According to the 2011 Urban Mobility Report, released today by the Texas Transportation Institute, this delay cost the average D.C. driver $1,495 once you factor in lost productivity and increased trucking times. In Chicago, it’s $1,568. L.A., $1,334.

Every year, TTI puts out their Urban Mobility Report, and every year we criticize it for its autocentrism. After all, its sole measure is how fast a vehicle can speed down a given mile of roadway. Maybe your city is dense and friendly to pedestrians and bikes, so that it’s easy to glide past the automobile gridlock on your short commute to work. Or maybe transit provides an excellent and affordable alternative to traffic jams. None of that matters to TTI. If someone, somewhere, is sitting in traffic, that’s all that matters. All other measures and modes of urban mobility are ignored.

TTI doesn’t bother to figure out how much time is saved if one avoids that congestion by taking transit, but they do examine how much time transit riders save drivers by taking vehicles off the road.

How public transportation reduces delays for drivers, 2010. Source: 2011 Urban Mobility Report, via APTA.

If there were no transit, the country’s drivers would be facing an additional 796 million hours of traffic delay. (Take that, drivers who grumble when their gas tax “user fee” funds mass transit!)

“Operational treatments” like ramp metering, traffic light timing, and removing crashed vehicles from the road have become much more effective in the last 20 years but still don’t come close to the savings provided by transit, saving about 40 percent as much as transit in terms of hours of delays, fuel, and costs.

Still, in TTI’s examination of congestion relief strategies, public transportation is barely alluded to and never mentioned outright, while operational treatments get significant attention. There is a shout-out to smart growth, or “denser developments with a mix of jobs, shops and homes, so that more people can walk, bike or take transit to more, and closer, destinations.” They also suggest telework and, of course, adding capacity.

TTI warns that congestion is only as bad as it is because the economy is still sluggish. We can expect a rapid worsening of the situation when the economy rebounds – 3 more hours of delay by 2015 and 7 hours by 2020, per commuter, with costs rising from $101 billion to $133 billion, more than $900 for every commuter, and enough wasted fuel to fill more than 275,000 gasoline tanker trucks.

I guess it’s time to really get to work on expanding and improving transit service then; right, TTI?

Market and Kearny and 3rd Streets, 1909. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

“Whose Streets? OUR Streets!” yell rowdy demonstrators when they surge off the sidewalk and into thoroughfares. True enough, the streets are our public commons, what’s left of it (along with libraries and our diminishing public schools), but most of the time these public avenues are dedicated to the movement of vehicles, mostly privately owned autos. Other uses are frowned upon, discouraged by laws and regulations and what has become our “customary expectations.” Ask any driver who is impeded by anything other than a “normal” traffic jam and they’ll be quick to denounce the inappropriate use or blockage of the street.

Bicyclists have been working to make space on the streets of San Francisco for bicycling, and to do that they’ve been trying to reshape public expectations about how streets are used. Predictably there’s been a pushback from motorists and their allies, who imagine that the norms of mid-20th century American life can be extended indefinitely into the future. But cyclists and their natural allies, pedestrians, can take heart from a lost history that has been illuminated by Peter D. Norton in his recent book Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. He skillfully excavates the shift that was engineered in public opinion during the 1920s by the organized forces of what called itself “Motordom.” Their efforts turned pedestrians into scofflaws known as “jaywalkers,” shifted the burden of public safety from speeding motorists to their victims, and reorganized American urban design around providing more roads and more space for private cars.

Typical street scene in 1909, long before private cars had become a major problem. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

For decades, over 40,000 people have died each year in car crashes on the streets of the United States. This daily carnage is utterly normalized to the point that few of us think about it at all, and if we do, it’s like the weather, just a regular part of our environment. But it wasn’t always this way. Back when the private automobile was first beginning to appear on public streets a large majority of the population, including politicians, police, and business leaders, agreed that cars were interlopers and ought to be regulated and subordinated to pedestrians and streetcars.

It’s almost impossible to imagine the speed with which conditions on urban streets changed at the dawn of the motorized era. Here’s a quote from the California Automobile Association’s Motorland magazine in August 1927 describing the rapid growth in car ownership:

In 1895 there were four cars registered, in 1905 there were 77,400 in use, in 1915 the total had risen to 2,309,000, and in 1925 there were 17,512,000 passenger automobiles on the highways, and the total is now in excess of 20,000,000.

Motorland magazine cover, July 1927

With over two million cars clogging city streets in 1915, and death and injury tolls rising, cities took various measures to address the problem (quoting from “Fighting Traffic”):

From 1915 (and especially after 1920), cities tried marking crosswalks with painted lines, but most pedestrians ignored them. A Kansas City safety expert reported that when police tried to keep them out of the roadway, “pedestrians, many of them women” would “demand that police stand aside.” In one case, he reported, “women used their parasols on the policemen.” Police relaxed enforcement.

Pedestrians on Market Street, 1937. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

The common usage of the streets by all was considered sacrosanct and attempts by motordom and/or police to regulate people’s use of the streets was widely resisted. Plenty of police didn’t agree that pedestrian behavior should be criminalized on behalf of motoring:

New York police magistrate Bruce Cobb in 1919 defended the “legal right to the highway” of the “foot passenger,” arguing that “if pedestrians were at their peril confined to street corners or certain designated crossings, it might tend to give selfish drivers too great a sense of proprietorship in the highway.” He assigned the responsibility for the safety of the pedestrian—even one who “darts obliquely across a crowded thorofare”—to drivers… By 1916 “jaywalker” was a feature of “police parlance.” Police use modified the word’s meaning and sparked controversy. “Jaywalker” carried the sting of ridicule, and many objected to branding independent-minded pedestrians with the term… The New York Times objected, calling the word “highly opprobrious” and “a truly shocking name.”

Typical of auto industry-sponsored advertising shifting the burden for road safety from motorists to the children who had customarily been able to play in the streets safely. (Motorland magazine)

Anti-jaywalking campaigns came to San Francisco too.

In a 1920 safety campaign, San Francisco pedestrians who thought they were minding their own business found themselves pulled into mocked-up outdoor courtrooms. In front of crowds of onlookers they were lectured on the perils of jaywalking.

In 1941 jaywalking became a topic of interest in local papers, with several images captured of women jaywalking. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

Clearly 20 years of anti-jaywalking campaigns in San Francisco and the country as a whole had not convinced people to abandon their customary ways of crossing public streets. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

In 1942 this shot at 5th and Market shows the women walking against the signal. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

As the 1920s continued, more and more cars were being sold, and the streets were both crowded and contested. Streetcar operators blamed cars for clogging thoroughfares and slowing down their lines, causing late runs and generally inconveniencing passengers. Motorists parked everywhere, jamming curbsides two-deep, when they weren’t weaving through chaotic urban streets. Attempts to regulate and standardize traffic patterns began during this era, with lanes, crosswalks, traffic signals, and parking regulations slowly emerging as “solutions” to the problems created by tens of thousands of private cars filling the streets.

February 3, 1927, Van Ness and Fell Streets, with helpful labels to show what motorists are doing wrong. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

More 1927 instructional photography. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

When sales slumped in late 1923 and into 1924, analysts speculated that the market for cars was saturated (at about 7 Americans per car at the time). The car industry consisted of dozens of companies, who began to fail or merge during this first contraction in sales. The industry reorganized its public relations and launched concerted efforts to redefine “saturation”:

There was no “buying-power saturation,” [motordom] said. The real bridle on the demand for automobiles was not the consumer’s wallet, but street capacity. Traffic congestion deterred the would-be urban car buyer, and congestion was saturation of streets.

By the late 1920s, a young graduate student named Miller McClintock had become the nation’s pre-eminent traffic researcher thanks to his 1925 thesis “Street Traffic Control.” His career is a window into the process of private corruption of public interests that riddles American history up to the present.

In his 1925 graduate thesis Street Traffic Control, the old McClintock had maintained that widening streets would merely attract more vehicles to them, leaving traffic as congested as before. The automobile, he wrote, was a waster of space compared to the streetcar, noting that “the greater economy of the latter is marked.” “It seems desirable,” McClintock wrote, “to give trolley cars the right of way under general conditions, and to place restrictions on motor vehicles in their relations with street cars.” He described the automobile as a “menace to human life” and “the greatest public destroyer of human life.”

Two years later all had changed. McClintock wrote of “the inevitable necessity to provide more room” in the streets. He called for “new streets” and “wider streets.”… In 1925 McClintock virtually ruled out elevated streets as expensive and impractical; two years later he urged that they be considered.

