Definitely No to the Freeway! (La Via Express)

While the world has gathered in Cancun, Mexico, to discuss again a shared approach to Climate Chaos, action is already being taken in countless communities. On a visit last week to Guadalajara, Mexico, more than a thousand miles west of the Climate Meeting, I had the pleasure of discovering a vibrant grassroots movement to block the construction of a new 23-kilometer elevated freeway through the heart of the city. Interestingly, this movement leans primarily on people who live along the proposed route of the freeway, but found crucial support and activism from Ciudad Para Todos (City For All), a three-year-old group of bicycle and transit activists who are Guadalajara’s most vocal opponents to the reign of the car.

This is the current situation along much of the line. Train tracks down the middle. High tension electric lines on the right, underground gas and oil pipelines under the left.

Ciudad Para Todos gained Guadalajara's attention with a months-long campout in the green space at the far end of this road to protest a bridge.

I met Étienne von Bertrab and Negro Soto Morfín, two of the main Ciudad Para Todos activists, at the World Car-Free Cities Conference in Portland, Oregon in 2008 and later they invited me to speak to the 2nd annual Congress of Urban Cycling in Mexico held in Guadalajara in September 2009. We got together just after Thanksgiving and they filled us in on the new campaign.

In June 2010, just before they left for York, England for this year’s Car-Free Cities Conference, the Jalisco State Government published a video online describing the new freeway (La Via Express) plan. The Jalisco state government (which encompasses the city of Guadalajara) declared its intention to build a freeway on the same railroad line that a previous city government had proposed for a linear park and garden corridor with bicycle and pedestrian zones. The corridor conveniently cuts through the city and is used by laborers riding bicycles 20-30 kilometers a day between home and work.

Avenida Inglaterra is just above the red line crossing the image; it is currently a rail corridor with utility lines and limited open space on either side.

Étienne and Negro brought the government video with them to England and showed it to the gathered planners and activists on the first day and made two guerrilla video responses. At first the Jalisco government protested to Youtube and demanded the videos be taken down on the grounds of copyright violation (they had garnered 12,000 views in just the first four days), but when that news broke, even more people went to see the videos. (Youtube did take down the videos for a while, but restored them after protests from Ciudad Para Todos.) All three are posted here, but this is the one primarily in English:

The guerrilla videos made by Ciudad Para Todos were circulating and galvanizing local opponents, but the neighbors had already begun organizing before they even saw the video. We met Dr. Alicia Jaik, an energetic former medical doctor, now running a small corner store along the proposed route. Her neighbor is a local politician and when he asked her what she thought of the proposal she announced her dismay. “What should we do?” asked the politician. “Get to work!” was her immediate response. Signs sprung up along the houses up and down the street.

One of the signs alongside the proposed route.

This is posted on the sidewalk in front of Dr. Alicia's shop, indicating the places where neighbors have already begun the transformation.

A short time later Étienne was walking along the rail line with a local journalist and was thrilled when he saw the signs. With the journalist in tow, he knocked on Dr. Alicia’s door and after realizing they had much to discuss, he was invited to a meeting called a few days later. At the meeting Etienne and Negro and their colleagues presented their videos, their larger critique, and the plans that had been created by the previous municipal government for a linear park. They were met with great enthusiasm. “What can we do? When can we start? Can we do it this Saturday?” demanded the neighbors. Etienne and Negro hadn’t anticipated an action plan emerging so quickly, but they saw a good thing when it appeared. “Why not?”

That Saturday was the first gardening party, beginning with the removal of tons of accumulated trash. From that July meeting there has been a regular Saturday work party ever since. There are now over 400 new trees planted and at least eight different neighborhood associations involved. Neighbors have established new relationships with each other, and public feasts have become a regular feature of the Saturday work parties and other days. The independent Hotel del Bosque sits on an adjacent corner. They were at first cool to the activism, but became an enthusiastic participant, including their recent support of a mural painted by some local graffiti artists.

This mural was just painted in the past couple of weeks on a wall facing the corridor.

A university campus is adjacent too, and students have been eager participants as well. Painstaking work with local businesses has gained further support, many of them angered by the backroom dealing going on with big connected Mexican companies ICA, Cemex, and Grupo Mexico. A press conference of two local business associations was held on December 2 supporting demands for more transparency, public hearings, and technical evaluations of the freeway plans before anything begins. Meanwhile, the facts on the ground are getting better every weekend.

Neighbors have begun implanting a linear park on their own.

Homemade signs adorn the newly minted unauthorized park.

This lovely garden has obviously been growing for much longer than the rest of the efforts nearby.

Neighbors and passersby already make use of the shady trees and park benches that locals have installed as part of their guerrilla park-making.

Picnicking and hanging out in the grassroots linear park.

On September 22, 2010, World Carfree Day, our intrepid activists decided to install a monument in the middle of the contested terrain. They acquired a junked car, and turned it into a large flower pot, fixing it in place at one of the busiest intersections on Avenida Inglaterra. On the morning they were going to put it in place, the first arrival was pondering how to move massive concrete pieces into place when a man drove by on a big backhoe, most serendipitously! He quickly agreed to use his machine to move two big slabs of nearby concrete across the railroad tracks and even suggested a better placement for them. Voila! A new monument was installed, and we had fun visiting it last Tuesday. Here’s a few shots of it, followed by a video showing its installation, including the arrival of a Critical Mass-like procession by the GDL en Bici crowd.

The yellow sign above indicates this car was a public art installation for Carfree Day, 2010.

Heavy cement was moved by a guy passing by serendipitously on a big backhoe!

Flowers Not Motors!

This back seat is a rest stop for bike and ped commuters crossing a long way from one side of the city to the other.

The down-to-earth politics of this new Freeway Revolt in Mexico are a shining example to climate change activists everywhere. As Dr. Alicia put it to us, “Aqui, nadie es nadie, todos somos todos.” (Roughly translated as “Here, nobody’s a bigshot, we’re all in it together.”) She was emphasizing that they weren’t relying on the political parties or their representatives, to the contrary, they were disallowed in this campaign. Our friends in Ciudad Para Todos underlined the same point: The local diputado (elected representative in the state government) could participate as a citizen, but they wouldn’t support his offer to bring in work crews, equipment, and resources, whereby his political party would colonize the effort for their own ends. Dr. Alicia told us, “Before neighbors wouldn’t really talk to each other. Now we’re a community!” She’d been gardening across from her house for years, but now there are hundreds of neighbors doing the same up and down the rail line. The doctor is already scheming ways to deepen the new community’s life. She was planning to establish a free outdoor library near the benches that had already been built. “Take a book to read, leave one behind.”

Adriana and Dr. Alicia in the park.

A dead tree across from her small store had come back to life with several dozen fluttering hand-written “leaves.” One of our favorites said “Leave the closet and let’s be citizens all the time.” It’s just such a reinvigorated—and visionary—citizenship that is the foundation of the transition that we must make in the face of Climate Chaos, the Energy and Economic Crises, and the generally dissatisfying daily lives we lead in the second decade of the 21st century.

The dead tree with living "leaves."

Leave the closet and let's be citizens all the time!

Thanks to Adriana Camarena, my compañera who fully participated in gathering this story, and without whom I wouldn’t have been able to write it!

Photo: San Francisco Department of Sidewalk Parking.

Even as Mayor Gavin Newsom, SFPD Chief George Gascón, and the San Francisco Chronicle press for a new law that would punish sitting or lying on the sidewalk, drivers continue to park with impunity across the pedestrian pathway, with nary a word from Newsom or the editorialists at the Chron, notably recent suburban transplant C.W. Nevius, who’s devoted several columns to the perils of sitting and lying.

Though cloaking their campaign for the new law in concern for beleaguered pedestrians, who they say must now run a gauntlet of surly youth and their unleashed dogs along Haight Street, Newsom and Nevius have completely ignored the real threat to pedestrians of cars obstructing their path.

Nevius, in fact, has a history of blaming pedestrians for their own injuries. In a column last October that was sharply criticized on Streetsblog, he attributed San Francisco’s high rate of pedestrian deaths and injuries to spacey walkers not looking where they were going, ignoring data to the contrary that cited driver speeding and failure to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks as major factors.

Some opponents have suggested that the push for sit/lie is actually a campaign tactic to stir up conservative voters in the fall, when several supervisorial races could shift seats on the board away from progressives. This makes sense, but I also think concern for property values plays a large part in the push from some Haight neighbors, who have shelled out big bucks for their houses but don’t feel like they enjoy a posh enough environment so long as these undesirables are allowed to occupy public space.

Property values have been an issue in the Mission, where some neighbors have tried to move day laborers away from their blocks. Other neighbors have spoken up for the rights of the day laborers, and many heated meetings and hearings have seen neighbors lined up against one another. The proposed sit/lie measure could target day laborers along Cesar Chavez and nearby streets, and the Day Labor Program was the scene last month of a lively protest against the proposed new law.

When I spoke as a supportive neighbor who lives a block away from Cesar Chavez, I pointed out the lack of sidewalk parking enforcement and asked, “Do cars have more rights than people?” The response was a resounding no.

Sit/lie targets commercial streets such as Haight, which are more visible to tourists. But residential streets, where sidewalk parking is rampant, are where our lives take place.

Sidewalks are an extension of our homes, where neighbors can enjoy casual contact, where the person walking the dog can bump into the person trimming the tree or the parent watching the child’s first ride without training wheels. We live in a city, and our sidewalks are as vital as our libraries, museums, and parks. When we have to slide over oil slicks and do a slalom to make it from one corner to another, walking becomes a chore.

Advocates for the blind and disabled have repeatedly sought relief from sidewalk parking and attendant hazards. Photo: Matthew Roth.

Compare the number of tickets given for residential parking permit (RPP) violations versus sidewalk parking. RPP enforcement, being time-related, by definition requires two visits by parking control officers (PCOs), first to note the time a non-permitted car is spotted and then a second time to check if it has exceeded the time limit. Cars blocking the sidewalk are immediately obvious. An RPP violation may inconvenience a few drivers if all other parking spots are taken and the space in question is needed by a resident. Sidewalk cars physically endanger all walkers trying to get by, especially the most vulnerable: the disabled or visually impaired, seniors and parents with children in strollers or holding toddlers by the hand.

