets

Last weekend, after months of planning, discussion and wading through city bureaucracy, Redding held its first ciclovía-style event, Shasta Living Streets, converting a two-mile stretch of Park Marina Drive near the Sacramento River into car-free space for people. It was the first open streets event in Northern California outside of the Bay Area.

“It was a success,” said Wallach Thomas, who was the main organizer. While some city bureaucrats had doubts that anyone would show up, Wallach said well over 500 people turned out on a rainy day. It helped that the event was timed with the popular Whole Earth Festival.

“I think it’s really going to make a big difference up here changing hearts and minds,” said Wallach Thomas. “It has implications and leverage far beyond the five hours of the actual event.”

Wallach Thomas got advice from her friend Cheryl Brinkman, a member of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s Board of Directors who has been involved with San Francisco’s Sunday Streets since its inception. Brinkman and her husband Rich Coffin took a trip to Redding to speak to a group of advocates interested in launching Shasta Living Streets.

“Gil Peñalosa, the father of ciclovías, always said that it’s not a competition among cities or towns.  Every city or town which starts a car-free streets program helps the next city or town start their program.  I’m thrilled that Redding had its first car-free event,” said Brinkman.

The organizers of the event actually received an email from Peñalosa offering his congratulations, and encouraging them to carry on their work.

“I hope this event will be a means to many great initiatives,” Peñalosa wrote. “Living Streets will show residents that streets can be used for more than just moving cars; streets are our largest and most valuable assets, the space the belongs to all, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, social or economic background.”

“As other programs inspired you, now you are inspiring others.”

Group exercise was part of the program for Shasta Living Streets. Photo: Jeff Worthington

"This is so cool," was the reaction of many kids to Shasta Living Streets, said Wallach Thomas. Photo: Jeff Worthington

Image: Streets Alive

San Mateo County’s first Streets Alive event may have had bad luck with the weather last April, but many Peninsula cities are eager to get another shot at celebrating car-free streets with an even bigger event in 2011.

“Even though it was rained out, it was pretty popular with residents,” said Eric Pawlowsky, an aide to San Mateo County Supervisor Carole Groom, who declared May 1 Streets Alive Day last week. “There was really some momentum there from the public.”

Thirteen cities are set to participate by allowing people to enjoy healthy activities on open streets, up from eight last year, including Belmont, Brisbane, Burlingame, Daly City, East Palo Alto, Foster City, Millbrae, North Fair Oaks, Pacifica, Redwood City, San Bruno, San Mateo, and South San Francisco.

The Peninsula region will join a global movement of cities from San Francisco to Bogotá, Colombia, where it all started, to close streets to cars and open them up to people for a Sunday afternoon. From Grand Avenue in South San Francisco to Visitacion Avenue in Brisbane to Redwood City’s Courthouse Square, residents will be able to walk, bike, sit, talk, and play in temporary sanctuaries of open public space.

Cities will have community bike rides, fitness activities, and farmers markets as part of their events, said Pawlowsky. Redwood City is said to have the largest event planned, including activities like Bollywood fitness and educational exhibits, while East Palo Alto will tie in their street opening with a Cinco de Mayo celebration.

Even with limited funds available for the budding program, some cities that can’t afford motor vehicle closures are finding creative ways to get people active, said Pawlowsky. Residents can enjoy trail walks in Pacifica, the Serramonte Fair in Daly City, and other outdoor community events in Millbrae and North Fair Oaks.

A little weekend viewing from the west coast of England. Since the summer of 2009, neighbors in Bristol have organized “Playing Out” events on seven streets, setting aside car-free hours for kids to play in the street without constant parental supervision. Watching this video immediately brought to mind Clarence’s Streetfilm of the 78th Street play street in Jackson Heights.

The Bristol moms behind “Playing Out” have put together a stellar web site laying out the case for car-free time on residential streets. I especially like their answer to the question: “Why do children need to play in the street when there are parks nearby?”

Parks are great for family outings and for older children who can get there independently but, unless you happen to live right next to a park, it usually involves a special trip, escorted and supervised by adults. Street play is very different. Firstly, it is literally on the doorstep so children can play ‘semi-supervised’ whilst parents get on with other things. This allows for more free, unstructured play, without being under the constant gaze of adults. Secondly, it is a step towards greater independence, giving both children and parents more confidence to gradually extend their ‘freedom to roam’, leading to children eventually being able to get to parks and other local places by themselves.