What had happened in the two years between the diametrically opposed advice given by McClintock? He had been hired by Studebaker’s Vice President to head up the new “Albert Russel Erskine Bureau for Street Traffic Research,” which was first placed in Los Angeles where McClintock was teaching at UC, but a year later moved by Studebaker to Harvard University, where the car company continued to fund the ostensibly “independent” institute. As the years went by McClintock became one of the foremost authorities on traffic planning, though his organization dropped the “Albert Russel Erskine” from its name when the chairman of Studebaker Motors committed suicide in 1933!

McClintock came to San Francisco early in his career. In the August 1927 Motorland magazine, he penned an article summarizing his research “Curing the Ills of San Francisco Traffic”: “… it is recognized that an ultimate requirement for the solution of street and highway congestion is to be found in the creation of more ample street area.” And sure enough, it was in this exact period that San Francisco embarked on a series of street widenings throughout the city, including for example, Capp Street and Army Street in the Mission District. Interestingly, McClintock’s traffic study shows the predominant car-free life of San Franciscans at the time:

On a typical business day studied by the traffic survey committee, 1,073,963 persons entered and left [the central business] district during a fourteen-hour period from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. Vehicles of all types, including streetcars, carried 744,667 people in and out of the district, In addition, 329,296 pedestrians entered and left the district during the same period… In no other city is there such a large pedestrian movement into the central district, nor such a large outrush of people during the noon hour. Both of these conditions may be attributed to the large capacity of apartment houses immediately adjacent to the district…

Incredibly, streetcars were used by 70 percent of the people depending on some kind of transportation to get downtown, while only a quarter used passenger cars, but the latter made up 61 percent of vehicular traffic as compared to 11 percent for the streetcars! What has been poorly understood in the triumphant narrative of the private automobile is how cars benefited from enormous public expenditures, even when they were being used by a relatively small minority of the population. New infrastructure to accommodate motorists far outstripped any public investment in public streetcar service, let alone any subsidies for the privately owned lines. Meanwhile, electric streetcar companies were slowly going bankrupt, with their fares publicly restricted and the public streets on which they operated slowly being taken over by private vehicles.

Traditional use of the streets by pedestrians was being criminalized by new traffic codes. McClintock put forth a new Uniform Traffic Ordinance, adopted by San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, which was intended to “legislate jaywalkers off the streets,” crowed a Motorland magazine editorial. In 1915, Ford already had a factory at 21st and Harrison in the Mission making Model-T’s, and by the mid-1920s, the new car business was fully ensconced along Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco:

Chevrolet dealer at Van Ness and Sacramento, 1933. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

Rambler dealer, Van Ness Avenue, August 1964. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

Interior of Don Lee Cadillac showroom (now AMC Theaters). (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

Don Lee Cadillac dealership, Van Ness and O'Farrell, 1928. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

Miller McClintock continued his work on behalf of the auto industry from his bought-and-paid-for perch at Harvard University.

Miller McClintock [became] the impresario of a new kind of highway road show. In the spring of 1937, the Shell Oil Company combined McClintock’s traffic expertise with the talents of the stage designer Normal Bel Geddes to build a scale model of “the automobile city of tomorrow.”… Others interested in the rebuilding of cities for the motor age adopted Shell’s technique. At the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition, United States Steel displayed its vision of San Francisco in 1999, with wider streets, cloverleaf intersections, and an elevated highway.

Overshadowed by the far more successful World’s Fair in New York City, and in particular by the tone-setting “World of Tomorrow” exhibit there built by General Motors, the 1939 US Steel vision of San Francisco in 1999 is worth peeking at:

"San Francisco in 1999" Golden Gate International Exposition, 1939. US Steel financed this diorama, meant to reinvent San Francisco as a Corbusian radial city with a new rationalized and centralized port combining all piers in a single monumental jetty extending from 16th Street. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

This close-up from the US Steel 1939 vision of San Francisco in 1999 shows the intersection of 7th and Howard streets with elevated roadways passing under each tower. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

Here’s a description of the exhibit by Richard Reinhart in his book on the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition “Treasure Island: San Francisco’s Exposition Years”

Artist Donald McLoughlin had prepared a dioramic view of San Francisco in 1999 for the US Steel exhibit in the Hall of Mines, Metals and Machinery. This prognostic nightmare showed the city stripped of every vestige of 1939 except Coit Tower, the bridges and Chinatown. All maritime activity had disappeared from the Embarcadero. Shipping was concentrated at a super-pier at the foot of 16th Street.

North of Market Street every block contained a single, identical high-rise apartment house. South of Market, sixty-story office towers of steel and glass alternated with block-square plazas in a vast checkerboard pattern. Elevated freeways ran through the geometric landscape.

McLoughlin correctly anticipated the removal of maritime activity from San Francisco’s waterfront, though his massive modern pier is spread along the Oakland bay shore rather than on a prominent pier jutting out from 16th Street. Visions like this, and the better known version in New York, informed the post-WWII population as it fled cities for the suburbs. Those who remained though, had a different idea of what our cities would become, and thanks to their stopping the highway builders in their tracks in the late 1950s and early 1960s, San Francisco was not crushed in this way.

Interesting to recall that while 30,000 citizens were mobilized to stop freeway building in San Francisco (the very same elevated, pedestrian-free streets McClintock had come to endorse as an industry flack) thousands more, mostly African American and white youth, staged a vigorous civil rights campaign along auto row, demanding that blacks be given equal treatment in hiring by auto dealers, especially Don Lee’s Cadillac dealership.

Crowd cheering civil rights employment settlement with auto dealers, 1964. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

Contrary to the fervent wishes of today’s motorists, streets have not always been the domain of cars. Clever marketing prior to the Depression led to radical redesign of both the physical streets and our assumptions about how public streets should be used. As we ride to and from work on our bicycles these days, or get together in Critical Mass or Bike Party social rides, we are participating in a new push to redefine how streets are used, and most importantly, how we think about public space. While we haven’t yet found a new consensus, the rising tide of bicycling, parklets, Sunday Streets, car-free zones, etc., all amply demonstrate that the private car’s days are in decline. Add a dollop of global warming and a couple of scoops of cheap fossil fuel scarcity, and the question of Whose Streets is once again a key issue of social contestation. Perhaps at least we can stop blindly accepting death and mayhem as an inevitable and natural consequence of our social transportation choices!

Cartoon by Jean-Francois Batellier, a French artist who sells his art and books on the streets of Paris.

The Chamber of Commerce report states that American transportation performance has been through the roof lately, a finding that should lead the Chamber to question some of its assumptions. Source: U.S. Chamber TPI 2011 Update

The Chamber of Commerce released its annual Transportation Performance Index (TPI) last week [PDF], and you can tell it’s due for a total overhaul, because according to the Index, recession-battered 2009 was a banner year for transportation performance.

Using 2009 data, the Chamber, a powerful lobbying group that represents millions of American businesses, determined that the performance of the nation’s transportation infrastructure is improving. However, even the Chamber dismisses the significance of its own results, saying the “improvement” is illusory — due to the decline in driving, and thus congestion, during the recession. But there’s another good reason to dismiss the results: The Chamber is measuring the wrong things.

The Chamber uses the TPI “to track the performance of transportation infrastructure over time… and demonstrate the connection between infrastructure performance, rather than spending, and the economy.” It claims to be the first organization to ever measure the correlation between the quality of transportation systems and economic growth.

But the Chamber’s metrics produce some truly baffling results. During the economic torpor of 2009, the index experienced its greatest improvement in a single year since 1990. Despite the nonsensical figures, the Chamber uses the report release as an opportunity to call for renewed infrastructure investment.

“By all accounts, the nation’s transportation networks continue to languish.” said Janet Kavinoky, head lobbyist for the Chamber’s infrastructure program. “The improvement of the TPI is not sustainable and does not represent a long-term trend… It is due to the economic downturn, rather than strategic policy and regulatory reforms or new investment.”

That’s all true, but that’s not the only reason to question the results of the TPI.

Of the 21 indicators the Chamber uses in its complex formulas, none deal with emissions. Of all of the ways the Chamber chooses to evaluate the U.S. transportation system, none investigates the effect on air and water quality. They certainly don’t take public health into account, ignoring the effect of our transportation choices on our waistlines or our lungs. In fact, the Chamber completely glosses over non-motorized transportation. Pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure doesn’t count as one of the “fixed facilities” the Chamber examines.