Still, RPP tickets outnumber sidewalk tickets by a margin of five to one, year after year. Typically, sidewalk violations must be called in, and neighbors are often reluctant to snitch on each other, and the time lag between phone call and actual enforcement allows many violators to leave and avoid being ticketed. RPP has dedicated teams of PCOs that seek out violations.

Even the oft-cited thuggishness of the sitters and liers has its reflection in sidewalk drivers. Assaults on PCOs have increased in recent years. One PCO testified at a hearing on the extension of parking meter hours that extending hours into the evening would endanger PCOs ticketing cars at expired meters after dark. Sidewalk parking often occurs right in front of the perpetrator’s home, as a result of confusion about the definition of driveway versus public space.

PCOs ticketing such cars are especially vulnerable to assault, and this has been cited as a reason for official reluctance to enforce the law. So the thuggish threats of the sitters and liers are a reason we need a new law, but the thuggish actions of the sidewalk parkers are a reason not to enforce the laws we already have.

We’re being told that punks and pooches are the real danger to pedestrians. And if you’re forced to walk in the street by some lout parking across a driveway and you get hit in traffic as a result, you can count on Nevius to chalk up your contusions to pedestrian inattentiveness! 

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!

British Petroleum should be given the death penalty. Oh wait! They don’t have death penalties for corporations. In fact, though they apparently have all the rights of individuals with respect to “free speech” (which they are free to buy at any price they wish), they cannot be held accountable as individuals for overtly criminal behavior. And even if they were, their bottom-line obsessing, litigation-phobic approach to the worst oil spill in history is just an example of normal corporate behavior in 2010. Their efforts to control press access and spin the story to their advantage have been consistent since the original accident, insisting on journalists being embedded on BP boats or planes so they can control what is seen and reported.

Penalizing corporate executives that get “caught” only legitimizes the rest of the criminal class in their everyday destruction of the planet. Maybe BP executives will be held criminally responsible (probably not), but the entity whose logic controls the behavior of anyone who is its executive is virtually immune. Unlike its political competitors in human form, the corporation is also apparently immortal.

The abject obeisance of the Obama government during the first 30 days of the oil geyser is a shame. Government ignorance and inaction, following the routine corruption that granted safety and environmental waivers to BP for this drilling project, should rock its legitimacy as much as Chernobyl did the Soviet government’s in 1986. I hope that blind faith in technology would also suffer a severe blow. Assurances about safe technology, proper safe guards, etc. are made about all our energy sources, from undersea oil drilling to nuclear power to the fictional “clean coal.” (Just last Tuesday I was speaking at a class at UC Santa Cruz where a couple of earnest students tried to argue that nuclear power was the solution to global warming!) This oil geyser resembles nothing so much as an uncontrollable nuclear meltdown. But rather than radiating thousands of square miles of countryside as happened in the Ukraine in 1986, this is filling the Gulf of Mexico with billions of gallons of crude oil. The sea is already dying, which is beginning to cascade into seaside communities and economies. The death of the Gulf will have unknown further effects on weather, ocean ecology, bird migration, and much more, and that’s before the massive underwater oil plume reaches the gulf stream in the Atlantic and does even more damage. It’s an insane, unwanted experiment in a foreseeable and preventable ecological catastrophe of unprecedented scope and severity.

Turns out that BP is closer to us, in a bigger way, than a lot of folks realize. Only a couple of years ago BP and the University of California at Berkeley signed a $500 million deal that will build a new biofuels research institute at the school, to be managed by BP and it is to BP that all patent discoveries will go. Obama’s Energy Secretary Steven Chu was the UC official who made the deal. Now his deputy energy secretary is the former chief scientist for BP! Maybe folks who want to protest this disaster should explore an alliance with the dynamic student movement that has already been in motion since last fall. Protest and obstruction do have their place.

Nature in the City's new proposal for a 10-mile "wild" corridor.

But other things are afoot in San Francisco too of a more affirmative nature. A couple of weeks ago the Public Utilities Committee of the Board of Supervisors held a well-attended public hearing regarding new ways of working with local water supplies from ground water and storm water to rain catchment and graywater. On Wednesday night Nature in the City presented their new campaign for a Bioregional Park (PDF) in the heart of San Francisco, a long-term feature of which is a 10-mile corridor that sweeps from the Presidio in the north down the spine of the City’s major peaks and then angling east across McLaren Park to Bayview Hill and Candlestick Point.  A natural corridor that knits together as many existing open spaces and parks as possible, planted with native plants to restore basic habitat for local critters, bugs and plants, would also help them to migrate through the urban environment. Bikeways, hiking paths, even daylighted creeks could be part of this.

And the SF Bike Coalition just announced their new campaign Connecting the City—San Francisco's Crosstown Bikeways for All (which is not as ambitious—after all these years—as a modest little flyer I put out in 1987 calling for a City of Panhandles). So far it’s a campaign to raise money, but it demonstrates a willingness to finally push for a more serious challenge to the dominance of private cars over our public streets. It’s a campaign that dovetails nicely with the notion of a wild corridor, new ways to think about watersheds and underground creeks, and more. It’s welcome development for the bigger agenda of altering how we live.

Ultimately these small choices are the only way we CAN start to lay a new foundation, technologically and socially, for a real transformation of life that will preclude disasters of the magnitude in the Gulf. A materially comfortable life for all should be the goal of a creative and energetic campaign of social and technological re-invention so that we radically reduce our use of energy, water, and other materials.

Combining the various incipient insurgencies for other uses of public streets, maybe we can start by getting some accurate numbers. What percentage of the land area of San Francisco is covered in public streets? What percentage of that street area is dedicated to cars as opposed to bicycles, pedestrians, or even transit lines (obviously buses use the same streets as cars, but not nearly as many streets as cars; nor do they generally park curbside)? What percentage is open space, parklands, sidewalk gardens, etc.? What are the largest contiguous zones of open lands not built on in some fashion?

I propose that once we get the numbers, which we can only guess at now, it will be possible to raise the demand for a specific percentage of city streets being permanently turned over to new uses, including daylighting subterranean waterways, building city-spanning parkways for crosstown bicycling, walking, and for the critters, scurrying and slithering. What do you think? Five percent of the streets converted to new auto-free uses? 10 percent? 25 percent? How far can we go?

Our era is characterized by a profound impotence in the face of national and global breakdowns. We don’t have a political vision, let alone a movement of movements, ready for prime time. We have to build the capacity to reinvent life one block, one neighborhood, one city at a time. The good news is that thousands of your friends and neighbors are already involved in just these efforts. Paul Hawken in his book “Blessed Unrest” identifies 30 million grassroots environmental organizations around the world! He calls them the immune system for Earth. Let’s hope the immune system will behave like our own bodily immune systems, and start killing the threats to our global health, the corporations that left unchecked will certainly kill us and everything else on the planet.

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.

The roar of approaching motorcycles drowns out all conversation until they're well past.

There are many specific contributors to our unnecessarily noisy environment, from the incessant sirens of emergency vehicles to the mechanized roar of the early morning garbage trucks, to the always galling car alarm serenade.

San Francisco's streets, however, are not that noisy compared to say, New York City. Or even compared to what it must have been like in the early decades of the 20th century when the City was criss-crossed by streetcars. Our cable cars are good examples of the kind of noisy transit that used to dominate the streets. For those who live along the tracks of the J-Church or N-Judah, or the cable cars, they know well how noisy a "light rail" vehicle can be.

Transit and street noise is taken largely for granted. We know it takes mechanical devices using fossil fuels to carry us around, unless we've embraced bicycling.

For us cyclists, the sounds of our whirring wheels and gentle gear changes is a pleasant confirmation of our self-propulsion. One of my favorite aspects of Critical Mass is the completely altered soundscape that accompanies our progress through the City. Sure, sometimes we're hooting and hollering, and there are at least a half dozen folks who might show up with serious sound systems pumping loud tunes into the air (a side note: the SFPD ticketed all the sound systems last month for lack of sound permits in their ongoing war of attrition, trying to literally raise the price for participating in CM). But the majority of time the sound is that of rolling bikes, murmuring voices, tinkling bells, and laughter. It's such a lovely kind of quiet, full of life and sweet energy, but so different from the anonymous, unaccountable thrumming of machines that fills our ears so often that we frequently stop noticing until they are turned off. And once you've ridden through the city in a mass of bicycles, it's hard not to remember that different urban environment, and wonder why it can't be more like that all the time.

One of the pleasures of a vibrant street life is the serendipitous encounter with street artists or performers, whose work is often dependent on the availability of a quieter public space. I had the pleasure in 1980 of running into Jean-Francois Batellier on the streets of Paris, France, one of the more prolific street artists there at the time (he appears in the car-free plaza in front of the Centre Pompidou daily to vend his drawings, books, postcards etc.) A lot of his work speaks to the alienation of modern life, the destruction of the urban fabric, and specifically a lot of great cartoons addressing the car culture. I got his book at the time, and one of his pieces stayed with me all these years:

By Parisian street artist Jean-Francois Batellier.

I really hate the motorcycle that you hear from blocks away. As it approaches, sidewalk conversation has to stop since no one can yell loud enough to be heard over the roar of the engine. The motorcycle has to be a full block away before anyone can even try to resume talking in a normal voice. Many Streetsblog readers are enthused about the new public plazas, mini-parks and parklets that are finally getting a local tryout. I love them, and see in them a harbinger of a more convivial, friendly, sociable city. But in this awkward interim period before they're fully developed, and while the preponderant use of local throughways is still overwhelmingly automobiles, we sit in our new parklets next to traffic, the sonic environment dominated by internal combustion engines (not to speak of the olfactory environment!).

By Parisian street artist Jean-Francois Batellier.

Another pet peeve is the sonic deterioration of BART. I recall riding it when it opened in the early 1970s and being impressed by its smooth, quiet, gliding quality. These days, whenever the train is going through a turn, whether between the Civic Center and 16th Street stations, or from downtown to West Oakland, the jarring screech of the metal wheels on rails is deafening; again it stops all conversation. Even just at high speed through the Transbay Tunnel it's much harder to converse than it used to be.

Noise is recognized by the San Francisco Department of Public Health (DPH) as a serious issue. And there is a Noise Task Force that brings together representatives of the police, DPH, city officials, entertainment businesses, and others. The enforcement of noise pollution ordinances is somewhat balkanized, with a half dozen agencies having varying responsibilities for it. The fight over late-night nightclubs is often driven by noise concerns, and Community Boards mediation services are often employed to address conflicts between neighbors with radically different tastes when it comes to amplified music and other kinds of noise.

