Streetsblog San Francisco

Community groups, city staff and elected officials celebrated the opening of the final Pavement to Parks plaza this weekend, a new 7,500 square foot space that months before was a wide asphalt expanse notorious for speeding traffic and more than a few drivers doing donuts amid smoking tires and revved engines.

City Attorney Dennis Herrera hailed Naples Green, a square in the Excelsior on Naples Street between Geneva Avenue and Rolph Street, as a “testament about what happens when community and government work together.”

Herrera invoked the history of the plaza, which in 1915 was turned into a temporary park to celebrate the Pan-Pacific Exposition and herald San Francisco’s recovery from the 1906 earthquake.  “This park is a testament also to what it means for San Francisco values and community history,” said Herrera. “I can’t think of anything better to commemorate what San Francisco is all about–a phoenix, a city rising and being everything that it can be–than the reestablishment of this park and bringing green space to this wonderful neighborhood.”

For years a group of merchants had been working through the Outer Mission Merchants and Residents Association (OMMRA) to improve the former slab of asphalt, first succeeding to get traffic calming and medians to slow speeds and reduce stunting, then finally convincing District 11 Supervisor John Avalos to cobble funding together through the city budget process and separate agency coffers. In all, the project cost $150,000, much of it coming from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), which controls the streets and runs Muni, the San Francicco Public Utilities Commission, the Department of Public Works (SFDPW) and a $10,000 grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation.

Avalos applauded the community and OMMRA for their steadfast commitment to transforming the space, referring to the frequent donuts and reckless driving that occurred there previously. “This is a community that has seen too much grass, too much greenery, paved over, so to reverse that in such a magnificent way, in such a large way is really great to see,” he said. “We know we’re going to have more people using the space, that will be an inhibition to the kinds of activities that were going on here before.”

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In a city with an appetite for experimentation, San Francisco’s parklets are particularly fascinating. What began as a guerrilla arts intervention meant to demonstrate the need for more public open space has now become a fully permitted procedure for extending sidewalks into the street and has the small business community, which routinely opposes removing parking or charging more for it, aflutter with interest.

During the 5th annual Park(ing) Day in September this year, the Planning Department announced it had opened a request for proposals (RFP) period seeking applications from interested parties who wanted to re-purpose the parking in front of their buildings to build and manage parklets.

The RFP encouraged community benefit districts, businesses and non-profits to submit preliminary designs for parklets, which would be reviewed by a select committee representing various departments in the city, including the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), which manages parking and runs Muni and the Department of Public Works (DPW).

Applicants were encouraged to view parklets as sidewalk furniture meant to enhance public space. From the RFP: “Parklets are intended to provide space for people to sit, relax and enjoy the city around them, especially where narrow sidewalks would otherwise preclude such activities. They are intended to be seen as pieces of street furniture, providing aesthetic enhancements to the overall streetscape.”

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Get ready to peek into a possible future for San Francisco parks.

This evening and next week, the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department will lead a tour of four properties being considered for purchase and transformation into parkland. The locations being considered are at 17th and Folsom; Palou and Phelps in the shadow of 280; on Third Street just down from the sewage treatment plant; and 24th Street near Church.

The tour meets tonight at 6pm at 17th and Folsom, then continues to 24th Street at 7pm. It continues next Wednesday at Palou and Phelps at 6pm, and moves to Third Street at 7pm. The public is invited to learn more about the location and the acquisition process. If Rec & Parks decides to move forward with the purchases, there will be many more meetings and opportunities for the public to provide input.

If approved, the parks would comprise crucial new green space as part of a long-overdue reinvestment in the eastern neighborhoods. It’s thanks to the city’s popular Open Space Fund that the acquisitions are under consideration. The voter-approved fund sets aside about $2 million per year to acquire parks and natural areas.

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The newest parklet in San Francisco is in one of the densest, most walkable neighborhoods, North Beach, and the early reception is very promising. Rebar Group installed the parklet three days ago in front of Caffe Greco and the aesthetic resembles the parklet they built on 22nd Street in the Mission several months ago.

“You have merchants on Columbus Avenue all starting to look at the streetscape as a unified gesture,” said Rebar’s Blaine Merker. “The Caffe Greco parklet will probably be the first of several that will start to extend the European pedestrian culture into the parking lane in a more unified way.”

The sidewalk extension occupies the equivalent of two former parking spaces and Hanna Suleiman, the owner of Caffe Greco, has no problem with the transition. “I think people talk about parking,” he said, but “when they understand the dynamics of parking, the issue of parking is not even relevant any more.”

Suleiman said enforcement of parking rules was nearly non-existent and many people abused handicapped placards. If the city wasn’t collecting money from the meters in the first place, the argument couldn’t be made that removing two spaces would deprive the city of meter money. He also argued even a modest increase in sales at his cafe would generate more money through sales tax receipts for city coffers than parking meters.