Here’s all you need to know to be convinced that the Chamber’s measurements of transportation performance don’t add up: Though it didn’t name the top states for transportation performance this year (that listing only comes out every other year), these were the top winners last year:

Source: U.S. Chamber of Commerce TPI 2010

Maybe that’s what you get when you evaluate performance on congestion based on “route-miles per 10,000 population” — the higher the better. That’s right. The Chamber judges congestion using a simple formula: asphalt divided by people.

The Dakotas don’t have a congestion problem because they have about 10 residents per square mile. If you want to see how a state deals with congestion, check out New Jersey (1,196 inhabitants per square mile). Trying to solve their congestion problem by building more “route-miles per 10,000 population” would be an exercise in futility.

Notably, the Chamber uses the Texas Transportation Institute’s Urban Mobility Report as its gold standard for measuring congestion, saying that methodological revisions in the TTI are a “game changer.” Report authors like that the TTI now measures off-peak travel times and includes San Juan, among other changes.

But those changes don’t address the major defects with the Urban Mobility Report. Real, significant changes would have included a move away from highway traffic speeds as the main measure of urban mobility. CEOs for Cities has produced a detailed review of the report [PDF] that should give the Chamber pause when using it as a primary data source. Among their findings: The UMR rewards longer commute times as long as average driving speeds stay high, and it fails to recognize regions that have actually succeeded in making commutes shorter.

The Chamber’s performance index does take into consideration the availability of transit and rail, as well as safety indicators on all modes. But even the measurements of rail and transit availability only measure route-miles and capacity — not frequency, reliability, ridership, or whether the route miles go to the right places, adequately connecting people with jobs and destinations.

So what are we left with? A transportation ranking that tells us that the wide-open states of the American West have wide-open highways, and that’s good for business. And as soon as those highways fill up with enough vehicles to justify their existence, better build more.

Clearly, as a representative of business interests, the Chamber believes it is looking out for the best thing for economic growth. But the assumptions it’s using are out-of-date. Building a transportation system that produces economic growth in the 21st century does not entail creating the conditions for vehicle miles traveled to rise continually. A recent report from the Center for Clean Air Policy documented how GDP is increasingly disconnected from VMT. Even the Chamber has recognized this trend, stating that “the importance of travel as a component of the U.S. economy has been declining since the early 1990s.”

For next year’s Transportation Performance Index, instead of more metrics praising empty highways, how about a smart growth indicator?

There is a strange world where up is down, in is out, right is wrong, and black is white. I’m not just talking about the San Francisco Planning Department’s indefensible trip-generation analysis for new parking spaces.

No, I mean the world of old-school traffic engineers, where improving safety on the streets means reducing conflicts with cars (you know, like pesky pedestrians), widening lanes and softening turning radii to allow traffic to move more freely. This is the world of Caltrans, for one, and it’s antithetical to making your city more livable.

Though the state has started to reform its highway and street design guidelines, city planners throughout the Bay Area can attest to the difficulty of adding bus bulbs, traffic calming or bicycle infrastructure in the face of engineers with their traffic bibles telling them there is no such thing as an acceptable green bike lane.

This excellent XtraNormal cartoon, which was produced by Strong Towns, lays out the problem, complete with jargon that will make your head spin.

If you have eight minutes and a wonky sense of humor/indignation, I recommend you watch. If eight minutes seems like a long time, imagine going up against these guys for a decade to reverse the violent upheaval perpetrated on your neighborhood decades prior in the name of progress.

Gives me chills.

Traffic on Octavia Blvd at Market Street. Image: SFCTA

The Central Freeway sections damaged by the Loma Prieta Earthquake in 1989 have been replaced by such a distinctive Octavia Boulevard, for many San Franciscans the double-decked behemoth that used to dominate the neighborhood has become a distant memory. Most of the traffic the freeway carried, however, has not disappeared and now city planners are tracking its displacement on city streets and devising scenarios for reducing it to make surrounding neighborhoods more hospitable to transit, pedestrians and cyclists.

The San Francisco County Transportation Authority (SFCTA) this week released baseline traffic information as part of the ongoing Central Freeway and Octavia Circulation Study and proposed solutions for improving the situation locally and regionally [pdf].

The most obvious finding in the study is that traffic levels, while somewhat reduced on Octavia Boulevard itself since the freeway came down, nonetheless continue to choke the study neighborhoods and affect numerous areas further afield.

The Central Freeway Circulation study area is roughly from Noe Street and 18th Street to the southwest, up to Turk Street and Franklin Street to the northeast, with some of the numbered streets in SOMA to the east and as far as Scott Street to the west. The neighborhoods include Hayes Valley, SOMA, The Mission, Duboce Triangle, Civic Center and the Upper Market/Castro, though it also attempts to measure impacts in neighborhoods as far south as Glen Park and the Mission, which have been dealing with commuter traffic that started using detour routes like San Jose Avenue and Guerrero Street to access downtown after the earthquake.

Despite the ubiquity of transit lines serving the Market Street/Octavia and Hayes Valley neighborhoods, most people traveling to and through the area use a car. While slightly below the city average for auto trips (59 percent), 50 percent of the study area’s 340,000 daily trips are by car, 21 percent by transit, and 29 percent by foot or bicycle.

“This study is like a microcosm of the city’s challenges,” said Tilly Chang, SFCTA Deputy Director for Planning. “If you look at mode share, it’s under-performing even the citywide average in terms of auto modes and non-auto modes.”

Projected housing growth in San Francisco over the next 25 years. Image: SF Planning Department

There are two reasons transit is not more attractive, according to Chang: the traffic, and the crowding on buses and trains, especially as they reach the study area. Viewed in the context of projected job and housing growth through 2035, the area will only get more crowded, both with regional and local trips.

At its first public workshop on the study this Monday, SFCTA staff highlighted how regional traffic patterns affect the local neighborhood, given all the vehicular traffic that uses Fell and Oak Streets to access the western neighborhoods and Franklin and Gough Streets to access the northern neighborhoods, just as it did when the freeways were present.

Though traffic volumes on Octavia Boulevard itself are between 50 to 60 percent of traffic volumes on the old freeway, attendees at the meeting argued much of the traffic dividend had been pushed to smaller streets, where rush hour backups can be severe and cause delays to Muni and create conflicts with pedestrians and cyclists.

After the presentation and initial discussion, workshop attendees broke into working groups and discussed possible improvements in broad categories, including:

• Circulation improvements
• Transit network improvements
• Pedestrian and bicycle projects
• Intersection and “hot-spot” projects
• Policy and programmatic strategies

Image: SFCTA

Within these broader areas, participants were asked to discuss a long list of projects [pdf], some of them already planned and programmed by city agencies, others more distant opportunities should funding and political support be secured.

Based on feedback from public workshops and presentations, discussions with partner city agencies, and a design charrette the SFCTA expects to hold this winter, the agency will develop three priority projects to design and slot into the grant funding pipeline in 2011.

Jason Henderson, a professor of geography at San Francisco State University and a representative of the Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association (HVNA), thought the presentation and the study were on the right track, but he critiqued the SFCTA for not collecting more data during the morning rush hours and on weekends, which he said were dominated by traffic nearly as much as the evening peak period.

“If they would just take the rest of the freeway down, we wouldn’t have this problem,” said Henderson, smiling.

Chang said they weren’t explicitly analyzing the further removal of the freeway to Highway 101 in the scope of this study, but that it would be considered in the context of the 30-year San Francisco Transportation Plan. “We will have to look at that in the context of a larger citywide plan,” she said.

Over the next several months, the SFCTA will hold several more presentations for interested community groups, including one during the HVNA General Meeting on October 28th.

What the view of CityPlace would look like from Mason Street. Image: Market Street Holdings LLC

At the heart of the San Francisco Planning Department’s 328-page Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) for CityPlace, sustainable transportation advocates have pinpointed one glaring flaw. In assessing the impacts of new off-street retail parking, the environmental analysis [pdf] concludes that building a 167-space garage will have the same effect on traffic as building no garage at all.

“This environmental analysis has really pitted this project against pedestrian safety and the livability of this neighborhood,” said Tom Radulovich, the executive director of Livable City.

CityPlace is a 250,000 square foot retail project planned for Market Street that the Mayor has trumpeted as essential for the area, “a key pillar in the continuing revitalization of Mid-Market that will bring hundreds of jobs and new revenues to boost our City’s economy and thousands of new pedestrians and shoppers to activate one of the most blighted blocks of Market Street.”

Radulovich along with attorney Arthur Levy and Walk SF had filed an appeal of the Planning Commission’s certification of the DEIR, arguing that it failed to adequately address and mitigate the dangers to pedestrians and bicyclists. Levy was also concerned the St. Francis Theater, designed by architect John Galen Howard, will be demolished and that the glass structure won’t fit in with the visual and historic character of Market Street.