It's an issue that comes up in more and more of our lives, and as more of us are getting older, we can hope for a more respectful approach to social space and noise. I know there will be comments here that say basically "if it's too noisy for you, stay home (or move to the suburbs)!" I've been struggling with bars and restaurants for a while already, but it's not nearly as bad as the problems my 78-year-old father has. If we don't find a restaurant with a quiet corner, we might as well not go out to eat because he really can't hear a thing over the roar of most San Francisco restaurants.

Sad to say, I'm heading the same way, even though I'm only 53. I've pretty much given up on bars, unless there's a quiet room or booth in the back. I can count the restaurants on one hand that are quiet enough to have a personal conversation that doesn't require yelling to be heard. It's a mystery to me why the common wisdom for restauranteurs is that a loud roaring restaurant is the most profitable. It would be nice if the private spaces in which we gather to drink, dine, and talk would honor the desire to talk as much as their narrow focus on selling us food and beverages. Perhaps some bar owner might still decide to promote a quieter environment. I'm sure there are a few out there already.

Ultimately our streets are our primary public spaces besides parks. We have a right to less noise, especially that imposed by trucks and motorcycles that are far exceeding the allowable decibel levels as they roar through our streets. If we continue to spend more time in our reclaimed street space, we should demand that right.

Cyclists in southwest Detroit. (Photo: Detroit Synergy)

Environmental Protection Agency officials watched intently Friday as a computer that measures air pollution on the spot showed spikes around industrial plants in southwest Detroit. ...

Next to the plants in the 48217 ZIP code and nearby areas are whole neighborhoods boxed in by oil recycling plants, asphalt makers, a steel plant, a stinky composting yard, a salt factory and an expanding oil refinery.

"This is what we live with," said [Jayne] Mounce, who lives near Marathon's oil refinery and petroleum terminals.

This week, Mounce said she had taken her own air samples with the help of national environmental monitoring group Global Community Monitor and found lead-laden dust, which could come from a steel mill nearby. A few months ago, similar sampling found a dangerous chemical in the air -- methyl ethyl ketone, a gas that can cause numbness, tremors and gait problems.

The story notes that EPA officials have "fewer than 50 air monitors" in the entire state of Michigan, where the industrial base has shrunk in recent years but remains a prime economic mover -- and generator of air pollution. Nonetheless, the Detroit residents' plea for stronger air quality standards is an unusual sight compared with the more common practice of localities seeking more lax rules or more time to comply with EPA pollution limits.

The citywide Stand Against Sit Lie campaign Saturday March 27 was a big success by all accounts. The website claims over 100 events took place on San Francisco sidewalks, and over 1000 people participated. That doesn’t sound overwhelming at first glance, but if you recall that this began as a brainstorm in a bar just a couple of weeks ago, and relied heavily on Facebook and personal networking, it is an impressive beginning.

Mayor Gavin Newsom, Police Chief George Gascón, and the S.F. Chronicle suburban-values attack-dog C.W. Nevius have been drumming up an Astroturf grassroots effort to criminalize sitting on sidewalks. The focus has been the Haight-Ashbury, where there are actual homeowners who have been contributing their energy to this effort. The joke at our 24th and Shotwell sit-in was that these same upscale homeowners in the Haight have been trying for over 30 years to “clean up” Haight Street. They had an organization for a while in the 1980s called RAD (Residents Against Druggies) and you could reliably buy pot or acid by looking for them, and then seeking the cluster of dealers who trailed them around the neighborhood!

Anyway, these folks, egged on by the powers-that-be, are clamoring for a new law to give police carte blanche to evict anyone they want to from the neighborhood’s sidewalks. The proposed ordinance is drawn very broadly, allowing for police to accost anyone on any sidewalk in the city and fine them and, if there’s a second offense, have them jailed for 30 days. This is being promoted as a means to enhance public safety, despite the fact that there are already laws against blocking sidewalks and aggressive panhandling. It’s unclear what purpose this new ordinance is supposed to fulfill, other than a new tool of arbitrary power for the police to use against “undesirable” populations.

Our group gathered at 24th and Shotwell as part of the citywide effort to say no to this proposed law. My partner Adriana organized it as a Tea Party, matching similar efforts near Buena Vista Park and elsewhere. We also put out some mats and a beanbag toss game, along with cake and tea. You really can’t imagine how fun it is to connect with passersby and neighbors on a local sidewalk until you try it out. First the Palestinian store owner came out wondering why we were there. He loved our tea since it tasted like ‘Arab tea’!

Adriana and Wolf discuss public life.

Our first “guest” was Wolf, a longtime resident of the Mission, a self-acknowledged dope fiend who had done a couple of long stints in jail. His dark leathery skin confirmed his years of living on the street. His mother was a Mission district Italian and his father a Mexican from New Mexico, and he had the distinction of being an American who was deported from Mexico after six years in Guadalajara. He was quite the beanbag tosser too! A white homeless friend of Wolf’s asked, “Just tell me this. “Why can white people sit on tables in front of cafés without being harassed? I don’t cause any trouble here. I’m just enjoying the street too.”

Adriana invited Spanish speakers to stop for tea, while various friends slowly began to gather. I spoke for a while with a British visitor who was walking his host’s dog. He couldn’t believe anyone would want to curb street life, since that was so much of why he and others wanted to visit San Francisco. A young French woman appeared in overalls a few doors down, emerging from her new gardening effort in the backyard. I hailed her and invited her for tea, explaining what we were doing. She too was aghast at the notion that San Francisco would restrict life on the streets this way. Both of them were quick to emphasize that safe streets are crowded streets.

Beanbagging fun on Shotwell.

Of course, the unspoken argument of the Sit-Lie proponents is that there are normative behaviors that must be conformed to. It’s not a problem to be on the sidewalks as long as you’re moving along in the endless process of shopping. It’s stopping to engage in activities that are economically purposeless, that actually animate a public life, that create the serendipitous and unpredictable moments and connections that give city life its strong appeal—those are the activities that must be “curbed.” There are three acceptable reasons to be in public space: working, commuting, shopping. If you’re not doing those things, go home and watch TV. That’s the American Way of Life. Earlier in the week, Adriana asked a local beat cop his opinion about the Sit/Lie initiative. He responded that it was a terrible idea. “Just another way in which a community avoids dealing with a grave social issue by having police move undesired people out of sight. It doesn’t solve the problem.”

We spoke with several dozen people during the three hours we occupied the sidewalk. A couple of local DPW street workers hung out with us and had some cake, played some beanbag. Part of their job is to shoo street people along, so they were sympathetic to the opposition to the proposed law. Two neighborhood  homies, Little George and Rigo, spend a lot of time on the corner, and they were delighted that we were staking it out as public space. Elderly Latinas were quite supportive. One woman, Carmela, came up to us and became quite animated. She told a long story about losing her son —7 years of duty in the army followed by 17 years of duty as a postal worker—who died after being hit by a car. She had earlier lost her husband, a sibling and her parents, but the loss of her adult son sent her into a tailspin of despair. “The loss of a son is like no other loss.” She would go out to the street day after day, sitting on stoops and sidewalks. She imagined people thought she was insane, but she needed to walk, to sit in the sun, to be on the street to heal her pain. “You don’t know what pain people carry in their hearts, only they know. I went to the streets to carry mine.”

A posse of cyclists stopped by, including Sue King who is one of the coordinators of Sunday Streets. She complained that we were engaging in a somewhat misguided effort since the asphalt-covered streets (as opposed to the limited space of the sidewalks) were a huge common space that we should be working to re-purpose. Of course she’s right, but the deeper problem is that we’ve already been put on the defensive AGAIN. So much of what passes for “progressive” politics in San Francisco is actually opposing pro-privatization, pro-business, pro-police initiatives. A forward agenda of urban transformation, whether motivated by the Transition Town logic driven by peak oil and climate change, or just the desire to make us more self-reliant and resilient, remains absent from the political landscape. Local activists continually fall into the trap of calling for “jobs” without any discussion of what kind of work SHOULD be done. Demanding jobs in the absence of a broad agenda of ecological transformation based on mutual aid and a solidarity economy is to reinforce the logic that trapped us in the first place.

22nd and Valencia.

That’s the beauty of opening a public space, even for just a few hours. Across the city, dozens of conversations took place, new friendships were forged, and political networks that might go a lot further in the future started to find themselves. At 24th and Shotwell, we didn’t hear a negative word from anyone until we were wrapping it up. A half dozen young hipsters were entering the apartment building we had been sitting in front of. I asked them if they knew about the proposed ordinance. They hesitated, and then one said, “you know, I actually would support something like that. I’m sick of these guys out here at 4 a.m. drunk, puking, yelling at each other.” It was a telling moment. Here were 20-somethings who thought another law was somehow going to remove undesirable people from their sidewalk, as opposed to a well-resourced campaign of public housing and social services. I pointed out that there were already laws against public drunkenness and a young woman said, “we call the police but they don’t show up.” So, passing another law is going to change that?

Karaoke erupts at corner of Hill and Valencia.

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.

Paul and Percival Goodman series of plans for cities presented in their 1947 book "Communitas" propose a libertarian-yet-socialistic urbanism, focused on both efficiency and individual choice. "The Community with the Elimination of the Difference Between Production and Consumption" presents a hexagon-shaped plan with multi-use residential, commercial, public and industrial sector in the city center, surrounded by a ring of "diversified farms." From "49 Cities" exhibit at SPUR.

The center of this city is highly dense and irregular. The proximity of the urban core to the farms and countryside allows for easy access from one to the other, and the farms are valued for their educational and aesthetic value in addition to their productive use.

Curiously, SPUR is hosting an exhibit right now called “49 Cities” in which a variety of utopian urban plans are revisited, from the works of Le Corbusier to Owenite cooperative colonies, to Levittown and Brasilia, and even a Buckminster Fuller plan to put a giant Dome over midtown Manhattan. One curiosity of the exhibit is its organization of a “Fear Timeline” which plots various utopian urban visions over a four-century long timeline. Clustered largely in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, most of the visions were concocted to address the dominant “fears” of their era, whether it be military invasion by a foreign army, securing internal security against uprising masses, ensuring access to water or food, controlling disease, etc.

