Streetsblog San Francisco

After four years of an agonizing bicycle injunction that prevented the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) from adding any significant improvements to the city’s bike network, a judge earlier this year finally freed the SFMTA to begin building out the city’s long-promised Bicycle Plan.

In short order, the SFMTA made some very noticeable improvements, adding protected bike lanes on Mid-Market Street, installing thousands of sharrows on bicycle routes, striping ten miles of new bike lanes in a year and placing hundreds of new racks around the city. However, the game changing transformation that will elevate San Francisco into the upper echelon of world-class bicycling cities has yet to happen.

Those of us on the streets every day know the city can’t settle for six-foot lanes that leave cyclists straddling the perils of speeding traffic on one side and car doors swinging open on the other. Why should the only truly dignified bicycling space be a handful of blocks on Market Street, the Duboce Bikeway and the Panhandle? To bring San Francisco up to date with Copenhagen and Amsterdam, or even Portland and New York, the city must embrace the infrastructure that makes those cities safe and inviting to people who ride bikes.

Given how long it took to get this far, you might reasonably wonder if San Francisco will ever get to a point where cycling is a safe mobility option and welcoming for people of all ages. Maybe, though, if you consider the strong advocacy community we have here, elected officials who really do want to change the streets and the projected population growth that will stir a greater demand for bike facilities, it won’t take as long as you think.

Perhaps all the city needs is a new bike plan.

In its most ambitious undertaking to date, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition (SFBC) has launched an initiative it calls “Connecting the City,” where bicyclists of any age and ability would be able to comfortably pedal across the city on a network of continuous bikeways from the Ferry Building to Ocean Beach, Park Merced to Downtown or Mission Bay to the Golden Gate Bridge.

“Connecting the City’s priority crosstown routes would take routes that are already being used and elevate it to 8 to 80 standards that feel comfortable and inviting for someone who is 8 years old or 80 years old,” said Renee Rivera, the SFBC’s acting executive director, borrowing a page from Gil Peñalosa.

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Bond Yee, a veteran traffic engineer who has spent thirty years designing and managing San Francisco's streets, will be named to fill the recently created Sustainable Streets Director position permanently, Streetsblog has learned. Yee was appointed interim director of the Sustainable Streets division eight months ago while the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) conducted a nationwide search for a permanent director.

"He was intimate in merging us toward the Sustainable Streets division over the last 8 or 9 months so he’s been putting the infrastructure there and I think it’s only fair that we give him a shot to bring it home," said SFMTA Chief Nat Ford.

Yee was the city's longest serving traffic engineer before Jack Fleck, who recently retired, and had been the director of the former Department of Parking and Traffic before stepping into his new role. He is greatly respected among many staffers at the SFMTA.

DPT was merged into Sustainable Streets last year as part of a directive passed by voters under Proposition E in 1999 to merge all departments into one agency to better govern the streets. Whether that has been working is something transit advocates have been debating. Some have even called the move a failure.

Many advocates had hoped to bring some fresh blood into the position and wanted the SFMTA to hire someone with a bold vision for streets governance, similar to what has happened in New York City under the leadership of NYC Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan.

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The Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), in a historic vote Wednesday that will help guide the future for more sustainable land use and transportation planning in the Bay Area, recommended a 15 percent per capita target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) by 2035, the most aggressive goal to date among California's metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs).

"Bay Area residents should be really excited about the 15 percent target. That's because it's high enough to trigger the transportation and land use changes we need to make the region more livable and affordable, especially as our population grows significantly by 2035," said Marta Lindsey, the communications and development director at TransForm.

Lindsey sent out an alert last week urging people to write emails to the MTC, fearing the commission would adopt a lower target of 10 percent, which its planning committee recommended at a meeting earlier this month.

"It's a realistic target given MTC's modeling and the kinds of investments and policies we already know really move the needle in terms of how much people drive their cars," said Lindsey.

Under the groundbreaking anti-sprawl bill, SB 375, most of the state's 18 MPOs are required to set a target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions for passenger vehicles and light trucks by 2020 and 2035. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) recently adopted a set of draft targets (PDF) for the four largest MPOs (the Bay Area, Sacramento, Los Angeles and San Diego), which represent 80 percent of the state's population. Each MPO will then be required to development a Sustainable Communities Strategy (SCS) to show how it will meet its target. CARB is expected to adopt final targets in September.