Supporting the appeal seemed politically impossible for the Board of Supervisors. Instead, Supervisor Chris Daly, who represents the area, with help from Judson True, an aide to Supervisor David Chiu, brokered a deal [pdf] before the supervisors meeting Tuesday.  Market Street Holdings LLC (Urban Realty), the project’s sponsor, agreed to charge a 20 cent per vehicle exit fee at the CityPlace garage that would eventually add up to $1.8 million for “bicycle and/or pedestrian and/or transit improvements.” That pleased the supervisors and the DEIR was certified on a 9-0 vote, giving the final clearance.

The rejection of the appeal followed a public hearing in which the advocates laid out their case, and the project’s sponsors were allowed a rebuttal.

"We need to be a city that does everything it can to ensure the livability of neighborhoods and to ensure pedestrian and bicycle safety ," said Tom Radulovich of Livable City.

“What we are talking about today are really issues of life and death. The fact that this project and this EIR are not mitigating the impacts that they’ll have on this community,” Radulovich told the supervisors.

The neighborhood, he argued, which houses many low-income residents, seniors and children, is dangerous enough and doesn’t need any more auto traffic spilling into the six affected intersections. Sixth Street, immediately adjacent to the project, is one of the city’s worst streets for pedestrian fatalities and injuries.

“In helping Market Street we can’t make 6th Street even worse,” Manish Champsee, the president of Walk San Francisco, testified. “Three of the top five intersections for pedestrian safety are on 6th Street.”

The DEIR analysis, instead of looking at automobiles as the real danger to pedestrians, assessed the impacts to pedestrians based on increased foot traffic and conflicts with other pedestrians.

Radulovich said the analysis flew in the face of the Planning Department’s own parking code, Section 150 [pdf], and the city’s General Plan, “which states that if you have a short-term parking need in the downtown, don’t add more parking, convert long-term parking to short-term parking because adding more parking creates more automobile trips.”

“We do not want to stop the project. We want to improve environmental analysis in this city.” –Andy Thornley, SFBC

“The notion that providing 200 more parking spaces will not create more [automobile] trips is ludicrous, frankly,” said Andy Thornley, the program manager of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, whose offices along with Livable City and Walk SF have been been located in the Mid-Market area for many years.  “We do not want to stop the project. We want to improve environmental analysis in this city.”

Thornley said as San Francisco moves away from using intersection Level of Service (LOS) to analyze transportation impacts and toward evaluating automobile trip generation (ATG) “it’s very troubling to see an environmental document come forward that makes such a flimsy estimate of auto trip generation.”

The advocates argue that allowing CityPlace and other projects excessive parking sets a bad precedent and runs afoul of a Transit First policy and neighborhood plans that are supposed to guide transportation and land use decisions.

CityPlace’s sponsor argues that despite the 4,500 spaces in more than a dozen nearby city-owned garages, parking in the building is needed for the project to succeed because of the type of value-based “household goods, electronics and sports equipment” stores they are seeking. Drivers, they argue, need to transport large purchases. According to the San Francisco Business Times, the stores being sought include TJ Maxx, JCPenney, Ross, Dick’s Sporting Goods and Big 5 Sporting Goods.

Jim Abrams, who presented the CityPlace transportation plan to the Planning Commission, argued the parking in the building would be much less than similar retail spaces in dense, urban areas such as Brooklyn and Queens, and would be setting an example by providing “the lowest amount of parking of any comparable center in the country.”

By contrast, though, some nearby stores including Macy’s, Bloomingdales, Barneys and Nieman Marcus offer no parking in the building for their driving customers. The San Francisco Examiner recently reported that Target wanted to move into the Metreon where there is no on-site parking.

The project rendering of Stevenson Street, where drivers will enter and exit the parking garage. Image: Market Street Holdings LLC

“I think the fundamental decision to drive or not is whether you have a prospect of finding parking,” said Bill Wycko, the head of Major Environmental Analysis for the San Francisco Planning Department.

Wycko, responding to a question from Supervisor Daly, said his office is not able to effectively analyze ATG for shopping trips because there has been no research and surveys conducted on retail auto trips, which would offer some evidence for how retail parking affects driver behavior. Instead, the analysis is based on commuter surveys.

“Intuitive or not, the relationship between supply in parking and how people travel, other than the obvious situation where you don’t have a car, you don’t drive, is not as obvious as you would think and for shopping trips the substantial evidence, the real evidence, is largely non-existent,” said Wycko. “We can all have our hunches and our intuition but that’s kind of not what we use in [California Environmental Quality Act analysis].”

Wycko did acknowledge the city is engaged in a monumental process to overhaul LOS and replace it with ATG, which will presumably require planners to analyze trip generation associated with parking spaces.

“There is an effort to take a different approach and as part of that approach one of the things we’ve been urging is that there does need to be follow-up monitoring because one reason there isn’t data, especially local data, is that there hasn’t been this sort of, okay, if you do this, what’s the behavior pattern? If you do that, what’s the behavior pattern?”

In an interview with Streetsblog, John Rahaim, the Planning Department Director, said he supports eventually transitioning to ATG but feels the issues raised by transit advocates in the appeal probably don’t belong in the CEQA process.

“Whether we should be looking at the safety issues, and the pedestrian and vehicular conflicts is an important question. I don’t think it’s a CEQA issue, however. I would love to figure out a way to get at those issues outside of the CEQA process, which is a cumbersome process, frankly.”

Both Livable City and Levy are considering a lawsuit.

“I think that EIR is a very poor document. I think it’s legally defective. I feel that the Board of Supervisors was under a lot of political pressure to move this project along. That part of Market Street has been neglected and been a problem for a long time,” said Levy, who added that he would like to see the project move forward, but not it until it fully addresses the issues raised in the appeal.

The project is now scheduled to break ground in 2011 and despite the surcharge that will be directed toward bicycle, pedestrian and transit improvements advocates are skeptical they’ll happen quickly.

Radulovich said he was disappointed the letter outlining the compromise “wasn’t water tight” and didn’t include language guaranteeing the money and the improvements would come immediately. True later tried to assure him that the money paid to the SFMTA would secure improvements sooner rather than later.

“We feel strongly that the MTA is well positioned to use the money for this parking surcharge to in some way finance up front improvements for bicyclists, pedestrians and transit riders. So we feel confident that while it’s untested, the parking surcharge is a mechanism that will not just give money over time but provide for some up front money and that’s really up to the MTA to figure out the best way to do that,” said True.

SFMTA spokesperson Paul Rose said CityPlace had already separately paid $200,000 to the agency, $50,000 of which will be used for a study to see what improvements are needed, and the rest will be put toward implementation.

“The full scope will of course need to be developed based on the initial study,” said Rose.

Radulovich said transit advocates were an influential force in getting the sponsor to commit the money, and hoped that mid-block crosswalks — where a majority of pedestrian injuries and fatalities occur in the area — bulbouts and protected bike lanes would be included.

The SFMTA recently unveiled four long-term options to fix Masonic, but in light of Nils Linke's death Friday night, and with the bike injunction finally lifted, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, Michael Helquist of BIKE NOPA and other advocates are urging the agency to take action sooner rather than later.

"We've been really happy and encouraged to see the long-range vision the MTA is putting forward in terms of the four options that have been presented at the community meetings. We think this is really going in the right direction but with the recent tragedy this past weekend we feel like it really underscores the need to make some immediate improvements," said Renée Rivera, the SFBC's acting executive director.

She would like to see buffered bike lanes installed immediately, on a trial basis, in both directions of Masonic Avenue between Ewing Terrace and Fulton Street.

"This section is important because it is a section that is the steepest. Bicyclists are either going fast downhill on that section or going very slowly uphill, so in either case, it would really make the street much safer to put bike lanes with a buffered space between vehicle traffic just on that section. We think that by itself, done immediately, would make a significant improvement on this dangerous street," said Rivera.

For long-term improvements, the Bike Coalition has endorsed Option C in the SFMTA's plans, a street redesign that includes no parking, four traffic lanes and a cycle track.

A bicyclist rides northbound on Masonic near Turk where Linke was killed. He chooses the sidewalk. Photo: Bryan Goebel.

"Masonic is crazy. It's just nuts. It's a four-lane road and just everybody uses it," said Oliver, who uses the sidewalk on Masonic to get to a calmer side street on his way south to the Panhandle.

"People think it's the autobahn," said Melissa Fernandez, who was waiting for the 43-Masonic at the Muni stop near Golden Gate Avenue. "People are going 50 miles an hour when they're supposed to be going god knows what."