Given the overarching theme of utopia, I expected the exhibit to be more inspiring than it is. The authors of this study have chosen to flatten out the particularities of human culture, political movements, passion and visionary excitement, to instead present the studies as composites of specific statistical comparisons. The end result is a series of odd two-dimensional diagrams (like the one above) which allow plans from across time and space to be compared on total land areas, total housing, distribution of land-uses, population, green spaces in its variations, water use, etc.

Almost as an antidote to this numbing exhibit, Matt Hern came to town recently and gave a few talks. I caught him at the Studio for Urban Projects, an exciting new venue in the Mission on 17th Street near Guerrero. Hern is from Vancouver and has a new book out called Common Ground in a Liquid City: Essays in Defense of an Urban Future. I haven’t had a chance to read it all yet, but his presentation was quite a refreshing alternative to the kind of dry, bureaucratic approaches to which most urban planners tend to succumb. Hern is a fully accredited Urban Studies Ph.D., but standing in front of us in a white t-shirt and jeans, his head shaved, talking about planting community gardens in his East Vancouver neighborhood, and defending the right of the local junkies to hang out in the neighborhood park, he came across as the neighbor you wish you had. (He has small children too, and still says he’d rather have the drug dealing going on in the open in the middle of the park than being busted and pushed into the alleys and doorways of the surrounding neighborhood. That way he can see it and work around it.)

His book refers back to Vancouver, but it’s written from a number of other locales around the world. He has chapters from Thessaloniki, Greece, Istanbul, Turkey, New York City, Diyarbakir, Kurdistan, Portland, Oregon, and others. He explained to us that however you think about your own city, once you go elsewhere, it always develops in interesting ways. The comparisons one can make when far from home are often surprising. Suddenly you notice a sensible bus shelter, or an open streetside marketplace, and realize that an analogous locale in your home city could learn a lot from this new perspective.

Hern is concerned with gentrification, like most of us that live in cities that are rapidly evicting long-time populations of poor and working class people. San Francisco is a quintessential example of this process. Here in the Mission where I live, the process of turning into a mini-Greenwich Village proceeds unabated. You wouldn’t know there’s an economic crisis going on here by glancing in to the many new, crowded, upscale restaurants.

As Hern says:

The market puts us in Faustian bargain: almost any attempts to beautify, improve, develop, or embolden a community inevitably means it will price its most vulnerable/valuable citizens out and undermine all that good work. Capitalism values selfishness and self-interest above all. Progressive planning and social policy try to mitigate this, but are always behind the curve and at a pronounced disadvantage… Cities CAN do something other than smooth the way for capital and/or clean up its messes. It is possible to articulate and develop genuinely democratic and inclusive strategies that are not self-defeating, that don’t reduce “community” to a commodity. There have to be ways to imagine sustainable community development that doesn’t price people out. I think we can carve huge areas out of this economy for non-market life.

I agree. The specific remedy for the housing crisis that is pricing ever more people out of life in San Francisco is the limited equity co-op based on a land trust. We have functioning co-ops here in town, the most forward looking being the San Francisco Community Land Trust. They’ve already managed to acquire one building on Columbus in North Beach where the former elderly Chinese tenants are now owners, paying only slightly more than they used to pay in rent. Removing properties from the market in perpetuity should be the goal of an aggressive social capital fund under democratic public control -- not to make a revolution, but to start the process of wresting our lives from the vicissitudes of raw capitalism when it comes to home, community, and shelter.

Housing is only a small but important part of this larger agenda of radical change. To make San Francisco a city that connects with the needs of its residents requires a very different political structure and very different forms of power to emerge, ones that will allow for a wholly new kind of public planning to take place. The kind of transition to a low-energy, low-water, high quality-of-life future that we must begin to make will depend on a great deal of mutual aid and solidarity. Instead of building infrastructure that could facilitate a more robust common life, this city’s mayors have consistently put the interests of wealthy property owners and large corporations ahead of its working and middle class residents. The quasi-progressive majority on the Board of Supervisors since 2000 has done little to reverse this deep bias in city politics.

Utopian thinking is the only realistic way forward at this point. Leaving our fate in the hands of PG&E, Bechtel, Chevron, and the rest of that lot is to ensure our inability to face a future fraught with radical change.

Matt Hern sums it up nicely:

An ecological and an ethical city is one and the same thing—we can’t have a “green” city without reimagining our social institutions. And that can’t be made to happen by relying on politicians or planners or developers. They can’t lead, they have to get out of the way and allow the neighborhoods, communities, public spaces, and common spaces that make a great city to become the ongoing expression of a constant series of choices made by everyday citizens.

Fighting for our common spaces, our right to what we already DO have, is underway. This Saturday, March 27, from 10-5 all over town, take to the sidewalks. Sidewalks are for people! Use them! Many of us will gather at Castro and Market at 4 pm to dramatize our opposition to a mayor and police chief (and their political supporters) bent on destroying the fabric of San Francisco. Check it out online at www.standagainstsitlie.org.

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: 

I grew up in San Francisco and lived here my whole life. For the past few months the Chronicle has been publishing really inflammatory articles talking about “thugs and bullies” in the Haight who are making it a living hell for residents, shoppers, and business people to exist there. The police have been talking about how this is a grassroots effort of the neighborhood, but the timing shows that is false. First the Chronicle starts drumming up all this stuff. Then they have the Mayor walk down the street when he’s supposedly undecided about this. He walks down the street with his baby, and supposedly sees a man sitting on the sidewalk smoking crack. Obviously it’s already illegal to smoke crack (and you can do it standing up!). He uses this to announce that we need to make it illegal to have people sitting on the sidewalk. Two days later he introduces legislation to the Board of Supervisors, already vetted by the City Attorney. He proposes two separate pieces of legislation. If you do anything in politics, you know that’s impossible [to get this done so quickly]. The Mayor must have been working on this since a long time ago.

The same day the Chamber of Commerce/Committee on Jobs does a poll that they claim shows there’s 71% support for a law outlawing sitting on the sidewalks. The question that they asked was not simply if you support a law that will make it illegal to sit or lie down on a sidewalk. It asked if you support a law that would arrest people who were harassing you. I’d support a law like that! I don’t want to be harassed. There are already laws against that. There’re laws against aggressive panhandling, against panhandling, against blocking the sidewalk, against smoking crack.

They say this is “a tool.” Supposedly “the police will use their discretion to use it appropriately.” Public Defender Jeff Adachi pointed out in a hearing that there were a lot of people that could be subjected to this law—tourists sitting on their luggage, students sitting on a sidewalk, homeless people—and all these people would be subject to $100 fine the first time, while repeat offenders could do 30 days in jail. The Chronicle’s Nevius said “that’s ridiculous, the cops would never arrest a tourist for sitting on their bag,” but the law states that it would be illegal to do that.

The argument made by Nevius and other Sit-Lie Law supporters is that the police can be trusted to implement this sweeping legal mandate in a reasonable manner. But the law defines a normal behavior, sitting on a sidewalk, as a crime!

Here’s Nate again:

Obviously the law will be used against the most vulnerable people. It’s a biological fact that some time during the day you’re going to need to rest. If you don’t have a home to do that in and you’re homeless you’ll have to sit on the sidewalk. I like sitting on the sidewalk! I just went to Vietnam and Cambodia to experience the vibrant, amazing things that go on in the streets. People are out there all day and it’s just a much better feeling. I feel a lot safer with a lot of people on the streets.

I think it’s a two-pronged approach. One is to scare people when they’re on Haight Street—just go shopping, minimize engagement with other people … (forget about people watching or anything else). This is also a serious effort by the Chamber of Commerce and conservative politicians to create a wedge issue for the November elections. That’s already playing out. You see people like Scott Weiner who is running for Supervisor in the Castro campaigning by saying “I support Sit and Lie because I care about public safety.” He can now run, playing to people’s fears that have been created by the Chronicle through all this fabrication, and make them feel safe.

There’s a lot of routes you can go besides this idea of “pre-crime,” that you can just make totally normal behavior illegal and then give the cops the discretion to punish people based on how they look or anything. Because if they’re not doing anything else illegal you are just arresting someone for sitting on the ground.

A few other people started talking about the broader implications of this law, that it is going to make it illegal to sit anywhere on the sidewalk. The first response was a very defensive one: hey, we’re under attack. But then we started talking about what we could do with this. What kind of conversations can we have?

Dangerous use of public space! Let's do it! (Photo: Kurt Bank)

Public space is important. On one hand there’s all these greening initiatives going on, but at the same time we’re trying to make it illegal to exist in public space, setting a really horrible precedent. We thought about Park(ing) Days, where people voluntarily occupy parking places and make them parks for a day, and people really enjoy it. We thought, why don’t we bring that on to the sidewalks for a day? We need to be encouraging more people to enjoy public space, to talk to each other, enjoying our vibrant and exciting city. Through talking about that we decided we were going to reach out to people who were interested in that. The basic idea is that anyone can bring out a table, or lawn chairs, or a mat, and do whatever you want, because it’s completely normal.

Bring yourselves and anything you like out to the street, and just relax. You can do whatever you want, argue with your family, party with your friends, make coffee for people. Some people are reclaiming the tea party idea and having a huge tea party. There’s going to be all kinds of fun things for people to go and see and engage with. We want people to contact us through the website we’re developing, or FB or email. Send us a location, a street corner where you will be situated. What time you’re going to be there, and a couple of sentences about what you think you’ll be doing. Afterward, we’re asking everyone to document it with a photo or a video, even a cellphone picture, and send it back to us. We’re creating a Google Map and hopefully there will be dozens or hundreds of locations where people were doing things. It will be a lot more cohesive after that.

Later on Saturday, March 27, everyone is going to Market and Castro to the new plaza there. By going there we want to connect to a bit of local history. In the 1970s Castro, they passed a similar law to target hippies that were laying around smoking pot or staring at the wall on acid or whatever, but what they really used it for was to target gay men who were flocking to the city to see this exciting new scene that was growing. There was this group called the Castro 14, guys who got put in jail for sitting on the streets. Harvey Milk was a huge opponent of this, and it eventually got repealed after he died because it was totally ridiculous and unfair and it was destroying part of the culture of the Castro.

It’s important that people contact us because we want to provide them with some basic infrastructure to make it a bit more focus and pointed. It’s unusual to do this kind of street activism when something is just being voted on at the Board of Supervisors. It’s going to go on the ballot this November regardless of how it’s voted on by the Board. We have this problem with Ross Mirikarimi and David Chiu who are basically bending to political pressure. They haven’t committed either way, but we’re going to send documents to everyone who contacts us with fact sheets and contact information to organize our opposition. Write us at info@standagainstsitlie.org and you’ll be getting good information, not spam, from us.