Definitely No to the Freeway! (La Via Express)

While the world has gathered in Cancun, Mexico, to discuss again a shared approach to Climate Chaos, action is already being taken in countless communities. On a visit last week to Guadalajara, Mexico, more than a thousand miles west of the Climate Meeting, I had the pleasure of discovering a vibrant grassroots movement to block the construction of a new 23-kilometer elevated freeway through the heart of the city. Interestingly, this movement leans primarily on people who live along the proposed route of the freeway, but found crucial support and activism from Ciudad Para Todos (City For All), a three-year-old group of bicycle and transit activists who are Guadalajara’s most vocal opponents to the reign of the car.

This is the current situation along much of the line. Train tracks down the middle. High tension electric lines on the right, underground gas and oil pipelines under the left.

Ciudad Para Todos gained Guadalajara's attention with a months-long campout in the green space at the far end of this road to protest a bridge.

I met Étienne von Bertrab and Negro Soto Morfín, two of the main Ciudad Para Todos activists, at the World Car-Free Cities Conference in Portland, Oregon in 2008 and later they invited me to speak to the 2nd annual Congress of Urban Cycling in Mexico held in Guadalajara in September 2009. We got together just after Thanksgiving and they filled us in on the new campaign.

In June 2010, just before they left for York, England for this year’s Car-Free Cities Conference, the Jalisco State Government published a video online describing the new freeway (La Via Express) plan. The Jalisco state government (which encompasses the city of Guadalajara) declared its intention to build a freeway on the same railroad line that a previous city government had proposed for a linear park and garden corridor with bicycle and pedestrian zones. The corridor conveniently cuts through the city and is used by laborers riding bicycles 20-30 kilometers a day between home and work.

Avenida Inglaterra is just above the red line crossing the image; it is currently a rail corridor with utility lines and limited open space on either side.

Étienne and Negro brought the government video with them to England and showed it to the gathered planners and activists on the first day and made two guerrilla video responses. At first the Jalisco government protested to Youtube and demanded the videos be taken down on the grounds of copyright violation (they had garnered 12,000 views in just the first four days), but when that news broke, even more people went to see the videos. (Youtube did take down the videos for a while, but restored them after protests from Ciudad Para Todos.) All three are posted here, but this is the one primarily in English:

The guerrilla videos made by Ciudad Para Todos were circulating and galvanizing local opponents, but the neighbors had already begun organizing before they even saw the video. We met Dr. Alicia Jaik, an energetic former medical doctor, now running a small corner store along the proposed route. Her neighbor is a local politician and when he asked her what she thought of the proposal she announced her dismay. “What should we do?” asked the politician. “Get to work!” was her immediate response. Signs sprung up along the houses up and down the street.

One of the signs alongside the proposed route.

This is posted on the sidewalk in front of Dr. Alicia's shop, indicating the places where neighbors have already begun the transformation.

A short time later Étienne was walking along the rail line with a local journalist and was thrilled when he saw the signs. With the journalist in tow, he knocked on Dr. Alicia’s door and after realizing they had much to discuss, he was invited to a meeting called a few days later. At the meeting Etienne and Negro and their colleagues presented their videos, their larger critique, and the plans that had been created by the previous municipal government for a linear park. They were met with great enthusiasm. “What can we do? When can we start? Can we do it this Saturday?” demanded the neighbors. Etienne and Negro hadn’t anticipated an action plan emerging so quickly, but they saw a good thing when it appeared. “Why not?”

That Saturday was the first gardening party, beginning with the removal of tons of accumulated trash. From that July meeting there has been a regular Saturday work party ever since. There are now over 400 new trees planted and at least eight different neighborhood associations involved. Neighbors have established new relationships with each other, and public feasts have become a regular feature of the Saturday work parties and other days. The independent Hotel del Bosque sits on an adjacent corner. They were at first cool to the activism, but became an enthusiastic participant, including their recent support of a mural painted by some local graffiti artists.

This mural was just painted in the past couple of weeks on a wall facing the corridor.

A university campus is adjacent too, and students have been eager participants as well. Painstaking work with local businesses has gained further support, many of them angered by the backroom dealing going on with big connected Mexican companies ICA, Cemex, and Grupo Mexico. A press conference of two local business associations was held on December 2 supporting demands for more transparency, public hearings, and technical evaluations of the freeway plans before anything begins. Meanwhile, the facts on the ground are getting better every weekend.

