Streetsblog San Francisco

Photos: Aaron Bialick

The ongoing streetscape transformation on and around McCoppin Street in recent weeks has brought a new bike lane, raised crosswalks, planted bulb-outs and medians.

Crews installing cobblestone pavement on Stevenson Street today.

The planted bulb-outs and medians being added to McCoppin and nearby alleys (Stevenson, Pearl, Jessie Streets, and Elgin Park) will help absorb rainwater and lighten the load on the city’s stormwater systems. Such treatments, which are called for in the city’s Better Streets Plan, also help narrow the view of the street, signaling drivers to slow down, as do the cobblestone pavement treatments in the alleyways.

The new westbound bike lane on McCoppin (which was included in the SF Bike Plan but coordinated with the Department of Public Works’ project) connects the one-block bike lane on Otis Street to Valencia Street and the McCoppin bikeway, which runs through the future site of the McCoppin Hub plaza toward Market Street and Octavia Boulevard.

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Tomorrow the SF Planning Department is putting on the first in a series of walks as part of its new Green Connections project, an effort to improve access to parks making better use of city streets.

Biking and walking routes to Heron's Head Park. See the full PDF. Image: SF Planning Department

The intent of the program, according to the department’s website, is to create “a citywide network of green streets that can be built over time, improving pedestrian and bicycle access to parks, open space and the waterfront.”

At a kick-off meeting last month, planning department staff began collecting feedback and showing how traffic calming and greening techniques could be included in the plans. On tomorrow’s walk, you can tell planners what you like and don’t like about the pedestrian environment en route to Heron’s Head Park near Hunter’s Point.

Planners will use the walks and other public events to engage communities in shaping the Green Connections project, and by late 2013 they hope to finish conceptual designs in six neighborhoods: Chinatown, the Tenderloin, the Western Addition, Potrero Hill, Visitacion Valley, and Bayview-Hunter’s Point.

Tomorrow’s two-hour walk meets at 1 p.m. the EcoCenter at Heron’s Head Park at 32 Jennings Street (coincidentally at the east end of Cargo Way, where crews are currently constructing a two-way protected bikeway).

Check out all the project materials from the kick-off meeting on the Green Connections website, and see highlights after the break.

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Mayor Ed Lee speaks at the groundbreaking. Photo: Aaron Bialick

Construction began on a model for sustainable streets in San Francisco today when Mayor Ed Lee and city officials broke ground on a block of Newcomb Avenue in the Bayview District, promising a much friendlier streetscape for residents and the environment.

“You see a vision right in front of your door,” Mayor Lee told an audience of residents and agency officials who collaborated on the project. “A vision that’s going to bring about slowing the traffic, trees, permeable landscaping – all kinds of things that you see other neighborhoods get.”

The treatments in the Model Block project [pdf], such as greener sidewalks and bulbouts, over twenty trees, raised crosswalks, and chicaned street parking with permeable pavement, aim to treat stormwater as it falls, enhance the public realm, and create a safer street by calming motor traffic.

“This is one block of our many streets of San Francisco that altogether cover 25 percent of our city,” said Department of Works Director Ed Reiskin. “But they were designed more for people to drive through than to be on, and to cover up the environment rather than to work with its natural processes.”

The innovative practice of treating stormwater with streetscape plantings, known as greenstreet treatments, has been commonly used in Portland, Oregon. That city lacks more expensive infrastructure like San Francisco’s rainwater storage facilities and controlled combined sewage system, which are not always able to handle loads of rainwater that fall on the streets.

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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.

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A new wider tree well get's a new tree from Friends of the Urban Forest. Photos: Matthew Roth.

Starting last week along Tiffany Street near 29th Street, contractors started cutting up sidewalks, jackhammering them and taking the crumbled pieces of concrete away in trucks. By the end of the week, what looked like an ugly construction zone began to get the personal touch of residents hoeing and digging in the dirt underneath the concrete, preparing it for a block party planting day this last Saturday, when the street was closed to cars and neighbors came together to work and throw a street party.

24 property owners on Tiffany Street and 29th Street banded together to transform their long block from a concrete jungle into something a little closer to a real jungle, using a $24,000 Community Challenge Grant and enlisting the support of Friends of the Urban Forest (FUF) along the way.

Rita Roti, a resident on Tiffany Street for over 13 years, had had enough with the lack of greenery and started organizing the neighbors she knew around the concept of the concrete planter boxes.