Another activity on the way to criminalization? (Photo: Kurt Bank)

Washington
D.C., Maryland, and Virginia are set to apply for federal disaster aid
to offset the costs of cleanup from this month’s record-breaking
mid-Atlantic blizzards, according to the Washington
Post reports today. But the so-called Snowpocalypse could dent more
than just worker
productivity — already crunched transportation budgets are also
on  the line.

In Virginia, new Gov. Robert McDonnell (R) warned
before yesterday’s second round of storms that the state would have to
use part of its road maintenance and repair budget to pay for highway
plowing and extra police duty.

Virginia had already
sliced $893 million from its long-term transportation budget in its
most recent round of belt-tightening, bringing the state’s total cuts
to $4.6 billion … or the
equivalent of running six years of transportation programs with
five years of funding.

Maryland, among the first states to set up a dedicated transportation
trust fund, is not in as dire of a budget situation as its southern
neighbor. Yet budget analysts in the legislature are
pressing for about $60 million a year to be taken from that trust
fund to cover Maryland’s general budget shortfall.

Meanwhile, the state transportation secretary acknowledged
that if snow removal costs grow too burdensome this year, spending
on capital projects (such as the proposed new Red Line transit system) may
need to be diverted.

Finally, though the capital’s $6.2 million snow-clearing budget was
already exhausted by a massive Christmas-week blizzard, D.C.’s
transportation department has offered few details on where any extra
funds would come from. A "reprogram" of
money from other accounts has been mentioned, but city officials appear
to be putting their hopes in a successful appeal for assistance from
Congress.

Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), a longtime supporter
of D.C.’s Metro transit system, summed up the region’s sense of
urgency this way in a statement to the Post:

[Homeland Security] Secretary [Janet] Napolitano said she
would call it the Valentine’s Day Storm. I said, ‘Don’t send chocolates,
don’t send flowers,
send dough for snow.’

The
White House budget envisions a new investment in urban farmers markets’
such as this one, which served D.C.’s low-income Anacostia area for two
years. (Photo: DC Food for All)

Even in transit-rich New York, a highly touted new Costco is laying off employees as shoppers avoid its not-too-walkable location. On the flip side, farmers’ markets are seeing new growth and serving more lower-income shoppers in Milwaukee, Oakland, and other areas.

Now the White House is getting in on the action, with $400 million included in
its fiscal year 2011 budget to support development of new food outlets
in urban communities where the nearest grocery store is often a
half-mile or more away — the neighborhoods that policymakers call "food deserts."

The White House proposal is modeled after a Pennsylvania effort that has steered more
than $57 million in grants and loans to develop 74 local food markets
in lower-income areas of the state. The Obama administration’s version
would be anchored by $250 million in New Market Tax Credits, which give
developers incentive to launch new projects in economically distressed
areas.

While the $400 million budget plan is not being
directed through the U.S. DOT, it could have a significant upside for
urban transportation officials looking to improve access to transit and
create new opportunities for walkability.

Sign of the times? Sde-by-side foreclosures in Massachusetts. (Photo: Yovani via Flickr)

Irresponsible
behavior by banks led them to the brink of collapse — a collapse which
would have sent the global economy into a terrifying period of decline
– and so the government stepped in to prevent bank failures (after
learning a lesson from the dreadful experiment with Lehman). But these
interventions have put banks in a situation where they stand to gain
enormously from taking large and dangerous financial bets.

Similarly, government policies such as low gas tax rates and
import protections on light trucks encouraged the development of a
bloated domestic auto industry focused on the production of inefficient
SUVs.

When high oil prices and deep recession then
threatened to push General Motors and Chrysler into bankruptcy, leading
to hundreds of thousands of lost jobs, the government felt it had no
choice but to step in to keep the companies afloat.

Now the
government owns large stakes in companies that will only profit if the
American public goes car-buying crazy over the next few years.

The
list goes on. The economic crisis that currently afflicts us has made
it clearer than ever that we need to change the way we do many things,
but because the economy is in such difficult shape, it is hard to
pursue anything other than policies designed to keep the economic
engine from stalling out completely. Big transitions must wait for
later.

Can the same be said for sprawling urban development?
Have government interventions essentially bailed out the very places
that proved most vulnerable amid oil shocks and housing busts?

Chris Leinberger argued that very point in a recent blog post at The New Republic’s Avenue:

While there is no federal or private … dataset that
identifies where exactly in metropolitan areas the most mortgage
defaults are, local analyses and some news reports indicate the bulk of
the problem is on the fringe…Thus,
some of the biggest beneficiaries of federal efforts to stem
foreclosures and keep families in their homes are those located in
exurbia.

He
has a point. Foreclosures have been concentrated on urban fringes, so
federal efforts to modify mortgages and otherwise reduce defaults have
tended to direct more aid to exurbs than inner suburbs and city
centers. In addition, rates of home ownership and car ownership are
higher in the suburbs than in city centers, so federal housing
subsidies (including the new home-buyer tax credit and low interest
rates generally) and automobile subsidies ("Cash for Clunkers") have
had a geographic bias toward suburbanites.

To a certain
extent, this has been unavoidable. Most Americans live in auto-oriented
areas in suburban places, and a large share of those Americans are
facing financial difficulty. Any measure that helped stressed
households, including checks of equal value cut to all workers, would
tend to benefit suburbanites more than urban dwellers.

One
should also be careful not to oversell the value of the interventions.
Efforts to reduce foreclosures have actually had pretty depressing results.

But
certainly the government might have done things differently — and
pursued policies designed to help households as much as possible –
rather than those aimed at keeping households in homes they couldn’t
afford, or moving families into homes in unsustainably sprawling
locations. So it’s important to ask: What can we expect for exurban
areas and how will the government’s policy choices affect them?

First,
it’s important to understand the dynamics of the bubble. For a number
of reasons, among them low interest rates and innovations in mortgage
finance, the residential real estate market began to experience a boom
at the beginning of this decade. This energy in housing markets
manifested itself in different ways in different places.

In
areas where housing supply was tight — where it was not easy to
respond to increased demand by building more — prices rose sharply. In
areas where housing supply was more elastic, prices rose some, but
construction exploded. In general, it’s tough to build in dense center
cities, and easy to build on the low-density fringe.

As a
result, rising housing demand led to construction on the urban fringe.
It also led to higher prices in center cities, which pushed many low-
and middle-income families to move to places with cheaper housing
markets, which increased demand for homes on the fringe and led to even
more construction. Rising demand for exurban living led to construction
of exurban housing, and rising demand for urban living led to construction of exurban housing.

When
the crash came, it quickly became apparent that housing inventory on
the fringe had grown out of all proportion to the actual demand for
such housing. Meanwhile, there continued to be excess demand for homes
in center cities.

So while the bust ended up being painful
for everyone, it was far less painful for urban centers. In those
places, price declines brought in buyers, helping to keep inventory
down and price declines orderly.

In exurbs, by contrast,
falling prices went hand in hand with huge numbers of vacancies. Prices
fell chaotically and dramatically as inventory overhang led to falling
home values, which contributed to foreclosures, which added to
inventory, which further depressed home values and led to still more
defaults and foreclosures.

Another way to say this is that
center-city housing markets experienced a correction, while exurban
housing markets entered a vicious cycle leading to wrenching housing
price declines that will likely push prices below replacement costs in
some areas.

This is a dangerous place for neighborhoods to
be. Vacant homes will begin to deteriorate, and occupied homes unlikely
to sell for more than replacement costs (or more than the value of the
owner’s mortgage) will suffer from disinvestment. The housing stock
will become second-rate.

As neighborhoods fall apart,
wealthier and more mobile homeowners will move away, while excess
inventory and rock bottom prices will attract
low-income households. The tax base will fall and so services will
decline, and the general desirability of such areas will drop. Some,
and perhaps many, of these neighborhoods will become slums.

How
do we know? Well, this is a storyline we’ve seen before, both in center
cities during the decades of urban decline and in depopulating Rust
Belt cities for much of the past half century. It is a process that is
very difficult to reverse.

And in some ways, suburban slums
may be far worse for the poor than the previous urban version. In
center cities, density and public transit provide a basic level of
mobility for the working poor; in suburbs, by contrast, lower income
families cannot survive without an automobile. And even with massive
suburbanization, inner-city decline could never entirely escape public
attention, thanks to lingering employment concentrations in center
cities, as well as historical and cultural attractions there. As a
result, there was always some pressure for renewed investment in center
cities.

But suburban neighborhoods are relatively remote; the
very idea of the places is that residential neighborhoods remain well
away from employment concentrations and other destinations. Remoteness
may well allow suburban slums to decline in obscurity.

These
changes will not be universal, just as previous decline in urban
centers was far from universal. Rich suburbs will likely stay rich, and
denser suburban areas may well experience great success by shifting to
greater walkability and density. But many suburban neighborhoods may
find themselves in circumstances that once characterized urban slums –
poverty, deteriorating services, failing schools, and rising crime.

Given all of that, how do the federal government’s assistance programs measure up? Not particularly well, unfortunately.

The
mortgage modification programs have primarily been oriented around
keeping people in their homes (and loans). These have generally not
been that successful; a surprisingly large number of modified mortgages
still wind up in default. Keeping families who cannot afford their
loans in their homes is likely to be bad for the families themselves
and may lead to disinvestment, as those homeowners will continue to be
cash-strapped and may suspect that they’ll be unable to sell the home
for more than the value of their mortgage.

Meanwhile, the
housing tax credit is tailor-made to get relatively low-income buyers
– and first-time buyers — into suburban homes. That’s the intent; the
thinking is that bringing buyers into the market will support prices
and end the cycle of decline.

But this effort may well fail.
Housing inventory in hard-hit neighborhoods is too substantial to be
much reduced by an $8,000 credit (particularly one put in place when
one-fifth of the population is under- or unemployed). And by
encouraging lower income families to move to these neighborhoods, the
government may actually be accelerating the process of decline. Higher
income families already in those areas may not be willing to stay alongside the newcomers, and their departure will reduce the tax base.

In short, the government isn’t just subsidizing sprawl. It’s subsidizing the deterioration of sprawling areas.