Neighbors have begun implanting a linear park on their own.

Homemade signs adorn the newly minted unauthorized park.

This lovely garden has obviously been growing for much longer than the rest of the efforts nearby.

Neighbors and passersby already make use of the shady trees and park benches that locals have installed as part of their guerrilla park-making.

Picnicking and hanging out in the grassroots linear park.

On September 22, 2010, World Carfree Day, our intrepid activists decided to install a monument in the middle of the contested terrain. They acquired a junked car, and turned it into a large flower pot, fixing it in place at one of the busiest intersections on Avenida Inglaterra. On the morning they were going to put it in place, the first arrival was pondering how to move massive concrete pieces into place when a man drove by on a big backhoe, most serendipitously! He quickly agreed to use his machine to move two big slabs of nearby concrete across the railroad tracks and even suggested a better placement for them. Voila! A new monument was installed, and we had fun visiting it last Tuesday. Here’s a few shots of it, followed by a video showing its installation, including the arrival of a Critical Mass-like procession by the GDL en Bici crowd.

The yellow sign above indicates this car was a public art installation for Carfree Day, 2010.

Heavy cement was moved by a guy passing by serendipitously on a big backhoe!

Flowers Not Motors!

This back seat is a rest stop for bike and ped commuters crossing a long way from one side of the city to the other.

The down-to-earth politics of this new Freeway Revolt in Mexico are a shining example to climate change activists everywhere. As Dr. Alicia put it to us, “Aqui, nadie es nadie, todos somos todos.” (Roughly translated as “Here, nobody’s a bigshot, we’re all in it together.”) She was emphasizing that they weren’t relying on the political parties or their representatives, to the contrary, they were disallowed in this campaign. Our friends in Ciudad Para Todos underlined the same point: The local diputado (elected representative in the state government) could participate as a citizen, but they wouldn’t support his offer to bring in work crews, equipment, and resources, whereby his political party would colonize the effort for their own ends. Dr. Alicia told us, “Before neighbors wouldn’t really talk to each other. Now we’re a community!” She’d been gardening across from her house for years, but now there are hundreds of neighbors doing the same up and down the rail line. The doctor is already scheming ways to deepen the new community’s life. She was planning to establish a free outdoor library near the benches that had already been built. “Take a book to read, leave one behind.”

Adriana and Dr. Alicia in the park.

A dead tree across from her small store had come back to life with several dozen fluttering hand-written “leaves.” One of our favorites said “Leave the closet and let’s be citizens all the time.” It’s just such a reinvigorated—and visionary—citizenship that is the foundation of the transition that we must make in the face of Climate Chaos, the Energy and Economic Crises, and the generally dissatisfying daily lives we lead in the second decade of the 21st century.

The dead tree with living "leaves."

Leave the closet and let's be citizens all the time!

Thanks to Adriana Camarena, my compañera who fully participated in gathering this story, and without whom I wouldn’t have been able to write it!

Between Chris Christie’s decision to wind down construction on the ARC tunnel and the fare-hiking aftereffects of Albany’s political malevolence/incompetence, it was a rough week for sustainable transportation in the New York City region. Governors and legislatures may call a lot of the shots when it comes to transportation policy, but thankfully not all of them. Case in point: All the great changes in New York documented by the fine team at Embarq in this stunning video, the first in a series called “Cities in Focus” which will also showcase innovations from Curitiba, Istanbul, Mumbai, Los Angeles and Mexico City.

Watch this installment and see Michael Bloomberg, Janette Sadik-Khan, and Streetsblog originator Aaron Naparstek all appear within a few seconds of each other. And check out City Fix blogger Jonna McKone’s report on the video premiere earlier this week. (NYC DOT Senior Policy Adviser Jon Orcutt dropped a few intriguing bits of info about how the city is developing bike-share plans.)

We’ll see more results of NYC innovation this Sunday, when Select Bus Service and the re-designed First and Second Avenues officially debut.

Back in 2008, residents in Jackson Heights, Queens, banded together to win car-free Sundays on 78th Street, creating a new, temporary public space for children and families in one of NYC’s most park-starved neighborhoods. This year neighborhood activists aimed much higher: They wanted to make the street car-free 24-7 for the entire months of July and August.

As you’ll see, thanks to lots of motivation and strong leadership from their City Council Member Daniel Dromm, they overcame initial hesitation from the local community board’s transportation committee — which voted the idea down — to make it happen.