"There's just so much concrete everywhere, I've always wanted to change it," said Roti. She said as a result of the organizing around the planters, her neighbors had met with California Pacific Medical Center on Valencia and Cesar Chavez to discuss the plans for reconstruction there and now they were talking about adding additional traffic calming at the corner of Tiffany Street and 29th Street. This stretch of Tiffany is already a virtual bicycle boulevard because of traffic calming and a bicycle cut-through at the north end, where if meets Valencia.

"It used to be 4,000 cars a day before the traffic calming," said Roti, and many of them were flying down the street at dangerous speeds.

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Source: Chicago's Green Alleys Handbook

During the heavy rainfall season, San Francisco faces some daunting challenges: Draining the water, keeping the roads from getting slippery, and containing and treating the runoff. Some storms are so severe that the city can't keep pace. That's when we see flooding in the Muni tunnels and sewage discharges into the bay.

But the solution -- or at least part of the solution -- could be as simple as changing the material that we use to pave our streets.

The city considered a wide variety of low-impact-design techniques for managing water at community meetings held in 2007. Among the solutions was permeable pavement, a technique dating back centuries that fell out of favor during the fast-and-cheap highway booms of the last few decades.

As Miles Chaffee, President and founder of Milestone Imports explained to Streetsblog, the benefits of permeable paving are numerous. "It decreases impervious land coverage, provides a more stable load-bearing surface, and allows the water to go into the ground," he said. "It eliminates the need for detention ponds, which require additional space. And it takes off a lot of stress from the sewer systems when it's done correctly."

In addition, permeable paving can be made lighter in color, which reduces the urban heat island effect. It can be made of recycled materials, such as concrete and rubber, and by filtering the water, it removes pollutants. There are advantages for bicyclists as well: "It takes that film of water off the ground that makes it slippery," Chaffee said.

Islais Creek Channel. Photo: Matt Baume

(Editor's note: This is Part 2 in a 3-part series on the Bay Area watershed.)

San Francisco may be getting new waterfront soon, thanks to ambitious projects currently being studied by the city's Public Utilities Commission, including proposals for daylighting, or uncovering, long-buried creeks and streams and creating open-air channels that flow alongside the city's sidewalks and streets.

Top contenders for daylighting include: Islais Creek, originating in Glen Canyon Park and flowing through Bernal Heights to Islais Creek Channel, passing under Third Street just north of Bayview; Yosemite Creek, flowing from McLaren Park in Visitacion Valley through Portola to Bayview and entering the bay near Candlestick Park; and the little-known Stanley Creek, flowing along Brotherhood Way into Lake Merced near the border with Daly City.

Like the Center Street daylighting proposal in Berkeley, these projects wouldn't attempt to replicate a natural habitat, due to the limitations of dense human development. Instead, the PUC proposes a "compromise" approach that would merge the needs of communities with the hydrological benefits of exposed waterways.

And those benefits would be significant. A 2007 study by the PUC found that daylighting Yosemite Creek would reduce strains on the water system; an important finding, since those strains regularly cause raw sewage overflows that exceed federal limits. A three-hour storm -- such as the one seen last weekend -- could drop over 50 million gallons onto the Yosemite watershed, overwhelming pipes that are decades past their expected lifespan.

As we have reported, Berkeley Professor Nicholas de Monchaux's Local Code proposal for activating San Francisco's "Unaccepted Streets" called for transforming the patchwork of 529 acres of underutilized alleys, street-ends, and pathways into a network of green spaces. Were San Francisco to build out the more than 1500 identified sites, de Monchaux estimates that the city would save $4.8 million in air pollution mitigation, $6.9 million in energy savings, and a staggering $1 billion in stormwater infrastructure.

From the proposal:

The final outcome of our proposal is a pedestrian network of places, and a virtual network of spaces as well. A focused web threaded through real and virtual fabric; our systematic interventions turn away from the idea of urban infrastructure driven by cars and highways to a more robust, and perhaps natural, notion of urbanity. Instead of the old metaphors of lungs and circulation, we propose a robust, networked logic of health and social welfare, a distributed immune system for the 21st-century metropolis.

While the project didn't win UCLA's WPA 2.0 design competition, Professor de Monchaux and the five other WPA 2.0 finalists were afforded an audience in late November with President Barack Obama's Director of the Office of Urban Affairs Adolfo Carrion and HUD Deputy Secretary Ron Sims, who both apparently showed great interest.

"My goal now is to initiate some of those conversations with local agencies," said de Monchaux. "I think a very interesting next step would be to implement some of the designs locally, create a community based laboratory to see how these designs would perform."