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Standing in the glaring Mission District sun yesterday on a wide new sidewalk, before a crowd of advocates, city planners, merchants, construction crews, artists and many others celebrating the completion of the Valencia Streetscape Improvement Project, Mayor Gavin Newsom officially released a bold vision for improving the pedestrian realm in San Francisco called The Better Streets Plan.

Newsom spoke of leveraging the work happening at individual agencies and packaging them into a narrative for our public realm, versus scattershot, reactive decision making to appease those who yell the loudest.

"In the past, none of that really existed," Newsom said, brandishing the thick Better Streets Plan booklet. "We had communities that said enough's enough, we need you to focus on our streets and then someone with a louder voice came to the board of Supervisors or the Mayor's Office and said no, no, no, focus on our street."

"Now we have a deliberative, proactive plan, now we're codifying in the General Plan of San Francisco this vision," said Newsom. "This will anchor the future of this effort for decades and decades to come."

The Better Streets Plan, now in its final draft after years of community input and planning, envisions a transformational and sustainable future that brings San Francisco more in line with how it was designed to be before the automobile strangled many of its neighborhoods. 

In the plan's introduction, Newsom states: "The Better Streets Plan illustrates that the City and community working together can realize actual street changes that improve San Francisco's streetscapes - to make our streets more useable and attractive and universally accessible to all, to make them safer and more welcoming, to improve their ecological functioning, and to return them to their rightful place as the center of civic life in this wonderful city."

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This interview originally appeared on the SFBC's blog.

San Francisco is experimenting with a number of innovative ideas to help create more public space to hang out and enjoy the city. New parklets and street plazas are sprouting on streets around the city, welcomed by local businesses and neighbors. The process of thinking about streets differently and making public space benefit everyone is only in its infancy in San Francisco, but like a healthy baby it’s growing fast right before our eyes.

At first guess, the Department of Public Works might not seem like the place to look for innovation, but San Francisco has a different approach. DPW’s website spells out a particularly environmental and community-minded mission: “The Department of Public Works is committed to making 
San Francisco a beautiful, livable and sustainable city. We design, build, operate, maintain, green, and improve the city’s infrastructure, public rights-of-way, and facilities with skill, pride, and responsiveness, in partnership with the San Francisco community.”

I had the opportunity to sit down with Ed Reiskin, the Director of the Department of Public Works recently, to talk with him a bit about the way he sees our city. The Department of Public Works has special relevance for people who regularly walk and bike as the keeper of our streets.

What is your experience bicycling in the city?

“As the guy who’s responsible for the city’s streets, there is no better way to get a flavor of the condition of the streets than to be on a bicycle. I think every Public Works Director should have to ride around their city on a bike. It’s a great way to know your roads.”

“I enjoy biking because it’s the best way to get around. Last week on my day to do kid drop-off I took my five-year-old on the back of my bike. And she was really excited: ‘can we do this every morning?’  But as we rode in, my wife and her sister (who works at the school) were also driving in. We all left at the same time—and the bike got there first on top of how pleasant it was.”

“I’ve also started to use bikes for meetings during the day—there’s a bike for use by employees at City Hall. After this I’m going down to our maintenance yard at Cesar Chavez and I’m going to bike.”

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(Editor's note: This is Part 3 in a 3-part series on the Bay Area watershed. In Part 1, we examined a radical new daylighting proposal in Berkeley; and in Part 2, we looked at the changes that SF streets may face under a bold plan by the Public Utilities Commission.)

Although the daylighting of underground urban streams has its roots here in the Bay Area, it's a practice that's spread around the country and the world in the last few decades.

Early daylighting projects like the Napa River, Strawberry Creek, and Codornices Creek formed the basis for a worldwide shift in the possibilities presented by urban watersheds. Now, a series of best-practices has begun to emerge from the ever-growing number of daylighted streams around the world, which could inform the proposed transformations of creeks here in San Francisco.

The SF Public Utilities Commission is now studying the feasibility of daylighting Yosemite Creek, Islais Creek, and Stanley Creek. While their research is underway, Streetsblog decided to take a closer look at successful urban water projects around the world from which planners might draw inspiration.

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(Editor's note: This is Part 1 in a 3-part series on the Bay Area watershed)

The proposal to convert Center Street in Berkeley from an asphalt thoroughfare to a park-like promenade -- revealing a long-hidden underground creek -- is the latest twist in the interesting and often-controversial story of the Bay Area's heavily-modified waterways.