The fight was worth it, Dromm told us. “It was recognized just about two weeks ago in The Queens Tribune as being one of the best things about Queens – this play street,” he said. “So imagine if we hadn’t done it?” Indeed.

All summer long, 78th Street was filled with a warm, family atmosphere, sometimes well after sundown. As for next year, there’s talk of possibly giving this car-free street even greater permanence. Stay tuned.

"I'm looking forward to getting started," said Jeremy Shaw, MCM's lead organizer. "This is just the beginning of a new community space that the community will define."

Shaw said the market is starting well, with eight farmers and various prepared foods and crafts and artisan booths, five cultural, performance, youth or artistic partners, two after-school programs, tables from the YMCA, and an art project from Root Division.

"We need to make sure the balance of vendors is right, we need to make sure different types of emerging businesses from the neighborhood are represented," said Shaw. "We need to make sure to get the word out that this is a community space and a platform for existing institutions to bring the programs they are already doing into the street."

In the longer term, Shaw wants to see the weekly activity in the middle of Bartlett Street become a tool to long-term permanent improvements to the street.

"We will be consulting with the community and raising funds for making streetscape improvements, adding murals and considering other design components the community brings forward," he said.

Having fun in The Mission. Photo: dustinj

Unlike previous months, Mayor Gavin Newsom even chimed in this week with accolades, urging people to get out and enjoy streets opened up to people and closed to car traffic.

“Sunday Streets has become a great way for families from all over the Bay Area to enjoy our neighborhoods,” said Mayor Newsom. “It has also become a national model for creating a safe, fun, car-free place for people to get out and get active.”

This Sunday's event will also see a special hockey demonstration by the San Jose Sharks at Harrison St. between 18th and 19th Streets, and a free noontime circus performance by Circus Bella in the O’Connell High School lot Harrison at 20th.

For program information, go to sundystreetssf.com.

The organization fighting the massive freeway plan in Vancouver

I’m just back from a fantastic five-day visit to Vancouver to help celebrate and publicly ponder Car-Free Vancouver Day. The event started six years ago along East Vancouver’s Commercial Drive (“the Drive” as it is often called there). It has grown to encompass five separate neighborhood street closures, one being the very wide 4- to 6-lane Main Street where it is closed for about 17 blocks. To San Franciscans the event has a certain familiarity, combining something of our venerable tradition of street fairs with the newer excitement of “Sunday Streets.” But unlike the well-established and highly commercial street fairs, or the city-sponsored Sunday Streets, Car-Free Vancouver Day is a product of grassroots organizing, with hundreds of volunteers working hard for months to produce an exciting day of urban reinhabitation.

Street closure as art gallery.

Learning to unicycle on Car-Free Vancouver Day

"Score a goal for community!"

Serious salsa dancing for fun

Transition town meeting in mid-street.

The event has its roots in the years-long campaign to stop a $10 billion freeway and port expansion plan that will bulldoze local farms, neighborhoods, and indigenous sites, in addition to wrecking a couple of extant urban wilderness zones at Burns Bog and Surrey Bend. The Gateway Sucks campaign emphasizes that this plan, which is still proceeding, will lock in more urban sprawl and sabotage the local greenhouse gas reduction plan, all to increase trade in raw goods and disposable junk.

Car-free Commercial Drive in midday

The East Vancouver neighborhood was the first to propose a day-long closure of the its main corridor Commercial Drive as a way to demonstrate popular opposition to further freeway building. Urban activists like Matt Hern, who along with his family was my super fantastic host, saw a street closure as a way of animating the community, bringing people face to face in a car-free zone for at least a day, but in so doing, promote a more convivial and integrated neighborhood life year-round. Based on my short visit, I’d have to say that it’s been a smashing success—the provincial British Columbia government has yet to back down on their gargantuan 20th-century development plan, but the rising tide of community activism, urban gardening, bicycle advocacy and much more is palpable in Vancouver.

East Tenth Avenue is one of Vancouver's primary bike boulevards.

Similar to Berkeley's traffic-calmed cul-de-sacs, Vancouver makes bicycling a priority in many locations.

Community gardens abound in Vancouver.

The City Farmer gate made of old tools.

The recently elected mayor is a source of controversy. On one hand he’s a big bicycle advocate and has pushed through two tangible improvements for cyclists that have generated plenty of heat from merchants and auto-centric citizens. One long-standing demand of local cyclists, an additional southbound lane for bikes on the major arterial Burrard Bridge, has been established.

