Streetsblog San Francisco

Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of occasional stories on the “2011 Road Repaving and Street Safety Bond.”

A $248 million streets bond measure being pushed by San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and other electeds is on its way to the November ballot after being approved this week in a 9-2 vote by the Board of Supervisors. The “2011 Road Repaving and Street Safety Bond” would provide funds over three years to repave the city’s crumbling streets and fix cracked and buckling sidewalks. Streets with high volumes of transit, bicycle and pedestrian traffic would be prioritized.

“With more than half of our 850 miles of roadways deteriorating, we must confront the crisis in the condition of our streets now or we will face even greater costs and threats to public health and safety later,” Lee said in a statement released yesterday.

The San Francisco Department of Public Works (SFDPW) recently posted maps online that give a citywide breakdown of which streets stand to benefit from the bond money. The final list of streets would be “geographically equitable” and the SFDPW would “ensure that projects are evenly distributed to all parts of the city” without raising property taxes.

The agency’s outgoing director, Ed Reiskin, recently appointed to head the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, said funding sources to improve street conditions have gradually declined over the years, and the measure is urgently needed to rebuild a growing backlog of streets in poor condition.

“We have a huge need. That backlog is maybe three quarters of a billion dollars, and there’s just no way that we can dig out of that hole using the operating dollars that are funding police and firefighters and library services and health and human services,” Reiskin told Streetsblog in a recent interview.

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Now that the Valencia Street sidewalk reconstruction between 15th Street and 19th Street has given us sparkly new pedestrian space, the Department of Public Works (DPW) has begun putting on decorative touches. The DPW has planted two types of trees as well as pedestrian and roadway scale lighting, all of which reflects the decision from the community outreach process that began in 2004.

The DPW said the two types of trees are the deciduous London Plane (platanus acerifolia) and the evergreen Brisbane Box (lophostemon conferta). The DPW is planting 96 new trees across the length of the project, which project manager Kris Opbroek said were "just a hint of things to come."

The streetlights are two different heights: The teardrop shaped fixtures are approximately 27 feet tall for roadway scale and the harp-shaped pedestrian scale fixtures are approximately 14 feet high.

Now if they could just clear the bike lanes of gravel and fix that dangerous pavement edge near Mission police station!

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Business owners on one block of Valencia Street can see the light at the end of the tunnel after months of painful construction that made their stores less accessible to customers. Street trees, bicycle racks and pedestrian-scale lighting haven't arrived yet, but between 16th and 17th Streets, a sparkling new widened sidewalk is beckoning shoppers and diners back even before DPW crews have finished resurfacing it.

Construction on the Valencia Streetscape Improvement Project started in early August, and is bringing wider sidewalks, additional street trees, additional street lighting, sidewalk bulb-outs, and art elements to Valencia between 15th and 19th Streets. While bicyclists are still waiting for the bike lane to be repainted, pedestrians are starting to see the fruits of the DPW's work, and multiple business owners on the block between 16th and 17th Streets were feeling relieved this week as customers returned from holiday travel and no longer found narrow sidewalks and construction barriers.

During construction, "our sidewalk was barely two-and-a-half feet wide, so people were not coming to this side," said Adam Hernandez, a design consultant at Z-Barn Interiors. When the construction barriers were cleared from the sidewalk recently, that all changed, he said. "I'll tell you, since they took this off just before Christmas, it's been a huge difference."

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The Congress for the New Urbanism will meet in Portland, Oregon, in early November for the annual Project for Transportation Reform, a summit to further define and clarify emerging urban transportation policies that embrace entire networks, rather than interdependent transportation segments, and that seek to balance modal transportation splits and reduce overall vehicular miles traveled (VMT).

Summit attendees and partners, including Streetsblog, will participate in discussions on emerging network planning and develop a strategy for informing the national transportation infrastructure debate, of particular significance as the climate and transportation bills move forward. As the draft CNU Statement of Principles on Transportation Networks notes [PDF], climate change and infrastructure problems in the US continue to intensify:

The US now has the world’s highest level of VMT per capita, while simultaneously experiencing the highest traffic fatality rates of any developed nation. Per capita traffic delay has more than doubled in the United States since 1982. This deterioration in transportation system performance has occurred in spite of an ongoing public investment of more that $200 billion per year in transportation infrastructure."

CNU President John Norquist said the current focus by transportation professionals on road capacity gives us cities like Detroit, where consistent spending to widen roads has destroyed communities.

"Federal and state DOTs don't understand how cities work. They still want to take rural forms and jam big roads into cities." he said. "Rather than measuring projected traffic flow, they should be measuring how much value it adds to a neighborhood. The US can't afford to be energy wasting and spending money on projects that destroy the value of neighborhoods."

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San Franciscans are likely to see slower response times to street cleaning requests and a reduction in landscaping and tree maintenance in their neighborhoods following a number of layoffs announced this week at the Department of Public Works. Twenty four street cleaning positions are being cut along with 15 gardening and arborist positions.

"This was our share and it's unpleasant," said DPW Director Ed Reiskin. As a result of the city budget crisis, the department was forced to slash its street cleaning budget by $2.7 million and trim its landscaping budget by $800,000. A reduction in street sweeping services was announced last month.