For many bicyclists, Masonic is a main north-south connection, and the flattest route. On Monday afternoon, I saw plenty of bicyclists traveling in peak traffic in both directions of Masonic despite the dangers, and spotted a few on the sidewalk, especially going uphill. 

Mariana Parreiras, who lives on nearby Central Avenue and has been involved in the Fix Masonic efforts for three years, said neighborhood activists were disappointed with some of the original designs for improving the street because there weren't enough traffic calming measures in them. Even though the SFMTA lowered the speed limit in 2008 from 30 mph to 25 mph, most drivers ignore it and it's rarely enforced. Lowering down the speed limit is the first bureaucratic hurdle a neighborhood must achieve before the SFMTA can tame a street.

"We knew when we asked for the reduction in speed limit that just that wouldn't have any impact in how people actually behave on the corridor. Changing the sign out from 30 to 25 doesn't make people go any slower but it means that there are more things we can do to it to actually make people move slower," said Parreiras, a transportation engineer.

In a paper last semester on calming Adeline Street in Berkeley for her UC Berkeley city planning class, Parreiras noted how changing an urban street's speed limit to 20 mph, a number that cities such as London and New York have begun implementing in campaigns to make the streets safer for vulnerable users, can make a significant difference.

Many studies show that a small decrease in speed corresponds to a large decrease in both the risk of collision and the severity of injury and risk of fatality of a pedestrian. This suggests that constraining the speed on Adeline to 20 mph instead of 25 mph can have great benefits for pedestrian safety, and by extension, the safety of all other road users.

In addition, she points out the street becomes more inviting to pedestrians and bicyclists, and more people are encouraged to travel by foot and on two wheels. Advocates in San Francisco would like to see the city explore a 20 mph campaign.

A majority of the collisions on Masonic Avenue involve cars versus cars. "We know that there are a lot of collisions that happen on Masonic and they are not just with pedestrians or bicycles they're with everybody. We are interested in making it safer for everyone," says neighborhood activist Mariana Parreiras. This photo by Jim Herd shows a March 26, 2008 collision on Masonic near Grove involving three cars.

In response to Linke's death, and the calls by advocates to take quick steps, SFMTA Chief Nat Ford sent a letter (PDF) Thursday to the SFMTA Board of Directors updating them on the agency's efforts to improve Masonic. He recounted everything the agency has done the past few years and said immediate measures will be considered:

The fatal collision has raised questions about what can be done in the immediate short-term to improve conditions on Masonic Avenue. Traffic signal timing will be reviewed with particular emphasis on controlling speeds on vehicles traveling in the southbound, downhill direction of Masonic Avenue. We will also review interim measures that could be implemented in the short-term.

Ford listed a number of changes the SFMTA has made on Masonic, including new pedestrian countdown signals, a new traffic signal on Grove Street at Masonic, the removal of the double left turn lanes from Oak Street onto northbound Masonic, the installation of "YIELD TO PEDESTRIANS AND BIKES" and "BIKES ALLOWED FULL USE OF LANE" signs, upgrades of yellow school crosswalks and signage "to high visibility," and an expansion of the "NO LEFT TURN" peak hour restrictions.

"The SFMTA will continue to work with the community to improve Masonic Avenue," Ford added. He did not respond directly to the SFBC's call for bike lanes to be added immediately. 

Even though the SFMTA has made a number of changes over the years, the community is not satisfied with the pace of change or the results.

In 2006, Mark Christianson started the group Fix Masonic to lobby for significant changes. In 2008, he and other neighbors gathered 500 signatures asking the SFMTA to initiate a traffic calming study. That study was delayed for up to a year, according to some advocates, because SFMTA staff was too busy working on the Bike Plan EIR. The SFMTA would not comment directly on why the process has taken so long.

The agency has held two community meetings on Masonic this year, including one earlier this month, and plans another in September or October. The traffic calming study is not expected to be complete until late this year.

"The process from then (2008) to now with a traffic calming process underway is either painfully slow or about right depending on your view of the MTA's response to making traffic design changes," Helquist wrote on his blog, BIKE NOPA. He noted that some of the traffic modifications the SFMTA has suggested in its redesign proposals are "needed now" and "can be implemented without disrupting the eventual design and involve minimal-to-moderate expense."

Reverend Will Scott, an associate pastor and cathedral missioner at St. Cyprian's Episcopal Church on Turk Street, got involved in efforts to fix Masonic about three months ago and agrees there is an urgent need for speed management.

"It's like a freeway in the middle of the city, and I think there are ways that we really need to ask ourselves is speed really a value when there are human lives at stake, and there are many different uses of these streets other than cars," said Scott, who added that he became especially sensitive to the issue after his mother was hit by a driver while walking to a museum in Washington D.C. a few years ago. She is still recovering.

Crossing Turk Street the other day, with food in hand for a potluck, the pastor said he was "terrified." Turk, a wide street that has not been calmed, has a higher speed limit, at 30 mph.

"We need to just be more conscious of just how valuable one another's lives are and the kinds of work around safety both from a long-term ecological perspective but also in the short-term," said Scott. "How do we make sure that we're attentive and aware of one another, and that our city systems recognize that and honor and build streets and roads and buildings that really hold those values and respect those values."

It will now be up to the SFMTA to determine what immediate changes need to be made on Masonic, an issue that will likely be discussed at the SFMTA Board's next meeting September 7th.

“Ultimately, they’re the experts and we expect them to tell us how they’re going to address it. All we want is for the speeds to come down. How exactly they’re going to accomplish that is what they need to tell us," said Perreiras.

Photo: Bryan Goebel.

What does San Francisco's retired top traffic engineer think about Market Street, Muni and global warming? We sat down with Jack Fleck recently for an extended interview. The 62-year-old retired last week after more than 25 years with the former Department of Parking and Traffic and the current San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA).

Fleck expounded on a number of topics and his answers offer some insight into his thinking over the years as the city's lead traffic engineer.

On cars and driving:

As a student I started connecting all these problems with the automobile and the first one was related to the urban riots, I mean the fact that at that time equal housing laws didn't exist. So, African Americans were pretty much confined to the inner city, at the same time the freeways were crisscrossing the cities and making them much less livable, destroying neighborhoods and creating noise and pollution and all of that, and they became like pressure cookers and they exploded, and so the inner city blight and the white flight were something I paid a lot of attention to in the '60s. But then also reading Jane Jacob's book, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," and how she contrasted Robert Moses, who was the big freeway builder. His vision of how the freeway was always good versus the reality, and not just freeways, but parking lots and widening streets and all the things that she talked about to create the fabric of a city and the way that the automobile was part of the problem. It wasn't like that was the only problem, but that was something she talked a lot about and I learned the word 'livability' I think from Don Appleyard when I took classes at Berkeley. I went to grad school in City Planning at Berkeley.

So that sort of struck home as that's what I want to do, make cities livable and I don't know that it was really a word that was used a lot until more recently, but it does make sense. That's from all the days that I've been involved in this is trying to make this city a better place to live. But then there were other problems with cars obviously, the wars for oil and I think I learned the word ecology in about 1969, it was the first time I heard that word. I was like 'oh, that's a good one', because air pollution, oil spills which obviously are still a problem. So all of that sort of compounded to make me much more anti-automobile, but still, I was like 'yes, cars are still convenient and people love cars.' I was never a person that loved cars like they were my baby or something, like some people their whole identity is caught up in their cars and that's still true today, but they are very convenient to get around and so it's a love/hate thing.

On getting more people out of cars:

I think all the things that we do. We try to dedicate the space for bike lanes, for bus lanes. I'm not one to punish the drivers. I'm not really trying to do that, but I'm trying to make it attractive for these other modes, and if it comes down to a choice where you can't do both, then I would favor the other modes. I don't really consider myself anti-automobile in the sense that, just pragmatically speaking, you could get yourself in a lot of trouble politically if you try to take on all the drivers, why go there? You don't need to do that. That's why I was a little frustrated, or very frustrated, when the bike injunction happened, because we have been very careful to put in bike lanes that we felt didn't really cause any negative impact on the traffic. Almost all, we knew that there were some that were going to be more controversial and we were kind of putting off doing those, so the ones that had been put in, we thought were relatively non-controversial. So the fact that an injunction happened when we'd only done things that we thought were pretty safe was frustrating.