This is the Burrard Bridge in Vancouver. Why can't we do this with one lane on the west span of the Bay Bridge once the east span is complete? That way bikes could ride all the way across...

Another is a two-way bike lane that has replaced one of the westbound lanes on a major boulevard in downtown, Dunsmuir Avenue.  Even more dramatic is that Dunsmuir is reached by an old viaduct that was built as part of a freeway plan several decades ago but never completed. Now the onramp has the bike lane on it and a whole lane has been switched over to two-way bike traffic. If Vancouver can do this, why can't San Francisco start planning to narrow the five lanes on the Bay Bridge, reduce the speed limit to 30 or 40 on the west span, and with the eventual completion of the new east span bike lane, we'll be able to cross the bay on bike at long last?

Dunsmuir viaduct two-way bike lane.

Dunsmuir viaduct bike lane.

This is the Dunsmuir viaduct from below. It's an old freeway ramp that was stopped a generation ago from completion through downtown. Now it has a bike lane on it, but a study has begun to see if removing it might be the best plan.

Merchants are complaining but bicyclists are delighted about the new two-way bike lane on a major downtown boulevard in Vancouver, Dunsmuir Avenue.

Using the divider as dedicated bike parking.... brilliant!

The whole downtown area endured (celebrated?) the Winter Olympics this past February, and the city’s budget is now being slashed. The same pro-bicycling mayor hired a city manager who is gutting the local school budget, park maintenance, libraries, and everything else they can cut to address the massive cost overruns the city incurred to host the Olympics. The False Creek area, once a seedy industrial zone, has been utterly refashioned (not unlike San Francisco’s Mission Bay) with the Olympic village housing area (promises for large amounts of public housing have been reneged on now, not surprisingly) and a refurbished shoreline promenade looking out at a manmade “Habitat Island.”

"Habitat Island"?

Well yes, we have to make habitat now, having fully destroyed it in the past.

Weird modernistic ped bridge near False Creek, with "green" roof on new building behind it.

San Francisco and Vancouver have a lot in common. Big money keeps flowing in, driving real estate prices into the stratosphere, and keeping them there. But an increasingly active citizenry is resisting the untrammeled capitalist growth and development model with an indomitable spirit that makes Vancouver a great place to visit IN SPITE of its much-touted “success.”

I had the pleasure of speaking to four separate gatherings of organizers, presenting some of my “typical” themes. Building on the logic of Nowtopia, I argued that the Car-Free Vancouver Day movement should work to avoid having their festival succumb to the logic of being not much more than an alternative mall. That means utilizing the public space they’ve opened for much more than commerce, in fact finding so many compelling things to do in it that they displace commerce in ways similar to the way that bicycles displace cars during Critical Mass (many of the activists in Vancouver are big Critical Mass participants too). I was happy to see a lot of other activities while I was rolling around between Main Street and Commercial Drive. Here’s some images of music and bikes to wrap up this report:

Music in the streets, in many forms and styles.

Brass to start get your party on.

The Velopalooza beer bike... central to a week-long celebration of bicycling earlier in June.

Marigold demonstrates a mature ride.

Me too!

This was in the tree over the amazing Purple Thistle crowd, a youth center with enormous creativity and energy.

Jeremy Shaw, who has been organizing the market with the MCMC, hoped the kickoff event would bring enough people out to help the market gain traction. The project is meant to provide a community space and promote economic development.

"The point is to create choice for healthy foods," said Shaw, and "use it as an economic development engine where we create booths and stalls for Mission-based and local emerging businesses."

In addition to partnering with the Mission Economic Development Agency (MEDA), the MCM will work with La Cocina, a non-profit in the Mission that helps street food vendors by offering an industrial kitchen and classes for enrichment. Other partners include Arriba Juntos, Mission Beacon after-school programs, Mission Small Business Association, Mission Merchants Association, Revolution Cafe, Rainbow Grocery, Bi-Rite Market and the San Francisco Great Streets Project, among others.

"The food part is the anchor," said Shaw. "People come to buy food, and that's how we support these other community programs."

Shaw and other market supporters got a boost yesterday when the Board of Supervisors waived the fees for closing the street for the June 19th fundraiser. Organizers  go before ISCOTT, San Francisco's street closure permitting body, tomorrow to get approval for two months of weekly streets closures every Thursday, from 4-8 pm. Shaw is hopeful the permits will come through and has been working with the agencies responsible for street closures to improve those chances.