“It’s really a kind of a misconception that we don’t have parking,” he added. “We have parking here. Most of the garages are empty during the week.” He also noted if a driver had to pay $55 for a parking ticket, it would be a lot more economical to park just off Columbus in a garage. “It seems more logical for people to walk that extra two minutes and park in the public parking, but we’re lazy by nature.”

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Tomorrow, at locations all over the Bay Area, people will reclaim the curb for PARK(ing) Day and re-imagine slices of the urban landscape usually reserved for automobile parking. It will also mark a milestone for San Francisco’s groundbreaking Pavement to Parks program, as the interagency effort to transform parking spaces into parklets shifts focus to empower residents.

Andres Power, the project manager for Pavement to Parks, said he will no longer be involved in building parklets, except for the four remaining projects in Noe Valley and North Beach, but has worked with other city departments to develop a permit process that will allow anyone to apply and do it on their own.

Initially, he’s sending out a request for proposals [pdf] that contains all the information, including the design and placement guidelines, and a flier residents can pass out to businesses.

“The intent, at this point, is to select at least 20 or so projects, depending on how many responses we get,” said Power, who has already received about 100 emails from people who want parklets in their neighborhoods.

The pilot parklets at Cafe Revolution in the Mission and Mojo Bicycle Cafe on Divisadero have been wildly successful. Last year, a number of parklets were created for PARK(ing) Day to demonstrate how converting space for autos can enliven a street and business, providing a comfortable place to sit and enjoy the city, especially in neighborhoods cursed with narrow sidewalks.

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The narrow streets of Lower Manhattan date back centuries and pose a set of challenges nearly unique in New York City. With the city's first "pop-up café," DOT is testing out a solution to one of those challenges: the lack of public space caused by cramped sidewalks.

The wooden platform of the café takes the place of a few parking spaces along Pearl Street, sitting on top of the roadbed. With 14 tables -- the same red model now familiar from Times Square -- and 50 chairs, the space will be able to absorb some of the neighborhood's lunchtime rush. Sidewalk cafés are generally not allowed in the neighborhood because the sidewalks are too narrow.

The name "pop-up café" is perhaps a bit misleading. No food is being sold in the space -- it's just public seating. This first café is sponsored by two neighboring restaurants, Fika, a coffeeshop, and Bombay's, serving Indian food, but they don't offer table service and anyone who likes may sit down. 

The "pop-up" bit, though, is apt. Ro Sheffe, the Community Board 1 Financial District Chairman, said DOT approached the board with the idea on July 7. "Thirty-five days later and there it is," he said. "I wish we'd got you involved in the World Trade Center."  Read more...

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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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!

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Of the many agencies in a city, a department of public works (DPW) isn't usually the flashiest or most interesting. In San Francisco, however, under the leadership of Ed Reiskin, the DPW has taken the lead on a number of high profile projects like Pavement to Parks plazas and parklets and the Market Street trials, thrusting the agency's work in front of the cameras and into the public view.

To complement the many projects the agency is working on, it has significantly redesigned its website, from a sometimes difficult-to-navigate beast to a user interface that's more intuitive and helps the public navigate the many projects affecting city streets and public space. It's not exactly corporate, but it certainly improves upon the former iteration.

If you've been reading us for a while, you know that DPW is one of the agencies most significant to your perception of the streets and one of the best at responding to 311 service requests for such things as fixing potholes on cycling routes, so streamlining their information flow to the public is no small matter.

Some of the new features on the website worth noting include an interactive map that allows users to read about projects that are happening in their neighborhood and around the city, better navigation and quick links to access specific services, permits and to make service requests, a video streaming component, and because its San Francisco and we know of Mayor Newsom's penchant for tweeting, the obligatory social media portal where users can interact with the department and receive regular updates in real time.

"Public Works is a 24 hour a day, seven days a week operation and we hope this new site will allow residents to conveniently access a broad range of information and services we provide," Ed Reiskin, Director of the DPW, said in a statement. "Whether you’re accessing the internet from your home, business, or handheld device, this new Web site will provide streamlined information relevant to the needs of San Franciscans."

The DPW welcomes your feedback about the newly designed website, which you can provide in their online survey by visiting www.sfdpw.org. You can also follow them on Facebook and Twitter.

We are often attracted to city life for the energy, the boisterousness, the noise. I am a city guy having lived all my life in cities (born in Brooklyn, Chicago until age 10, Oakland until 17, and San Francisco since I was 20). I often make the joke that "nature is trying to kill me," when one of my friends suggests we go camping. Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s I was a punk rock fan, and went to dozens of shows with ear-splitting volumes. I've been to plenty of other events through the years with overwhelming noise, from other concerts to major sports events, etc. Maybe that's why I have had a ringing in my ears for the last two years (tinnitus). And perhaps not surprisingly, I've become increasingly frustrated at the oft-overlooked urban problem of noise pollution.

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