Streetsblog San Francisco

The intersection of the Great Highway and Lincoln Way during yesterday's Sunday Streets. Flickr photo: geekstinkbreath

The ever-popular Great Highway and Golden Gate Park route for Sunday Streets drew thousands of San Franciscans of all ages yesterday with more activities than ever before. For next year, organizer Susan King said that the SFMTA is looking to hold a different, more frequent route.

“The route will use some of the quieter streets that are already off limits to cars or are less used,” said King. “That includes Overlook and Middle Drive [in the park] and negotiating a different pathway along Martin Luther King Drive to get out to the Great Highway.”

She explained that the changes would allow the number of Sunday Streets events on the route to increase from the current two per year up to as many as one per month. It would also be “less intense” for city staff who work the event and allow the Recreation and Parks Department to continue reserving revenue-generating picnic spaces, she said.

“This route is so popular and there’s so much opportunity presented with the Great Highway because it is frequently closed for sand anyway, and because there are no major cross streets once you get through that bottleneck at the Lincoln and Great Highway intersection,” said King. “So we’re looking at doing this route on a regular basis in the coming years.”

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SF Bike Coalition Policy Director Andy Thornley on the Great Highway. Photo: Bryan Goebel

Sunday Streets returns to Golden Gate Park and the Great Highway this Sunday, extending the park’s regular weekend street openings all the way to the beach and beyond. Thousands of San Franciscans of all ages are expected to pedal, play and relax along the car-free route running all the way from the Panhandle along John F. Kennedy Drive to the windmill and down the Great Highway along Ocean Beach with lots of fun activites along the way.

There will be free performances from some talented groups throughout the route, including the San Francisco Symphony and Circus Bella in the park as well as two shows from local musical child prodigies. Of course, there will also be lots of family-friendly activities to participate in like skate rentals and dancing, RollerSoccer demonstrations, a Climate Change Education Mobile Climate Science Lab, free bike rentals, and the SF Bike Coalition’s Freedom From Training Wheels program.

Get out and make the most of the beautiful weather forecast and a car-free Golden Gate Park!

Flickr photo: geekstinkbreath

Thousands of people took to the car-free streets of the Bayview, Dogpatch and Potrero Hill yesterday for a sunny Sunday Streets.  Did you go? Please share your stories in the comments section, and see more photos below the break. The next Sunday Streets is July 12th on the Great Highway.

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Flickr photo: sfbike

Many a cycling tot will get another chance to graduate from training wheels this Sunday on safe, car-free streets by the Bay. Sunday Streets returns to Bayview with a tweaked route this year to include the Lower Potero Hill and Dogpatch neighborhoods in the plethora of family-friendly activities.

The list of activities this month is so long, in fact, that when organizer Susan King submitted it the San Francisco Examiner for publication, “the copy editors came back to me and said, ‘cut this down by a third’.”

“This is certainly one of the most robust program lists we’ve had,” said King.

The route will run along Third Street from Mendell Plaza to 22nd Street, where it will zig zag west by Espirit Park to the Jackson Playground at 17th and Wisconsin Streets. It was modified to accommodate vehicle traffic needs for a Giants game at the ballpark, but it will also bring the street opening to new doorsteps.

“It gives us a chance to really explore those two neighborhoods that we haven’t done before,” said King. “In Dogpatch, we’re going through the emerging merchant corridor on 22nd Street and tying it to Espirit park, which is a beautiful little park hidden behind the freeway.”

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Flickr photo: geekstinkbreath

An estimated 25,000 people turned out for a beautiful albeit windy Sunday Streets in the Mission yesterday, tying the attendance record for the city’s “official block party.” For many a participant, experiencing car-free Valencia and 24th Streets didn’t just continue to beg the question “why not every week?” but rather, “why not all the time?”

“This is freedom. This is liberation,” Mayor Ed Lee told Streetsblog as he strolled down a car-free Valencia Street. “Everyone’s having a great time, and I’m out here seeing how people feel and maybe generating some ideas of how we can keep more of this going.”

Parents, kids, and the young at heart filled streets lined with music, dance, food, and neighbors relaxed in lawn chairs in places that would be dominated by cars on any other day. Merchants ventured out from their indoor retreats to mix with the outdoor street life as patrons filled their shops and restaurants.

Sunday Streets coordinator Susan King said some participants complained the liberated space was too little for the amount of people flocking to the event from all over the city.

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Flickr Photo: Matthew Roth

A sunny weather forecast promises an ideal Mother’s Day for the thousands of San Franciscans planning to enjoy Sunday Streets in the Mission District. An extended route this year will be filled with live music and activities, and some of the biggest crowds yet are expected to fill Valencia and 24th Streets, one of the event’s most popular locations.

“This route is packed from end to end,” said Sunday Streets coordinator Susan King.  “We actually ran out of programming room to accommodate all the people who wanted to come out and perform and play, which is a great problem to have.”