Mission Community Market organizer Jeremy Shaw surveys the block of Bartlett where the proposed market would operate every Thursday. Photo: Matthew Roth.

The idea for the market came from community meetings in conjunction with the San Francisco Planning Department's Mission Streetscape Plan, where numerous community members voiced support for developing a market in conjunction with streetscape improvements.

"I think this project can show how a food component and the physical space can go together, said Ilaria Salvadori, a community planner who developed the Mission Streetscape Plan for the Planning Department. Salvadori and Shaw hoped the market would be the first step toward improving the streetscape on the block, which has relatively few curb cuts for a San Francisco block.

"The ultimate goal is to regenerate the area of Bartlett, which is underutilized right now," said Salvadori.

One of the first improvements will be made during the block party fundraiser, said Shaw, when participants will be encouraged to paint a mural designed by the Sirron Norris Gallery on Valencia Street.

"The mural is about providing the opportunity for anyone to come participate," Shaw said. "It's meant to be an emblem for the possibility for that part of Bartlett."

Shaw has also been working with the YMCA, the Boys and Girls Club, the Mission Beacon Center and Horace Mann Middle School to develop after-school programs and play streets during the market. Because the block is particularly long and wide, Shaw believes it's ideal for basketball, soccer or other games in the area not utilized for booths.

The market will also be modeled on the Noe Valley Farmers' Market, according to Shaw, one of the only markets in San Francisco that is run by the community and not part of a farmer's market organization. Rather than hold the market on a weekend day, organizers believe the 4-8 pm time slot on Thursdays will help the market stand out and will serve more needs for the Mission community.

The Block Party kick-off for Mission Community Market will be at Bartlett and 22nd Street, Saturday, June 19th, from 10 am - 3 pm.

The BP oil spill goes on. And on. We watch the oil on live web cam pouring into the Gulf of Mexico. And we watch. Political rage is muted, practical responses even more distant. What to do? How do we “take action” on something like this? How can individuals meaningfully respond to this catastrophe? Stop driving? Boycott one brand of gas? Stop buying things made of plastic? Let’s not flatter ourselves. A few folks I know are planning to go to a local ARCO gas station (owned by BP) to protest, which will surely be a big moment for the minimum wage employee in the cash booth, and probably an irritant to the half dozen or more motorists waiting to fill their cars.

The numbing impotence we feel is painfully calibrated to our inability to affect what’s happening. Consumer choices we might make will have zero impact on this disaster, and can’t shape the larger dynamics of a globe-spanning, multinational oil industry either. Just listen to Democracy Now on Friday morning to hear how Chevron has destroyed thousands of square miles of the Nigerian delta in its incessant exploitation of the oil there, or how the Ecuadoran Amazon too is covered in vast lakes of spilled oil.

The deeper questions about technology and science are far from our daily lives. The world we live in is embedded in complex networks of technological dependencies, which none of us have chosen freely. Nor do any of us have any way to participate directly in deciding what technologies we will use, how they will be deployed, what kind of social controls will be exerted over private interests who organize and run them for their own gain, etc. (supposedly the federal government regulates them in the public interest, but that is clearly false as shown YET AGAIN by this disaster). The basic direction of science is considered a product of objective research and development, when it has always been skewed to serve the interests of those who already have economic and political power. Public, democratic direction for science and technology is not only non-existent, we really don’t even discuss it as a possibility!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The deadline to sign up for TransForm's annual Car-Free Challenge is quickly approaching and the group is hopeful the event will raise awareness about the impact driving has on the climate, particularly in light of the recent oil spill in the Gulf.

TransForm's Marta Lindsey said that numerous participants in the challenge have said the decision to drive less has been motivated in part by the BP Deep Horizons disaster. "It's a small gesture, but I think it's important," she said.

One of the bigger challenges to organizing the event this year, according to Lindsey, is the ubiquitous transit service cuts that have made alternatives to driving that much less convenient.

"One thing that is really sad is it's a lot more difficult to go car-free this year than last because of all the public funding cuts," she said.

The event is a fundraiser for TransForm and the money raised will contribute to their advocacy in Sacramento to restore state transit funding.

Streetsblog will be profiling several Car-Free Challenge participants throughout the course of the event, so please let us know if you're taking the challenge and if you want to tell your story by writing us at tips@sf.streetsblog.org.