The Center Street project is a striking reversal of a century-old trend towards burying Berkeley's creeks below ground. It's also an example of the relatively new practice of "daylighting" forgotten waterways, a trend said to have been unintentionally sparked forty years ago in nearby Napa.

In the 1970s, as part of the redevelopment of its downtown, the City of Napa stumbled upon a new way of thinking about the urban watershed: Instead of leaving the Napa River buried, engineers removed its cover, exposing it to daylight.

"In the 70s, there was the redevelopment," Barry Martin, Napa's Public Information Officer explained to Streetsblog. "and a number of buildings were taken down. The creek ran underneath some structures, so as they were designing this urban renewal project, [daylighting] was part of that."

"I don't think there was any environmental thinking going on at that time," he added.

Some urban planners debate whether Napa's construction in the 70s constitutes the country's first daylighting project. In 2003, Steve Donnelly, then co-director of the Urban Creeks Council, dismissed the project as the nation's first, saying, "all they did was take the top off a concrete channel."

Uncovering the waterway didn't fix Napa's watershed problems, either.

Forty years after its restoration began, Napa still struggles with the health of the Napa River: Frequent flooding plagued the city during the past decades, and engineers are only now getting the water flow under control, in part thanks to tactics similar to those employed by the settlers of 200 years ago.

In the 1800s, residents recognized that the east side of the river's oxbow was too wet to use in winter, and set aside the land as a summer fairground. An amphitheater now sits on the land, but there's more to the park than meets the eye: It serves as a buffer during floods, redirecting overflow away from more vulnerable areas.

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San Franciscans, like residents of most big cities, are in a continuous process of reshaping public spaces. There are pilot programs for new ways to use Market Street, for pocket parks in areas covered with underutilized asphalt, for Sunday Streets closures, for opening sidewalks to “green sewers,” and even some tentative efforts to launch more public art and/or urban agriculture in empty lots. All of these experiments are welcome departures from the long-simmering biases favoring the total unquestioned domination of private automobiles over public space.

Behind most of the experiments are deeper ideas of an improved life, what some people are quick to dismiss as “utopian.” The anti-utopians apparently consider change impractical or threatening, or have accepted the close-minded meme of the past few decades that any kind of “social engineering,” or public planning to improve human interaction, is inherently totalitarian. This mentality is rooted in a presumption that the way things are is always good enough, or that even if they aren’t, humans are so inherently corrupt or power-mad that any effort to improve things can only make it worse. The dark chapters of mid-20th century totalitarianism (now being regularly conflated to the present by Murdoch’s pompous blowhards) are somehow supposed to be examples of why trying to make life better is impossible. The American Way of Life, with all its poverty, racism, militaristic imperialism, shallow materialism, et al, is somehow the best we can hope for, and anyone who doesn’t accept that at face value is at best a dupe of some future dictator.

For those of us concerned with transit planning, or urban planning more broadly, this politico-cultural baggage comes with the territory. It shapes the discussion before it starts, and so a lot of folks have learned to think small, so as not to fan the flames of fear.

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As San Francisco moves closer to a decision on a new sit-lie ordinance that proponents say would facilitate the SFPD's clearing of unsavory elements off of sidewalks in neighborhoods like the Haight, resistance is building, and several organizers have called for a day of sidewalk action on Saturday March 27, from 10 am to 5 pm. I sat down recently with Nate Miller, one of the people who decided that they weren’t going to watch the City succumb to yet another pandering campaign of fear mongering without standing up to say no.

The sit-lie campaign has been orchestrated from behind the scenes for the past few months, trying to appear as a spontaneous grassroots effort by residents of the Haight-Ashbury. But as Miller tells it, there is strong evidence of coordination between “grassroots activists,” the Chronicle’s resident suburban attack dog C.W. Nevius, Mayor Newsom and Chief of Police Gascon. Together, they are using the decades-long presence of impoverished and annoying “gutter punks” on Haight Street to push a law criminalizing anyone who is sitting or lying on a sidewalk anywhere in San Francisco. Gabriel Haaland wrote an intelligent editorial in last week's Bay Guardian calling for a new approach to actual conflicts (greatly exaggerated in this case), rather than expanding the definition of so-called criminal behavior.

Here’s Nate in his own words: 

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