What
should the government be doing? Well, for starters, it should recognize
that the housing crash has meant an increase in the relative price of
center city homes, which were already unaffordable for many families
before the bust. It is important to provide opportunities for
affordable center city housing (for its own sake, and to reduce the
rush of lower-income families to the fringe), and that means
encouraging construction in center cities.

In particular,
since it is clear that safe, walkable neighborhoods are in very high
demand and are therefore holding their value well, it is important to
build more such places.

Next, the government needs to stop
subsidizing home ownership and focus on increasing mobility. Home
ownership in an area where prices are declining is an anchor on a
household. It can trap families in declining neighborhoods or in
metropolitan areas where jobs are scarce. If keeping struggling owners
in their homes is a priority, then policy should focus on getting them
out of their loans and keeping them there as rent-paying tenants.

Third,
government officials should learn the lessons of urban decline –
particularly that allowing the decline of the tax base to lead to an
erosion in service quality will create negative social outcomes that
will be very difficult and costly to address in the future. Once poor
schools and high crime levels become the norm, it will take years and
overwhelming investments to turn things around. It will be better for
all involved to step in and continue to support services in
deteriorating neighborhoods.

And finally, policy should focus
on improving physical mobility and urban design in these places, for
two reasons. First, greater mobility — including walkability and
transit access — will be of great use to poorer families which may
have irregular or no access to an automobile. And second, efforts to
improve the design and connectivity of these communities will make them
more attractive and less likely to suffer from complete collapse.

The
problem is that these represent substantial changes — a transition
away from the prior way of doing business — and it is difficult to do
anything other than keep fingers in the dam at this point. This is
understandable.

But with our approach to the housing crisis
(and to the crisis of home and transportation affordability generally)
as with the banking crisis and the crisis of consumer spending, and so
on, the problem is clear — putting out the fire is not enough. Absent
real reform in banking, another crisis will hit us, and soon. Absent an
increase in savings rates, over-indebted households will paralyze the
American economy.

Without addressing the serious imbalances
in the way we plan and build our communities, we can expect a serious,
long-term crisis in exurban neighborhoods. It took us 40 years to begin
to get declining urban centers back on the right track. Do we really
want to repeat that experience?

Cars regularly block the bike lane on Fell Street near the Arco Station. Photo: Bryan Goebel

In a city where people and cars regularly jostle for space, it's not uncommon to have speeding traffic just inches or feet from pedestrians, homes, and parks. This spatial conflict is especially pronounced on Fell and Oak Streets, which serve all at once as de facto residential highways, major bike thoroughfares, and densely built-up residential and commercial streets, their sidewalks bustling with people on their way home or visiting the Panhandle.

For years, even decades, residents have fought to calm traffic along the corridor. Cars routinely speed down Fell and Oak, which were converted to three-or-four-lane one-ways half a century ago as a compromise with planners who wanted to build an east-west freeway, linking the Central Freeway to the Golden Gate Bridge, by demolishing the homes between them and wiping out the Panhandle. The compromise saved the homes and the park, but has left the neighborhood plagued with freeway-like traffic.

Now, some neighbors worry that new overhead information signs for drivers, which are being installed as part of the city's SFgo traffic-management program, will encourage speeding on the already fast one-way couplet. Residents are wary of anything that contributes to a freeway mentality on the street. Earlier this week, a 24-year-old San Francisco woman was killed by a driver while crossing Fell Street at Broderick.

"It's been treated as a freeway by the city, much to the peril of everyone who lives along the densely-packed residential corridors that are Oak and Fell," said Michael Smithwick, chair of the Alamo Square Neighborhood Association's transportation committee. "They're obviously not designed for freeway use, and have kind of been force-fed" the high traffic volumes.

Fell Street between Shrader and Stanyan, before it was converted to a one-way street. Photo: San Francisco Public Library Historical Photograph Collection

Because parking wasn't available on the street, Smithwick said, residents parked their cars on the sidewalk in front of their homes. "The sidewalks there were perilous, and sometimes completely impassible, because you'd have a car parked on it, and then the only way to get by was to step out into an active lane of speeding traffic curbside. So, obviously, no one walked on the street, it was just a mess."

"The city removed that fourth lane of morning traffic on Oak, and they predicted Armageddon, and it didn't happen."

Smithwick also points to traffic light changes as a hard-fought victory and improvement. For a long time, stoplights on Fell and Oak were disabled late at night, and simply flashed yellow. Semi trucks rumbled down at high speeds, shaking the buildings in their wake and setting off car alarms. About six or seven years ago, that finally changed.

Neighbors and Mirkarimi said they've struggled to implement the incremental changes, which are improvements, but none have fundamentally changed the streets. "Fell and Oak is a freeway, for all intents and purposes," said Mirkarimi, who fought for removing the tow-away zones, and installing the bike signal at Fell and Masonic. "Unless we are willing to radically calm Fell and Oak down, then we're just dancing around the edges."

It could have been worse: in the 1940s, planner envisioned a Panhandle Freeway. Flickr photo: Eric Fischer

Smithwick also likes the idea of two-way streets, but suggested crosswalk pedestrian bulb-outs as an immediate measure. "Now that you've got parking on both sides of the street" because the tow-away zones are gone, Smithwick said, "there's no reason, other than cost purposes, that you couldn't do a sidewalk extension into that parking lane at each of the corners."

Supervisor Mirkarimi strongly supports traffic calming measures on Fell and Oak, but said the issue needs to be examined in the context of the broader traffic impacts the NoPa neighborhood has experienced as a result of the tear-down of the Central Freeway in Hayes Valley, which was replaced by Octavia Boulevard.

The freeway environment on Oak and Fell needs to be tamed, Mirkarimi said, "but the question can't be answered unilaterally without talking about the blowback of Octavia Boulevard. That's also what's causing the small side streets that are becoming the alternative corridors for people to try to get where they want to go by not being on Fell and Oak."

The Board of Supervisors commissioned the San Francisco County Transportation Authority to complete a study "to assess all the positives and negatives due to Octavia Boulevard," said Mirkarimi, "because of traffic fluctuations and changes that travel westward because of the new boulevard." The study is due in mid-2010, but Mirkarimi said a similar study should have been completed before Octavia Boulevard was built.

The bulb-outs and wider median being installed on Divisadero Street, which intersects Fell and Oak, are part of broader efforts to calm traffic in the neighborhood, Mirkarimi said, but he's frustrated with the MTA's spotty approach to planning in the area. "The challenge I want to spotlight is the way it's incrementally being patchworked, and the way answers have been slow-coming," he said.

Both Helquist and Mirkarimi identified the Fell Street Arco Station, where long queues of cars that spill out onto the street and block the bike lane, and the new Falletti Foods market, which has encouraged dangerous turns into its parking lot, as especially hazardous situations that need to be addressed immediately. The latest concern, though, is the installation of new freeway-style overhead information signs on both Fell and Oak, which are part of the SFgo traffic-management program. The signs are intended to give drivers information like garage parking availability and congestion-causing events to avoid.

Infrastructure for new SFgo signs over Fell Street. Photo: Michael Helquist/BIKE NOPA

"The intent is, one, to get information from SFgo," said Helquist, "but also, finally, for them to get some input from the neighborhood about what these are. We're really hoping the presentation that they give will last about five minutes, and then they will address either some of the questions that I listed on my blog, and certainly questions from the neighborhood."

Mirkarimi said there is some support from neighborhood organizations for the Fell Street sign, but he has yet to hear a strong argument for the signs on Oak Street.

"To be honest with you, I'm not sold [that SFgo signs are] needed both on Fell and Oak," said Mirkarimi. "Some make a better or stronger case for Fell, but nobody's made a good case to me on Oak at all."

Walk SF's Manish Champsee said the SFgo program is moving in the opposite direction of state-of-the-art traffic calming techniques. "Cities are moving away from that whole idea of giving people information and giving them a false sense of security," said Champsee. "Traffic calming is going in the direction of let's give people a sense of danger," so they pay greater attention to their surroundings.

The meeting tonight will give neighbors a chance to discuss the SFgo program with its staff. In addition, Judson True, a spokesperson for the MTA, said the agency is open to hearing ideas from the community about the full range ideas for improving conditions on Oak and Fell. "We're always open to talk to any neighbors about ideas to improve our streets," said True, who cited numerous changes the MTA has already made. In addition to retiming the signals to slow traffic, said True, "We've reduced green light time overall, installed newer pedestrian countdown signals on the street, improved visibility of signs and added more speed limit signs."

True added: "We would be open to conversation about other ideas. We'd be open to bulb-outs."

The Alamo Square Neighborhood Association's Smithwick said neighbors have fought hard for all of those changes. It's a fight for every single bit of accommodation to safety and pedestrian equal access," said Smithwick. "It's a struggle, and it has been for the twenty years that I've been involved in this, all along the way."

Supervisor Mirkarimi echoed that sentiment. Converting Fell and Oak back to two-ways "would be fantastic," said Mirkarimi, "but at the very minimum, in the areas that also intersect Fell and Oak, like Masonic, that's exactly what we're trying to aim towards, is significant traffic calming, and I think the MTA has yet to produce any substantive answers."

The fundamental message for the city," said Helquist, "for DPT and MTA and SFgo, is that congestion is not the problem. Speed is."

The SFgo presentation at the North of Panhandle Neighborhood Association meeting will be held tonight from 7-9pm at Poleng Lounge, 1751 Fulton Street.

San Francisco is renowned for the beauty of its its Victorian homes almost as much as its rugged seaside setting. But with most buildings in the city, the architectural grace starts at the second level. For pedestrians walking down the street, seeing buildings the way most people actually see them, the view is not always so pretty. The main culprits, as the photo above illustrates, are garages and curb cuts.

As we've written about before, curb cuts cost the city dearly in both meter revenue and public parking spaces, and a comprehensive study by Mary Brown showed that barely half of all garages in the Mission District are even used for parking: 49 percent are used for storage. Preservationists have been up in arms about the impact garage additions have on historic homes, pushing to institute stricter requirements for moving additions through the planning approval process. At the same time, most new homes in San Francisco are still required to be built with garages.

Perhaps the greatest cost, however, is not the sum of individual architectural maulings, but the collective impact of an endless garagescape on the pedestrian realm. Buildings new and old in San Francisco are often not designed with the view from the sidewalk in mind, and, collectively, the result is a city of houses best viewed from afar. Perhaps most emblematic of this is the famous "painted ladies" of Steiner Street on Alamo Square, which are nearly always photographed with a row of delicately-placed trees obscuring their garage doors. Walking down Steiner, the immediate view of each house is dominated by their gaping garage cuts more than what is stacked above.