On Muni:

On bikes:

I grew up in Peoria and all the kids rode bikes. I mean everything we did. We rode bikes to school, we rode bikes to go visit each other. We rode bikes to Little League. I mean that was how we all got around and I was thinking about Ray LaHood, you know, he's two years younger than me but he's from Peoria, I'm sure he did that too, and he's a pretty big advocate for bikes right now, and that's pretty cool, you know? I was just thinking 'yes I can see how he would be advocate because we just all rode bikes.' Then at the University of Illinois I always rode a bike and when I lived in Berkeley I always rode a bike, but I don't really ride a bike in San Francisco that much. I mean we have city bikes here that I'll sign out if I want to go to a meeting and it's convenient, I am definitely very comfortable riding bikes, but I don't do it as much as I used to.

On Market and Octavia, the city's most dangerous intersection for bicyclists:

We've had a lot of problems at Market and Octavia. It's actually gotten a little better lately. We are keeping our fingers crossed. I'm wondering if it's because there are so many bicyclists now that the drivers are just finally becoming aware. I know Europe has made that argument that they can have bike lanes to the right and the drivers just learn to look, because there are so many bikes. Now it's an illegal right turn, I don't know whether those people making those right turns have now all of a sudden realized 'we really have to be careful', but we've done everything we can to try to make it very difficult to make those turns. So whatever, it seems like it's been a little bit better, cross my fingers, on that one

On Market Street:

Market Street would be wonderful to fix. My theory on Market Street is that it was designed in the '60s at a time when nobody rode bikes, and now we are trying to make it work for bikes. It's been really, really been fun to watch the increase in bikes on Market. So the problem is, I think, because of the position of the stairwells, there's not really room to widen the sidewalk. I mean if we could just widen it by a few feet we could put a bike lane in all the way down, but that's a very big if, because of the stairwells. Now some people had some good Market ideas I thought about, maybe moving the MUNI platforms so they aren't right next to a stairwell, in which case maybe you could widen the sidewalk. The problem is you have a platform and you have a stairwell and those are two pretty big objects, and there's only so much space in between them. So that's a big challenge. I thought a lot about it and haven't really been able to figure out how to solve it, but wish everybody luck on that one.

On making Folsom Street a two-way street:

I really don’t like to get hung up on the one-way street stuff but with Folsom I know people want to make it a traffic calmed Street and two-way and all that, but that’s where I get into this arterial argument.  I mean, we don’t want them on Mission.  We don’t want the traffic on Market. The parking garages downtown are really the key.  San Francisco did a brilliant thing by not allowing new parking garages, since like the late ‘80s or whatever.  If we had parking garages in all those high-rises the streets would be gridlocked.  I mean they just can’t handle any more traffic, but by not building the parking garages, most of the downtown streets really aren’t that congested and we could get even less traffic if we got rid of whatever parking there is.  So to make Folsom into a two-way street I think you’d have to figure out some way to get rid of the traffic that does exist, which like I say isn’t that much, but it’s enough to be needing some arterials and that’s kind of my thought about it.

On global warming:

I guess the main point I drive home is that the atmosphere can only absorb about 8 billion tons of CO2. In about 15 years there'll be about 8 billion people, so really our goal should be no more than one ton per person, whereas our current level is about 20 tones. So I think what I try to drive home is, how big the reduction has to be and we really just have to get off of fossil fuels, and there was a good quote from Ken Caldeira, do you know who he is? He was a speaker at SPUR, and I was curious about him. He's from Stanford, he said 'I think we need to more or less make it illegal to produce devices that emit CO2 into the atmosphere. Our target should be zero emissions.' Because realistically going from 20 to one is the same as getting rid of it completely, and of course the argument that just the oil spills and air quality and the wars for oil, I mean all those things alone would be good arguments for getting rid of fossil fuels, but the global warming is by far the strongest one. We just really need to get rid of the CO2.

San Francisco is more like Europe, maybe 10 tons per person, but still we are just way, way over what we could be sustainable. I think the world average is about five. So India is like pretty close but they have got a big coal-fired plant and they are growing fast. They really need to figure it out too. I think the main thing that we can do with all these things is to stop the growth in vehicle miles travelled. In-fill development, like they are assuming that all the future development will be in-fill, no further sprawl. So I think doing that is necessary but it's not sufficient to stop global warming. So that's when I get into just a further argument along these lines.

So San Francisco, what if we built all the cities in the country like Peoria and everybody else to be as dense as San Francisco? I mean we'd have to have people give up their yards and gardens and move to downtown Peoria? I don't think they are going to do it to be like San Francisco. But even here, 62 percent of our trips are by car, so you know, I mean there's a lot of cars out there, and so what if we were even more successful? What if we became like Copenhagen? Copenhagen still has four times as many kilometers by car as it does by bike, even though they have a 50 percent modal split, people use their cars for longer strips. So even Copenhagen would have to get rid of all those fossil fuels from all those cars and so the argument is then I really think that we need to go into electric cars, plug-in hybrids and that electricity has to be generated by renewal sources. And the good news is that there are all these manufacturers coming out with electric cars and plug-in hybrids. There's a lot of competition now to see who is going to get the one that really gets the popular response.

Of course the danger is that they will be so successful that we'll have more sprawl, more automobile-oriented development. It does solve the problems of wars for a while, it does solve the problems of air quality and hopefully can make a dent in global warming. It doesn't solve the problems of obesity and it doesn't solve the problem of urban life quality, all that kind of Jane Jacobs stuff. So it's not the ultimate total everything solution, but I think given the danger of global warming and being underwater kind of makes everything else moot. We can fight about all of the other things that we want to do, but if we are under water it's not going to matter.

Then here's a positive thing. The cost of solar power today is just barely above the cost of natural gas, generating electricity and if you look at the trend, it could be by 2020, at least this person from MIT seemed to think it could be cheaper than coal. That would be huge if we could get solar power down to that level then we could generate the electricity for these electric vehicles with basically no CO2. So there's hope. We don't need to, everyone in Peoria doesn't have to rebuild the city completely. It would be nice if we did all in-fill development and more density, and I think San Francisco, the relevance here is that we are a high density city that is a great place to live and that's what the rest of the country has to learn, is that density doesn't mean poor quality of life, we can make it a really good place and it's much more environmentally, ecologically sustainable to have high density than to have this sprawl.

Then there's another point of politically what we have to do. These federal subsidies are right now overwhelmingly for fossil fuels, exactly the opposite and we should not only be subsidizing, we should be taxing them and we should be subsidizing the renewables which there are some subsidies of, but not a lot and a lot of the subsidies are for corn ethanol which is probably the worst of the biofuels. There are some biofuels that are pretty good in terms of CO2 emissions, but not corn ethanol, that's like one of the worst ones. So it's got to politically completely turn around in terms of where the government puts its resources because it's all backward now.

On working with the advocates:

Actually, I was more of an advocate when I was in Berkeley. My first job there was to do citizen participation and we sort of construed that to mean community organizing.  So we were out there trying to get the neighborhoods to advocate for things.  So I really personally identify with the advocates and I also feel that it’s impossible to get things done without political support.

If it’s just city staff with a few opponents it’s very difficult to get anything done.  So the advocates are essential and having them there speaking in favor of the changes. With the whole Bike Plan obviously the Bike Coalition was very central to making that happen.

So by and large I’m totally comfortable with the advocates and the role they play.  I remember that Betsy Thagard was the founder of Walk San Francisco, I don’t know if you know her, but she moved to the East Bay.  I don’t know if she’s still around, I haven’t seen her for a long time, but I do remember she would complain about pedestrian safety and beat up on us and you know, and then afterwards, she said ‘well, what do you really need?’  And that was great because she was willing to support hiring staff, getting funding, making improvements and I think that kind of relationship with the advocates is really what I’ve always seen as a good thing.  

I don’t know, I’m not sure if there might be people who are just prejudiced against traffic engineers.  I mean engineers have a stereotype that we are kind of like stodgy or something, and people might just have that fixed in their mind and not be able to get past it, but I haven’t encountered too much of that.

Next: Who will be San Francisco's next top traffic engineer, and will he or she be the innovator we need? 

Editor's note: This is the first of a three-part series on the past, present and future of traffic engineering in San Francisco. 

Jack Lucero Fleck remembers his teenage years as a sputnik, the kind of kid who was as "nutty as a slide rule," loved math and science, and knew he was headed in that direction. It was the summer of 1965, and living in Peoria, Illinois, the same town where US DOT Secretary Ray LaHood grew up, Fleck couldn't quite peg what he wanted to do in life. And then there were the Watts riots.

"I got kind of interested in, 'well, what caused that? Why were people burning down their neighborhood?'," Fleck, 62, explained during a recent interview. "I decided I would go into civil engineering because I liked to do math and science and engineering and I would combine it with city planning to make cities better places to live, so people wouldn't want to burn them down."

