Streetsblog San Francisco

With flyers stuck on storefront windows along Polk Street spreading misinformation about the SF Municipal Transportation Agency’s developing plans to make the street a safer, more inviting place to walk and bike, local supporters of the project are rallying neighbors and merchants to attend a public meeting on Monday. There, city officials including SFMTA Director Ed Reiskin and D3 Supervisor David Chiu are expected to attend.

The flyers, handed out to merchants by an entity calling itself the “Save Polk Street Coalition,” falsely claim that the SFMTA is “planning to remove 20 Blocks of street parking on Polk St. from Union St. to McAllister St.”

In reality, the project’s proposed options, which were developed with input from well-attended community outreach meetings in September and December, would only remove some portion of the on-street parking on Polk, which in total represents 7 percent of all parking within a block’s range of the corridor. Meanwhile, the commercial street would receive the kind of improvements that have been shown time and time again to invite more shoppers.

Madeleine Savit, a 61-year-old mother, architect, and urban planner who lives in the neighborhood, has been talking with shop owners and attempting to debunk misconceptions about the project with a flyer of her own, which reads, “SFMTA’s Polk Street proposals benefit all in our community.” She said the vast majority of upset merchants seem grossly misinformed, and estimates that “Save Polk Street” is led by a handful of people.

“People don’t know what’s going on. So the most vocal people are the minority,” said Savit. “The problem is, we’re not dealing with facts. We’re dealing with emotion and fear.”

SF Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Leah Shahum pointed to streets like Valencia, where bike and pedestrian improvements have revitalized businesses by inviting people to spend more time on the street. “It’s very clear that when other corridors in San Francisco have been studied the way Polk Street is right now, there have been great improvements not only to the walkability and bikeability, but also to the business environment and real estate values,” she said.

On Polk, parklets and bike corrals that replaced parking spaces in the last couple of years have drawn more foot traffic. After a parklet was installed in front of Quetzal Cafe on Polk between Bush and Sutter Streets, a study conducted by the Great Streets Project found that more people stopped to talk or window-shop, and overall foot traffic increased.

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A new entity that calls itself the “Save Polk Street Coalition” has come out against the developing plan to improve safety for people walking and biking on Polk Street because it would entail removing some parking spaces.

The group’s website, which doesn’t identify any of the businesses or residents it claims to represent, decrees: “STOP the radical agenda of the SFMTA.” The sky-is-falling rhetoric continues:

Street parking is vital to Polk St. businesses. If you eat, live, work or shop along Polk Street this WILL affect you! If you want the restaurants, shops and services on Polk Street to survive make your voice heard. Save Polk Street from this misguided experiment!

First, let’s clear this up: The notion that car parking is what brings customers to shop in walkable San Francisco neighborhoods has been debunked time and time again. Customer intercept surveys on Columbus Avenue found that just 14 percent of people arrived by car, and those people tended to spend less than people who arrived by other means. Pedestrianization projects like the proliferation of parklets and temporary bans on parking on Stockton Street in Chinatown have drawn more people to streets while subtracting parking.

To boost foot traffic and make the street a more inviting destination, re-purposing public space from automobile storage to improve conditions for walking and biking is a solid strategy. And by making it easier to get to Polk without a car, fewer visitors would need to occupy a parking space in the first place.

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Cars littered on San Francisco’s sidewalks are a painfully common sight. The problem is perhaps most prevalent in outer neighborhoods like the Sunset and Bayview, where, for decades, homeowners with residential garages have paved over their front yards. The pedestrian environment on these streets is left degraded, with swaths of dead space where families and people with disabilities are often forced to walk around an obstacle course of cars and driveway ramps.

Make no mistake: It’s illegal to park on any part of a sidewalk or in a “setback” between the sidewalk and a building. The practice of paving over front yards was also banned in 2002.

Yet conditions in these neighborhoods make clear that the SF Municipal Transportation Agency does not enforce sidewalk parking on sight (though officials have claimed that’s the policy). Meanwhile, the Planning Department says it only fines homeowners who pave their yards when someone files a complaint. The issue recently got some attention in an SF Chronicle article last week, as well as the latest segment of KRON 4′s People Behaving Badly.

With all this space physically molded for car storage — practically every last inch on many streets – Livable City Executive Director Tom Radulovich said cleaning up San Francisco’s car-littered sidewalks will take more than getting parking control officers to hand out tickets. The Planning Department — which has no staff to proactively enforce rules against illegal setback pavings, according to the Chronicle — would have to crack down on violators, reversing decades of institutional tolerance for the practice.

“The city has turned a blind eye for so long that they have created a de facto entitlement” to illegal parking, Radulovich said. “City agencies have created an uncomfortable dilemma for themselves – start enforcing the law and deal with the fallout, or continue to ignore the problem and watch it grow worse.”

The setbacks, side yards, and backyards required in the city’s planning code ”were intended to create usable open space and/or gardens, not open parking,” said Radulovich. Greenery lost to pavement also means more stormwater flowing into the often-overloaded sewer system.

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A nice little transformation has taken place on Elgin Park, a one-block residential street next to the Central Freeway touchdown at Market Street and Octavia Boulevard.

Streetsblog reader Mark Dreger sent in the above photo of the makeover, noting that “it looks like SF’s version of a woonerf” — the Dutch term for the pedestrianized streets common in the Netherlands, where cars are allowed, but priority is given to people on foot and children playing.

The project is a piece of the Department of Public Works’ West SoMa Improvements, which set out to create greener, calmer streets in the neighborhood around McCoppin Street, where the Central Freeway spur was reconstructed in the middle of the last decade. While the removal of the freeway north of Market revitalized Hayes Valley, Caltrans insisted on rebuilding the freeway on the south side of Market, despite a city-backed plan to remove it further south.

Elgin Park, which lies west of Valencia between Duboce Avenue and Market (where there’s a bike/ped-only entrance ramp from Market), is one of several alleyways that are being revamped with new pavement and greening, as well as traffic-calming chicanes and raised crosswalks. At the west end of McCoppin (on the opposite side of the freeway), which has been re-paved with planted medians, chicanes, and bike lanes, the McCoppin Hub plaza is set to be constructed by summer, according to the DPW website.

Last summer, we wrote about a package of overdue streetscape improvements planned for the neighborhood around McCoppin Street, which would include a public gathering space called the McCoppin Hub adjacent to the Central Freeway.

Work on those projects is finally starting to make some profound changes to the neighborhood. Recently installed planted medians have had a noticeable traffic calming effect. Compare the above photo with the old McCoppin:

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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.

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Two important projects will get a hearing before an SFMTA engineering panel tomorrow, and advocates say a show of support is crucial.

First up is a hearing for the third set of 15mph school zones, championed by Walk San Francisco. More than 70 streets are on the latest list. As we’ve written, the 15mph school zone campaign is part of a groundbreaking citywide initiative pushed by Walk SF to implement safe speed zones around 200 schools, and comes just a few weeks before Walk to School Day on October 5.

The second item to convert Haight Street between Octavia and Market into a two-way street is a project that could face some opposition, but is being pushed by pedestrian, biking and transit advocates as a much-needed measure to calm traffic, improve walking conditions and speed up Muni service on the 6 and 71 lines. The plan would also give us San Francisco’s first red bus lane.

You can read the Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association’s letter of support here [pdf].

Tomorrow’s hearing starts at 10 a.m. in Room 416 at San Francisco City Hall.