As a consequence, San Francisco's sidewalks often feel hostile to pedestrians even when there aren't any automobiles zipping past. Massive, faceless garage doors, sunken driveway entrances, and neglected remnants of front gardens are the norm.

I went out in search of homes that still have their front gardens intact, and was struck by how humanizing this ground-level landscaping makes the street for the passerby.

Photo: Michael Rhodes

Like the rows of gardens and trees in Park Slope, Brooklyn, I also found that the pedestrian-friendly effect of front gardens and garage-free facades achieves its strongest effect when it's uninterrupted for several houses in a row, or even the whole block. At present, of course, this is almost never the case in San Francisco.

The political battle to stop new garages will be a difficult one, requiring both incentives and restrictions. Even if a new garage is never built again in San Francisco, the city will already have to deal with 200,000 existing garages and curb cuts. So, I also went out in search of houses that have found creative ways to make their existing garages less inimical to pedestrian comfort. While most buildings make no effort at all, and those that do often use ugly, too-tall gates that are generally not closed anyway, I did find one elegant, impressive example that nearly made its garage seem to disappear:

A cleverly obscured garage. Photo: Michael Rhodes

The home pictured above used to have an uncovered gaping garage entrance, but a gate was installed that greatly improves the home's appearance and maintains neighboring houses' row of gardens and gates. It doesn't address the sidewalk curb cut, which still leaves the pedestrian without a barrier from the street and makes it harder to plant trees, but it undoubtedly makes a big difference.

Only by peering over the gates is the home's garage visible. Photo: Michael Rhodes

This treatment might not work for all homes, but for home owners who don't use their garages for parking, or who don't use their vehicles daily, it could provide some guidance. It also has the advantage of providing better protection from water seepage, a common problem for homes with garages that were hastily added in the 1920s and 1930s.

Such an elegant treatment might be too much to ask for from most houses, but at the least, it's important that architects and home owners start thinking of the street level as the real perspective from which most people see houses and apartment buildings. Perhaps then we'll stop seeing new ("green") buildings with such utter disregard for the pedestrian realm.

For now, pedestrians in San Francisco have to enjoy well-loved front gardens, gates, and stoops for the rare commodities that they are.

A once-typical San Francisco sidewalk-scape. Photo: Michael Rhodes

Flickr photo: tacopoet99

"I think everyone looks at 18th Street as this great pedestrian-oriented street with these really amazing businesses on it where the sidewalks are too narrow and too crowded," said Tom Radulovich, a neighborhood denizen and Executive Director of Livable City, who is working with other advocates and merchants to make the block near Dolores Park more pedestrian and bicycle friendly.

"You see so many more people walking or bicycling through the neighborhood than driving, and a lot of them are locals."

As a first step, the MTA is considering -- and is likely to approve -- eliminating the 7-9 a.m. tow-away zone on the south side of 18th Street eastbound between Dolores and Treat, which would help calm speeding automobile traffic during peak morning hours, and hopefully reduce the amount of collisions in the area.

On a sunny Friday afternoon, while gathering interviews for this story, I witnessed a car collision on Guerrero at 18th, followed by a chorus of "whoas" from Tartine patrons. No one was hurt, but a Tartine employee said she's witnessed or heard at least six collisions in the last year.

According to the MTA, there were 23 collisions on 18th Street around Dolores and Guerrero between October  2003 and September 2008, the latest date figures were available. Four of them involved motor vehicles hitting pedestrians and four involved cars striking bicyclists. None of the crashes was fatal but almost all resulted in injuries. It's also important to note these statistics don't include the number of injury and non-injury collisions that went unreported.

Radulovich said traffic engineers have typically prioritized high-volume, high-speed automobile traffic on Guerrero, a "classic traffic sewer street," and 18th, without considering the walkability, bikeability or commercial vitality of the neighborhood.

A car collision last week on Guerrerro at 18th Street. Photo by Bryan Goebel.

Additional steps being envisioned for the block include building bulbouts on the corners to narrow the crosswalks for pedestrians, taking over a few parking spaces for a pilot project (similar to the plaza at 17th and Castro streets) that would test out temporary, wooden sidewalk extensions, and using one or two parking spaces to build a secure on-street bicycle parking pen, which would create more bike parking while freeing up sidewalk space. Such ideas are only conceptual at this point and would eventually require backing from the MTA.

Marc Caswell, the program manager at the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition who also lives in the neighborhood, said his organization is trying to secure a community challenge grant that would help fund a mix of bicycle parking, greenery and public seating on 18th and 24th Street.

"The SFBC is planning to work closely with merchants, residents, government agencies, and other stakeholders to improve the streetscape and create sufficient bike parking while improving pedestrian access by moving bike racks off the sidewalk and into the street," said Caswell. 

Bikes parked outside Bi-Rite Creamery on 18th. Photo by Marc Caswell.

"I also know a lot of people who work on this block do bike in. We provide eight parking spaces for bikes in our backyard but once those are full, staff has to find spaces up front, and a couple of people have lost their bikes because they have to park around the corner on Oakwood."

There are currently about ten bike racks on the block. Craig Stoll, the owner of Delfina, said his bike-commuting employees usually pile their bikes in the back patio, against a wall and stacks of wood, because the racks are rarely available. 

Stoll both drives and rides his bicycle to work and said he supports making the block more bicycle and pedestrian friendly, but he believes many of his customers drive to the restaurant. Still, he said he would rather take away a few parking spaces and give them to pedestrians and bicyclists than preserve them for automobile parking.

“When I mention it to people, and I talk about it, some people’s first reaction is like, 'oh great, now there won’t be any parking.' And some people are really jazzed about it. I myself, I’m excited about it. I hate to inconvenience [anyone], obviously, that’s not what I want to do, but on the same token, I think it’s a great experiment and fun for the city as a whole, for this neighborhood.”

Creating temporary sidewalk extensions has been discussed in the Mission Streetscape Plan process, according to Andres Power, an urban designer at the SF Planning Department.

"There would be areas, perhaps in front of Bi-Rite, Delfina, and the Bi-Rite creamery that would have a platform constructed to allow for cafe seating and public seating in the parking lane," said Power. "Landscaping and other elements would likely also be included."

He stressed that the Planning Department has not done any official outreach, though Radulovich has discussed it with the owners of businesses on 18th Street, many of whom support it. Stoll said he saw similar sidewalk extensions in front of an Irish pub in Florence and on the Amalfi coast in Italy.

The crowded sidewalk scene outside Bi-Rite Creamery. Flickr photo: jen maiser

"When we moved in here seven years ago it wasn't really like that. And now it's really a lively neighborhood block," he said, adding that most of his customers are walkers. "I see the same people walking all over this neighborhood."

Kyle Foley, who lives in the neighborhood and was about to dig into a piece of coconut passion fruit Bavarian cake outside Tartine, said she thinks it would be "fantastic" if the improvements were made. She said the businesses attract a lot of people to the neighborhood, including "outsiders who wouldn't necessarily come here as often as they do."

"I think it would be awesome to have more space for pedestrians and more tables outside. I mean, these tables are always packed, there's always a wait, and there's tons of bikers. I don't see any down sides to that plan but I'm also someone who doesn't have a car and I don't worry about parking and that kind of thing."

A line outside Tartine. Flickr photo: oieseau678

Alaska’s Copper River Highway runs through forest land. (Photo: alaska-in-pictures.com)

As the Associated Press reports,
the most immediate impact of Vilsack’s move will come in Alaska, where
the Tongass National Forest was poised for a road-building project
linked to new logging. But preserving roadless forests is a hot issue
all across the west, particularly in California, where Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger (R) has sought to keep roads out of three national forests that are close to the Los Angeles metro area.

It’s
important to note, though, that Vilsack’s directive is only in place
for a year — meaning that roadless forests won’t be assured protection
unless Congress steps in to pass the bills sponsored by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA).

And for anyone wondering whether keeping roads out of forests is a local issue, check out the Forest Service’s list of pavement-free zones in each state. You may be surprised to know how many protected areas there are.

I've lived in New York City for just about twenty years now but yesterday was my first trip to Times Square.

Sure, I've been to Times Square before. Plenty of times. But until yesterday Times Square had never ever been a destination for me. Rather, it had always been a place to avoid or, if unavoidable, a place to get in and out of as fast as possible on my way to somewhere else.

The New York City Department of Transportation's "Green Light for Midtown" plan brought me and a lot of other people to Times Square yesterday. And it kept us there. By simply removing motor vehicles from Broadway around Times and Herald Squares and inviting pedestrians in with seating, street performers, good people-watching -- and a naked cowboy -- New York City has created two great new public spaces for tourists, office workers and, yes, even jaded residents.

Streetfilms' Clarence Eckerson squares off with the Naked Cowboy. Icon Parking Systems, the Cowboy's sponsor, may be one of the few businesses unhappy with the new Times Square. The Cowboy is pleased.

The space is still raw and unfinished and it'll be interesting to see how it works during the weekday, but my two young sons and I had a blast yesterday along with thousands of others. Times Square is suddenly a place worth visiting and staying a while (especially if you're a parent desperate for an easy, low-cost weekend adventure for your kids).

The Naparstek boys experience Times Square for the first time. ("Can we get a big TV on the front of our house too?")

A large part of the design’s success stems from the altered relationship between the pedestrian and the structures that frame the square. Walking down the cramped, narrow sidewalks, a visitor could never get a feel for the vastness of the place. Now, standing in the middle of Broadway, you have the sense of being in a big public room, the towering billboards and digital screens pressing in on all sides.

This adds to the intimacy of the plaza itself, which, however undefined, can now function as a genuine social space: people can mill around, ogle one another and gaze up at the city around them without the fear of being caught under the wheels of a cab.

A more personal Times Square: Sunning in the middle of Broadway.

No doubt some aspects of the new Times Square will be found to be successful and others not working all that well. Still, DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and her team already deserve a ton of credit for their willingness to experiment and innovate. During the Iris Weinshall era at DOT, the idea of removing motor vehicles from Broadway was considered a huge long-shot, a Hail Mary pass, a kind of Livable Streets Holy Grail. It was difficult to imagine a version of the New York City Dept. of Transportation that would do it. These guys and their colleagues went ahead and did it...