For the last 25 years, Fleck, who retired yesterday from his job as San Francisco's top traffic engineer, has had a hand in almost every major transportation project in San Francisco, from the demolition and boulevard replacement of the Embarcadero and Central Freeways, to helping in the design of the T-Third line and Central Subway, to crafting a controversial proposal to remove the bike lane at Market and Octavia Streets.

He has sometimes been the bane of transit advocates for defending post-World War II traffic engineering orthodoxy favoring one-way street networks, such as those that roar through neighborhoods like the Tenderloin and SoMa. While some advocates have been working to dismantle some of the one-way arterials, Fleck, who became lead traffic engineer in 2004, is a firm believer in them. Still, those advocates and transportation professionals who have worked with Fleck (none we contacted would go on the record with their criticisms) say he has been a true professional and easy to work with.

"His views are very progressive and he's very environmentally conscious," said Bond Yee, the interim Director of Sustainable Streets at the SFMTA who has been at the agency four years longer than Fleck. "He epitomizes what the new generation of transportation professionals is becoming. He's a little bit ahead of his time."

Fleck had a lot to talk about during our 90 minute interview last week. Some answers are revealing and offer insight into his thinking as a traffic engineer who has been entrenched in the design of our city streets for more than two decades.

Fleck in his office at the SFMTA.

Fleck said he learned the word livability from Don Appleyard while he was studying City Planning as a graduate student at U.C. Berkeley and it struck him "that that's what I wanted to do, make cities 'livable,' and I don't know that it was really a word that was used a lot until recently, but it does make sense."

Fleck's first job out of school was working on the Berkeley traffic diverters, and he got a stern lesson that traffic engineering doesn't always have to do with left or right politics.

"Some of the NIMBY types are pretty conservative, but then some of my friends on the left would surprise me that they would be pretty hostile to the diverters, you know? That they were people who were with the anti-war movement or whatever and they were just inflamed, 'oh the idea of those things in my way.' So I kind of realized that traffic is a funny issue, it's not exactly left and right and people get very emotional about it."

Fleck recalls, for example, the battle over tearing down the Embarcadero freeway after the 1989 earthquake, when lefty Terrence Hallinan (who went on to become the long-time district attorney before Kamala Harris), was among the supervisors who voted 6-5 to rebuild it. He was working for the Department of Public Works at the time.

"These freeways were taking land off the tax rolls. They weren't really making the city a better place or anything. So, it was great to see it go," said Fleck, who was engaged in a debate at the time about whether the traffic from the demolished freeway would live up to predictions of gridlock on city streets.

"The fact that all that traffic didn't go away, actually, helped us win the argument to say that they didn't need the freeway because the city streets were handling it all."

"Going back to my Berkeley experience I do feel there are arterials that need to carry more traffic and then there are residential areas that you want to protect. So I don't really support the idea that the traffic should just be tossed out there widespread."

Fleck cites the demolition of both the Embarcadero and Central freeways as projects he was involved in that were some of his greatest accomplishments, but building the staff at the SFMTA, and changing the culture of the agency, is something he's most proud of.

"I think we've really looked at people who have backgrounds in both engineering and planning because they have that diverse sort of broader viewpoint," said Fleck." I think that we have people who really get it in terms of the Transit First policy and pedestrians and all the things we are trying to do here. I think in terms of a lasting legacy I would feel that that's more significant than anything."

"From the 50s, to now, almost 60 years, it's incredible to think back. There's only been five traffic engineers. And Jack's number five," said Yee, who was the longest serving traffic engineer before Fleck from 1990 to 2004.

Among the Transit First accomplishments Fleck listed in a slide presentation (PDF) at a recent SPUR luncheon are the city's 40 miles of bike lanes (bikes and pedestrians were added to the policy in 2000), 13 miles of transit lanes, transit signal priority at more than 100 intersections, pedestrian countdown signals at 800 intersections and a 30 percent reduction in injury collisions over the past 30 years. He also used this graph to point out that traffic fatalities have been on a steady decline.

"I kind of feel like this is in response to people who feel like traffic control devices actually are unsafe or less safe. I really don't subscribe to that. I think there is an argument to be made on big wide open intersections with low volume that it works pretty well without stop signs or anything because people have lots of visibility, and especially if you put traffic signals in, those can work."

Fleck attributes the decline to the three e's: engineering, education and enforcement, but thinks it's also the signals, the mast arms, the countdowns "and all those things that improve safety."

Fleck spent the first two days of his last week at the SFMTA attending the Western Institute of Transportation Engineers conference in San Francisco, where he made this presentation (PDF) with Yee titled, "What It Will Take to Stop Global Warming: The Case for Electric Cars." While he acknowledges that there is a danger electric cars could perpetuate sprawl and generate more auto-oriented development, Fleck sees them as key to fighting global warming.

"It's not the ultimate total, everything solution, but I think given the danger of global warming, and being underwater, it kind of makes everything else moot. We can fight about all of the other things that we want to do, but if we are under water it's not going to matter."

Fleck plans to continue working on global warming solutions, and hopes to improve his neighborhood in Oakland by encouraging "the political forces there to get solar panels on people's roofs and plug-in facilities in their driveways so people can have electric cars, and they won't be generating all this C02."

About leaving the SFMTA and the challenges ahead, Fleck was optimistic.

"I think we are in good hands. I really feel great about the staff and I feel like the organizational structure right now is very good," said Fleck. "I like the idea of introducing the word 'sustainability' into our name. I think traffic engineering has traditionally been safe and efficient movement of people and goods, which I support, but adding the word sustainable will also be a plus as we think to future generations and make sure that whatever we do now isn't damaging."

In a city as dense as San Francisco, it's inevitable that truck traffic often travels along streets where people live. But public health and environmental justice groups, the MTA and the Department of Public Health are now collaborating to ensure that the impact of that traffic is mitigated as much as possible, and doesn't continue to disproportionately affect the southeast section of the city.

To this end, Supervisor Sophie Maxwell called for an update on the collaborative effort at a hearing last week.

"Southeast San Francisco bears a significant burden of the city's traffic volume," said Maxwell. "Much of city's local traffic is disproportionately through communities of color."

A survey of the city's southeastern communities found that 46 percent of respondents said they smell pollution on their block every week, and 44 percent live within 500 feet of a high volume roadway, said Charlie Sciammas of People Organizing to Demand Environmental & Economic Rights (PODER). In addition to greatly increased asthma rates, a recent study found that living within close proximity to such streets correlates with higher body mass indexes in kids.

The MTA has a three-prong approach to solving the problem: the first is an update to the San Francisco truck traffic routes map, which the MTA's Sam Fielding said hadn't been revised since before the Embarcadero Freeway and a spur of the Central Freeway were torn down.

"We created a newly updated truck route map and asked for feedback from the public and 40 trucking companies," said Fielding. "It's advisory, and isn't incorporated in the General Plan yet, but we're talking to City Planning to incorporate it in the next update."

That will require going through an environmental review process, but the Planning Department is eager to incorporate the new route map, Fielding said. Simply having a well-distributed map is a major improvement over the previous situation, he explained, since even the MTA's staff wasn't certain at first where to find the old map.

The updated map doesn't solve the more complicated problem of trucks running on housing-lined streets, since that describes just about every street in the city, but it does give truck drivers who aren't familiar with the city a clear route through, meaning they are less likely to end up lost and driving around more than necessary.

Of course, being a truck route doesn't mean that a street has to be a completely dire traffic sewer without pedestrian amenities. That's the second prong in the approach: MTA traffic engineer Jack Fleck said the agency is trying to mitigate the negative effects of truck traffic by calming the streets they are advised to use.

"It's just a fact of life here that some of these streets do get heavier traffic," said Fleck. "We try to make sure they aren't too fast, slow down traffic, that they're safe for pedestrians, and good places to live."

Streets near main arterial corridors and those with spillover traffic are also prioritized for traffic calming improvements, said Fleck.

Megan Wier, an epidemiologist with the city's Department of Public Health, said DPH and MTA began collaborating to address the issue in February of last year, at the behest of the community groups PODER and the Chinese Progressive Association.

The solutions they developed include traffic-calming measures, tree planting, sound walls near freeways, and help with installing double-pane windows and indoor ventilation systems in buildings near arterial streets.

Finally, the third prong is nudging trucking companies to use cleaner, more fuel-efficient trucks.

All of these measures - and probably more - couldn't come soon enough for Victoria Sanchez, who said she lives close to multiple freeways. "It seems like it's worse now than before," she said. "Touching the outside of the house, it's filled with dirt from pollution."