The cuts come right as San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's office embarks on a number of new projects to green space and improve the public realm. The landscaping positions being eliminated include crews who've been heavily involved in the Pavement to Parks projects. Reiskin predicted the cuts wouldn't have a direct impact on those efforts, but rather, would affect the agency's ability to maintain landscaped medians, trim trees and respond to service requests.

"Nobody was spared and this just challenges us more to figure out how to be more efficient and use more in the way of low-maintenance planting, which we're trying to move more towards, so we need less gardening."

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While San Francisco Department of Public Works (DPW) Director Ed Reiskin has quietly pushed behind-the-scenes to accelerate Pavement to Parks plazas, the recently announced Market Street trial changes, and other visible projects that reclaim street space for green space and people, some advocates are concerned with how well his agency is coordinating around an arcane, but important process: DPW's five-year repaving plan.

Livable City Executive Director Tom Radulovich said that at a meeting last month about capital planning he attended at the SFCTA, only four people gave feedback and he was the only one that addressed the problem with inter-agency coordination around the repaving schedule. He believes the city needs to do more to successfully build complete streets under the Complete Streets ordinance and the Better Streets Plan.

In your five-year planning, you have the Complete Streets ordinance, which says if you're doing major street rehab and it's on a transit street, a bike street or a ped street, you ought to have the complimentary project, you ought to build it out as a complete street. Unfortunately they're not dealing with the Complete Streets Ordinance in the way that they ought to, which is coordinating the bike, ped and transit improvements at the same time as they do the repaving.

MTA spokesperson Judson True defended his agency's record, saying that "there is constant coordination looking at the paving schedules. Not just at DPT, but Muni as well." True pointed to Cesar Chavez, Divisadero, and now Market Street as positive examples.

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The Valencia Streetscape Improvement Project will bring major enhancements to Valencia Street that will benefit all of its users. To get there though, bicyclists and businesses will have to weather a nine-month storm of construction, which began three weeks ago. At a press conference today at ArtZone 461 Gallery, Supervisor Chris Daly and the DPW's Alex Murillo vowed to do everything possible to help make the process less painful, and business owners sought to remind residents that they will remain open throughout, even if work crews are right outside their door. 

Businesses are "basically looking at a double-whammy over the next nine to twelve months," said Daly. "The double-whammy being, obviously, the economy that's down, tough times for everybody here in San Francisco, and then looking forward to living through a construction project. So, I wanted to come here and help put this together to put the word out that Valencia Street is open for business, that you're going to find no better commercial corridor in all of San Francisco."

The enhancements on Valencia, from 15th Street to 19th Street, will include sidewalk widening, additional street trees, additional street lighting, sidewalk bulb-outs, and art elements. While business owners expressed concerns about maintaining access and parking during construction, there was broad support for the project on the whole.

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In a vote that signaled both San Francisco's new direction on parking policy and the severity of current budget shortfalls, the Board of Supervisors yesterday approved an ordinance giving the MTA authority to study installing parking meters in the eastern portion of Golden Gate Park.

By a unanimous vote, the Board indicated its support for the ordinance, though the supervisors reasons differed. The vote only authorizes creating a parking plan for Golden Gate Park, not its implementation, which the MTA will need to seek later.

The Recreation and Park Department, the MTA, Board of Supervisors President David Chiu, and Supervisors John Avalos and David Campos have expressed strong support for the measure in the past, since it will generate funds for the MTA and the Rec and Park Department, and is consistent with the city's Transit First policy.

After yesterday's vote, Supervisor Sean Elsbernd said he still has "major reservations" about installing meters in Golden Gate Park, including the meters' aesthetic impact on the park. Elsbernd also expressed concern about whether the meters would "create residual parking problems" in surrounding neighborhoods, such as the Inner Sunset, the Richmond, and Haight-Ashbury.

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Construction begins this week on a nine-month project that could periodically disrupt Valencia Street's bike lanes. The result, residents hope, will be a greatly improved streetscape for pedestrians and bicyclists.

The Valencia Streetscape Improvements project, which spans Valencia from 15th Street to 19th Street, is intended to provide a safer, more inviting environment for the street's users. Moving block by block over the next nine months, Department of Public Works crews will remove the striped center median, widen the sidewalk, add bulb-outs at some intersections and in the middle of some blocks, and add pedestrian scale lighting, art elements, bike racks (assuming the injunction is lifted), and new street trees. Parking lanes will also be widened to prevent dooring of bicyclists, and curbside loading zones for trucks will be reconfigured.

The crux of the project is "six to nine feet of sidewalk widening," said DPW project manager Kris Opbroek. "The sidewalk widening eliminates the center median," said Opbroek. "It should have a traffic-calming effect which would then benefit cyclists, pedestrians, and motorists, just in having everyone slow down basically."

The $6.1 million project is funded through a combination of federal Safe, Accountable, Flexible and Efficient Transportation Equity Act (SAFETEA) funds as well as two Transportation for Livable Communities (TLC) federal grants with local matching funds.

The final design is largely the result of neighbors' input, says Livable City's Tom Radulovich, who also lives in the neighborhood. "I and a bunch of neighbors went to some of the meetings," said Radulovich. "We designed the street we wanted, mostly. There's still some things missing from the street, but the good news was we had a design and then a few pieces of funding that nobody had anticipated came forward."

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