NYC DOT's Seth Solomonow, Janette Sadik-Khan, Andy Wiley-Schwartz, Ryan Russo and Sean Quinn at Times Square on Monday morning.

Open Planning Project executive director Mark Gorton catches some rays.

The changes underway in New York City right now are pretty breathtaking and livable streets advocates deserve some credit too. Yesterday I couldn't help but think back to a January 2005 dinner at Mark Gorton's Upper West Side apartment. Former Bogotá Mayor Enrique Peñalosa was the guest of honor. Transportation Alternatives' new executive director Paul Steely White set up the event and Jody Gorton cooked up a delicious meal for Times Square Alliance president Tim Tompkins and about fifteen advocates and civic leaders.

The topic of discussion that evening was Broadway and it's potential to be a truly great, pedestrian-only public space. Peñalosa believed it was possible and he was inspirational in laying out the vision. Project for Public Space president Fred Kent had been thinking about the idea for 30 years and he provided the historic perspective. ITDP director Walter Hook had seen pedestrian streets work all over the world and he talked about international best practices. Tompkins had to live with the daily consequences of whatever happened at Times Square and he reminded everyone of the political realities. At the time it seemed a little far-fetched, this notion that Times Square might someday be a mostly car-free space. But here we are five years later and it's happening along with lots of other good stuff.

It was from meetings like this one that the New York City Streets Renaissance Campaign was born and ideas like physically separated bike lanes, car-free streets and a less automobile-dependent city were popularized and made politically possible in New York and beyond. If you've been a part of New York City's livable streets movement, today's a day to pat yourself on the back. As Danish urban designer Jan Gehl says: "How nice it is to wake up every morning and know that your city is a little better than it was the day before."

Flickr photo: andreil

Why is San Francisco -- considered by many around the world to be a “progressive” and “green" city with a Transit First policy -- still debating whether to extend meter hours and parking enforcement, even in the face of a crippling Muni budget deficit? Didn't we merge Muni with the Department of Parking and Traffic precisely so policy decisions about management of the streets would benefit the operations of transit, bicycling, and walking?

Some politicians, including the Mayor, apparently can't stop viewing these issues from behind the wheels of their SUVs. They can't see past the myth that raising parking fees will drive away business, thus perpetuating an erroneous stereotype that most urban shoppers drive. My colleague Matthew Roth wrote a great piece debunking that popular fallacy, noting that the majority of shoppers don't drive to shop in areas like North Beach and that in aggregate, transit riders, cyclists and walkers spend more than drivers. Other cities that have managed street space in accord with Shoupian market-rate pricing and curbside vacancy targets, and have invested additional revenues in pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure improvements, have seen a rise in business, not a drop.

San Francisco could and should do the same, but the MTA -- namely its chief, Nat Ford, and its Board, all appointees who rarely act independently -- has bowed to pressure from the Mayor, and Supervisors Carmen Chu and Bevan Dufty and taken Sunday and evening parking enforcement until 10 p.m. off the table as a much-needed revenue measure to fund Muni. Instead, the MTA is going to study extending it to 8 p.m. Supervisor John Avalos and four of his colleagues on the Board want it penciled back in the budget. Supervisor Sophie Maxwell, who was on the fence, is coming around and might join other members of the Board of Supervisors next week in rejecting the MTA budget if Ford doesn't follow the recommendations of a "Transit Justice Package," and make some changes. As Supervisor David Campos has noted, asking for a $15 million readjustment is not a radical proposal.

Mayor Gavin Newsom, responding to a question from Streetsblog last week, seemed stuck to his windshield perspective. When I asked him what he thinks about the fact that Muni riders are taking a much bigger hit than drivers in this year's budget, he responded: "Look at what we’ve done in the last few years. There have been dramatic increases in parking, fines and fees related to automobile use. So, you have to look at the totality of the last few years and I think assess it in proportion to what’s happened over the years."

Nonsense. How about the last decades? We've bent over backwards to accommodate cars and vehicle ownership while transit service has deteriorated calamitously.

We're supposed to be a Transit First city, but we're not taking advantage of the enormous revenue opportunities that options like metered enforcement represent, and we haven't raised meter rates since 2005. There are an estimated 320,000 on-street parking spaces, of which only 25,000 are metered, and those metered spaces are far from market-rate. If the average parking space is about 200 square feet, that amounts to roughly 60,000,000 square feet of real estate that we're giving away for free or next to nothing so people can store their private property in public. Of the 83,000 residential parking permits (RPP) doled out each year, we practically give them away for $74. How does that make any economic sense?  We need to change the vehicle code that prevents the MTA from raising RPP rates, which are only priced at cost recovery (the amount to administer the program), and we need to charge a fee that approximates private lots and garages.

While SFPark is a great start at better management of the curbside, it will apply to only 6,000 on-street spaces and is not meant primarily as a revenue generator.  The kind of change we need is sea change, a complete transition away from 60 years of externalizing the costs of car ownership.  This kind of political leadership isn't coming from the top and seems fleeting among the majority of supervisors.

Chu and Dufty won't give in on their reticence. Chu, who gets around mostly by car, said in an interview earlier this year that she believes San Francisco has a parking shortage. Dufty was also feeling heat from the Mayor, but said he was also taking into account concerns from some Castro merchants. But really, if Chu wants available parking, she should back stronger market-priced meter enforcement. If Dufty wants more business in the Castro, he should back extended meter enforcement.

From Donald Shoup's book, "The High Cost of Free Parking":

"Market-priced curb parking will reduce traffic congestion, air pollution, and energy consumption caused by cruising and also make curb parking more convenient. Eliminating the need for off-street parking requirements will, in turn, reduce development costs, make the land market more efficient, and improve urban design. Finally, the revenue from curb parking will either improve public services or reduce taxes that distort the economy, or both."

Other cities have already done what the MTA originally proposed last month. Los Angeles, Long Beach, Glendale, Pasadena, Montreal and Princeton, New Jersey are examples of cities that have implemented parking enforcement on Sundays. Pasadena extends its evening meters to 12 a.m. on weekends, and 10 p.m. during the week. But in San Francisco? Most metering ends at 6 p.m.

Source: SFMTA

If the MTA is going to truly be an independent agency, then Nat Ford needs to stand up to Gavin Newsom for once, putting aside his political loyalties. Don't study extending metering hours, just do it! Ford went along with these parking enforcement proposals in the first place. If he doesn't make these changes, we might have to go back to the voters and change the governing structure of the MTA to get the kind of Transit First city we all deserve.

Matthew Roth contributed to this piece.

This morning our friends over at Transportation for America are launching a new site called My Commute Sucks, designed to give people around the country a place to vent their frustration over the nation's overburdened and inefficient transportation systems. Commuters can share their tales of commuting woe, upload photos and videos, and also take action by contacting members of Congress to ask for a more sane and sustainable approach to transportation policy.

Already the stories are starting to pile up. Here's one from a New Jersey commuter named Betty:

The Garden State Parkway in New Jersey is a nightmare, just like Jersey's other main arteries.

I would love to bike to the train, but the town of Little Silver doesn't have safe cycling roads. Pedestrians are also at risk on some of the very busy, sidewalk-free and shoulderless roads. 

Finally, the trains are a mess with many discontinuous lines, requiring bus/taxi/light rail connections between stations. ugh 

Build bikeways and we will come! Fix the trains and we will ride!

Brian Fellows asks:

Why should we tolerate 1- and 2-hour commutes?  Think how much time we spend away from our families, burning fossil fuels, and getting stressed out -- every day, every month, every year.  The quantity is staggering.  Even now, just 5 months after the start of our metro area's light rail system (which people are flocking to!) it still takes me an hour to get to work.  Building more lane-miles simply induces more people to drive -- and there you have it: even more traffic.  I would like Congress to attach requirements to highway money that mandate recipients/states to design higher-density and mixed-use development along the highway corridors. 

Photo by pawpaw67 via Flickr.

When she wrote a column for the New York Sun last year about letting her nine-year-old ride the subway on his own, Lenore Skenazy was pilloried by many as an irresponsible mom. She stuck to her guns, though, and started a blog
dedicated to "sane parenting", advocating the idea that we are
over-sheltering our children from infinitesimal threats such as
stranger abduction. According to Skenazy, the kind of independence
represented by that subway trip is necessary and healthy for children
– and their parents as well.

Now she’s making the publicity rounds promoting her book, Free-Range Kids. In a recent interview with Salon,
she pointed out that  while many American parents are terrified to let
their children walk a few blocks or ride public transit, they think
nothing of driving them everywhere — even though car crashes are the leading cause of death for children in the US:

Skenazy:
If you don’t want to have your child in any kind of danger, you really
can’t do anything. You certainly couldn’t drive them in a car, because
that’s the No. 1 way kids die, as passengers in car accidents.

Salon: Rationally, why aren’t cars the bogeyman instead of stranger abduction?

Skenazy:
It would change our entire lifestyle if we couldn’t drive our kids in a
car, and it’s a danger that we just willingly accept without examining
it too much, because we know that the chances are very slim that we’re
going to have a fatal car accident. But the chances are 40 times
slimmer that your kid walking to school, whether or not she’s the only
one, is going to be hurt by a stranger.

Skenazy’s
answer gets to the heart of why it is so hard for people to accept the
many ways in which automobiles hurt everyone in society, perhaps
especially children — through crashes, through polluting the air, through promoting obesity.
We can imagine a life in which our children are not allowed to play
outdoors, walk to a friend’s house or spend any time unsupervised. But
we just can’t imagine life without cars.

Or can we?

Photo by Matthew Roth

Welcome to town Chase.  I'm super impressed you have been reading Streetsblog San Francisco and made an ad that reflects some of the knowledge you've acquired here. This is obviously a shout out to the car-free community. Might the admen understand the incredible cost savings of ditching the car for a bike, which can save you more than $9,000 every year in direct vehicle costs, not to mention the health savings from an active lifestyle and the peace of mind of contributing fewer greenhouse gases to a dangerously warming planet?

Or maybe this is an homage to the cyclist as hero, walking into the sunset after defeating the highway lobby in Washington and securing billions for transit in the re-authorization of the transportation act.

I'm not sure a big bank like that has the time in between taking billions of taxpayer bailouts and spending them on new airplanes to focus on the subtleties of the message they're sending to the more than one-hundred thousand San Franciscans who ride weekly.

What do you think, Streetsblog Nation?