Families will have the chance to celebrate Mother’s Day dancing, riding bikes, skating, doing Yoga, painting, and watching performances on streets filled with live music at “nearly every other storefront,” said King.

Around 20,000 people are expected to relax and play along 15 car-free blocks of Valencia Street from 24th Street all the way to Duboce, a welcome extension this year to some of the corridor’s liveliest blocks.

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Enjoying car-free streets at Redding's first-ever ciclovía-style event, Shasta Living Streets. Photo: Jeff Worthington

Redding, California, with a population of 90,000, is probably best known for its sunshine, breathtaking landscapes and conservative politics. Located 200 miles north of Sacramento in Shasta County, the lush region surrounded by the Trinity and Cascade mountains offers an abundance of recreation, including a growing number of paved multi-use trails that draw large crowds of bicyclists and pedestrians.

The seven-year-old Sundial Bridge, a 700-foot long steel marvel on the Sacramento River designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, has become Redding’s living room.

“It is where everyone hangs out in town, especially when the weather is nice. In a normal community, whatever normal is, you would see that sort of energy in a downtown square, or park, or even a downtown third place, but it happens to be out at the Sundial Bridge,” said Paul Shigley, the senior editor of the California Planning and Development Report (CP&DR), who lives six miles west of Redding near Whiskeytown Lake.

Downtown Redding does not draw a similar convergence of people enjoying public space because like many California cities it was designed for the automobile, and is not a particularly welcoming place for pedestrians and bicyclists.  The city ranks 40th among 103 cities in California “for the number of pedestrian collisions by population,” according to a recent report [pdf]. Just last week, a 16-year-old boy was struck and killed by a driver while walking across a bridge that lacked a sidewalk.

“The town is set up to conduct motorists fast and to allow them to drive up to 50, 60 miles an hour right through the middle of town,” said Scott Mobley, a reporter for the Record Searchlight, the city’s daily newspaper.

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Photos: Bryan Goebel

An estimated 10,000 people celebrated Sunday Streets on the Great Highway and Golden Gate Park yesterday, enjoying six miles of car-free space from Stanyan Street to Sloat Boulevard. Sunny skies and calmer winds blessed the crowds of bicyclists, skaters and walkers, some of whom discovered Sunday Streets for the first time.

“Overall, it was a spectacular day,” said Sunday Streets coordinator Susan King. “It’s a great long route.”

One of the highlights included a few Guiness World Records attempts by a group of skaters led by the one and only “Godfather of Skate” David Miles. The Richmond District Blog has a recap and video.

Sunday Streets returns May 8th for a day of fun along the popular Mission District route on Valencia and 24th Streets. More info at Sunday Streets, and more photos below the break.

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Different vehicles shape a different streetscape in Peru.

Our daily urban lives shape our imaginations in so many ways. Few things box us in like our everyday transit options, and the patterns of traffic that shape our sense of public space. These patterns themselves are historical of course. A quick look back at the famous Market Street film shot a few days before the 1906 earthquake shows how chaotic and unpredictable the flow of traffic was when San Francisco’s main artery hadn’t yet been paved and standardized. Similarly, leaving the U.S. and visiting other countries provides a fantastic opportunity to experience other assumptions and possibilities for urban space, and surprisingly perhaps, a different range of vehicles.

In Peru for a couple of weeks I first had to adjust to a major cultural difference–unlike California, pedestrians don’t have any legal rights, let alone cultural preference. When you start to cross the street at a corner in a Peruvian city, you better be ready to run. Because the cars are not going to wait for you, in fact they tend to speed up when they see someone trying to use the road space ahead of them. I noticed the same thing on highways too, a consistent refusal to yield to entering traffic, a universal assumption of individual ownership of the right of way. Here’s a video below the break we shot standing on a traffic island in Peru’s second largest city while waiting for the traffic to clear so we could cross the street.

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Photo: geekstinkbreath

Despite the prevailing threat of rain, the clouds scattered for yesterday’s first Sunday Streets of 2011 from Fisherman’s Wharf to China Basin, allowing intermittent sunshine to grace the San Francisco waterfront. The event attracted thousands of people, including Mayor Ed Lee, who were able to tuck away their umbrellas and enjoy the car-free streets.

The new 11am-4pm schedule worked very well for the day, allowing people to play on the Embarcadero even later into the afternoon, said Sunday Streets coordinator Susan King of the non-profit Livable City, which organizes the healthy, community-oriented events.

“Thank goodness for the extra hour because as the day wore on it became clearer, literally and figuratively, that it was going to be a nice afternoon and it was,” said King. “There was enough sunshine that I was sunburned.”

King said the attendance was lighter than usual but she felt vindicated by the Sunday Streets rain policy, which calls for volunteers and organizers to set up regardless of the wet stuff, and decide by noon whether to keep it going. Yesterday the skies dropped the last bit of rain during the noon hour, and it was dry for the rest of the day.

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