Fewer cars means more walking and healthier kids.

By most measures, San Francisco is a great place to walk and bike, with its compact street grid, mixed-use neighborhoods and relatively mild weather. But a new study conducted by UC Berkeley professor Michael Jerrett suggests the city may need to focus on taming traffic before kids will get the full health benefits of that dense development.

Streetsblog New York's Noah Kazis reports on the study, which links traffic volumes to youth obesity:

Jerrett shows that not only does the built environment matter, but traffic volumes matter too. His team's long-term study tracked children from across Southern California, starting from ages 9-10 and continuing through high school. Controlling for a wide variety of factors, they compared the children's body mass indexes (BMI) to the density of traffic near their homes.

Children living within 150 meters of high-traffic areas were found to have, on average, BMIs five percent higher than those living near low-traffic areas. Only the immediate surroundings seem to matter: Traffic levels within 300 or 500 meters didn't affect BMI.

The researchers put forward two reasons for why traffic volumes contribute to obesity. High asthma rates could be part of the equation, making kids less likely to engage in physical activity. Kids - and their parents - also seem to be especially sensitive to the real or perceived danger from cars, much more so than adults.

To put the findings in context, a regular San Francisco block is about 600 feet, or about 180 meters. If kids live on a street with a lot of traffic, or if the next cross street is overrun with cars, there's a real chance they'll be less likely to bike or walk.

Ben Caldwell, who runs the Presidio Community YMCA's Bicycle Program, said the city needs to do a lot more than just install bike lanes and sharrows to make kids feel safe traveling the city's streets by bike or foot. "Few parents think that bike lanes and sharrows are enough to keep kids safe," said Caldwell. "Frankly, I think they're right in most cases."

Even with a long-standing injunction on any improvements to the city's bicycle infrastructure, cycling has grown at an impressive rate over the past three years. Still, Caldwell said it will take a lot more to get kids out of their parents' cars and riding bikes and walking to school, the library, or the park.

"Rather than a Bike Plan, we need a trails and bikeways master plan that looks at the entire network of trails and bikeways and paths and staircases and plazas, the entire non-motorized transportation network," said Caldwell.

But where to start?

"There's infinite number of examples of where we could do better out there," said Caldwell. Park Presidio, for example. "It's a nasty street but actually has a lovely path along the ridge that is effectively useless because it's so nasty to cross all the streets."

He suggests looking at the Buchanan Street mall in the Western Addition, which could be fixed up to provide a mixed-use pathway from the Rosa Parks school to the Buchanan YMCA and even Hayes Valley.

Not that San Francisco lacked for reasons to bring more livable streets to its residents, but Jerrett's study is a hard reminder that our tolerance for traffic has measurable consequences.

An artist’s rendering of the Woodall Rogers Deck project
in Dallas. (Photo: U. of MN)

The Star-Telegram story, which soon got snapped up
by the Associated Press, begins by challenging Dallas’ Woodall Rogers
Deck Park, a groundbreaking
effort to cap the city’s Woodall Rogers Freeway and create a
5.2-acre green space for the public. The park, aimed at creating a
walkable link between Dallas’ local districts, received
$16.7 million in stimulus funding from the Obama administration.

From the Star-Telegram:

The Woodall Rodgers project is a glaring example of how,
at a
time when many Texans distrust their transportation leaders, huge
chunks of federal and state money are being spent on projects that have
little or nothing to do with directly improving traffic.

"Texans
should be outraged by it, especially when they’re being asked to
support tax increases for transportation," said Justin Keener, vice
president for policy and communications at the Texas Public Policy
Foundation, a nonpartisan research institute in Austin.

The Star-Telegram reviewed 515 state projects awarded
funds
under the federal transportation enhancement program during the past 18
years and found projects large and small that had little to do with
mobility.

As it happens, the "nonpartisan" Texas Public Policy Foundation
makes no bones about its political alignment on its website, which outlines a
mission of "limited government" and offers a litany of pro-industry
critiques of the Democratic health care bills.

The group’s leadership is stocked with veteran advisers to
Republican Gov. Rick Perry (TX), and chairman of the board Wendy
Lee Gramm is a former Enron lobbyist who
aided her husband Phil Gramm, a former Texas GOP senator, in his
late-1990s push to de-regulate Wall Street.

Yet aside from Gramm’s group, the Star-Telegram story includes no
sources criticizing Texas transportation enhancements, which have
received $997 million since the program began in 1991.

One of the five members of Texas’ transport commission told the
newspaper that "we didn’t ask for" the federal requirement, and reporter
Gordon Dickson notes that some federal enhancements funding may be
misdirected thanks to state legislators’ eagerness to earmark the money
for local pet projects.

But on the whole, the newspaper’s criticism of quality-of-life
improvements appears out of left field — until the second half of the
piece, when its preferred alternative becomes clear:

It’s difficult to say how much $997 million [over 18
years] would buy if it could be used on highway lane construction
instead of enhancements. … The $997 million would be enough to build
eight miles of Southwest
Parkway from Interstate 30 to Dirks Road — and make it a freeway
instead of a toll road as planned.

Ah, the mournful pull of highway lanes not built — especially in a
Texas road system that
ranked No. 1 in size but No. 17 in efficiency, according to the
pro-free-markets Reason Foundation.

For a more balanced local take on the issue, check out Dallas
Morning News reporter Michael Lindenberger’s response
to the Star-Telegram.

(Photo: Roloff via Flickr)

How many movies would you see? One, two … or as many as you wanted to?

Former federal highway official Steve Lockwood presented that hypothetical at today’s University of Virginia conference to illustrate the nation’s wacky notion of transportation pricing.

"The reason we don’t have a flexible dialogue when it comes to pricing is that we don’t know how much things cost," he said.

Right now
tolling is prohibited on existing interstate highway systems built with
federal funds, with a few exceptions. But conference speakers on both
ends of the political spectrum agreed that the transportation system
must be priced more accurately in order to avoid catastrophic
consequences.

In other words: It’s time to start properly labeling the price of a movie ticket.

Douglas Foy, the former development secretary of Massachusetts, and transit critic
Adrian Moore of the Reason Foundation, sparred on many issued but
agreed that any new highway capacity should include charges beyond the
gas tax.

The comparison of film-going to driving is an
imperfect one, to be sure, but the core need to inform the public about
the consequences of decision-making applies to both activities.

"People
love to believe they can be free riders," Jay-Etta Hecker of the
Bipartisan Policy Center told conference attendees today. "People need
to be educated that this isn’t a free-rider system."

The
federal effort to encourage sounder urban transportation pricing
remains in its infancy, however. Mary Peters, George W. Bush’s second
transportation secretary, introduced the Urban Parternship Agreements
(UPA) in 2007 to incentivize congestion mitigation efforts, but New
York City lost its chance at the UPA cash after the state legislature
voted down congestion pricing.

(Data: IBM’s CPI)

As Washington conventional wisdom has it,
raising gas taxes or creating a vehicle miles traveled tax to pay for
transportation is impossible during the current recession. After all,
who would want to squeeze cash-strapped commuters during tough economic
times?

As it turns out, the public is very willing to pay for the
shorter commuting times that result from less traffic — and they’re
willing to pay top dollar, as IBM’s new Commuter Pain Index (CPI) shows.

When
asked what value they would place on every 15 minutes sliced from their
daily commute, 36.5 percent of CPI respondents said between $10 and
$20. That’s about five times the recent trading price of a ton of carbon emissions on the nation’s climate-change exchanges.

And
the price of a shorter commute was higher in more congested cities. In
Los Angeles, 22 percent of residents said every 15 minutes not spent en route to work would be worth between $31 and $40 — or more than $100 per hour.

What
does the data mean? For one thing, those who fear that voters would
revolt if asked to pay more for a more efficient, less congested
transport network shouldn’t let that stop policy-making. As every
successful politician knows (and the president is re-learning on health care), messaging is the key to winning over the public.

In
other words, Democrats who feign unwillingness to subject voters to
higher gas taxes are ignoring their ability to control the message.
When a greater contribution to transportation is pitched as a way to shorten commutes and give workers more free time, the prospect becomes more desirable.

And
it’s not that lawmakers don’t know how to decrease congestion,
particularly in the urban areas that were polled to produce the CPI.
Reducing the number of car trips and lowering demand during peak travel
times are proven to be a cheaper and more effective method of battling congestion than expanding highway capacity.

Is it time to nickname the White House’s Sustainable Communities Initiative the "Shorter Commutes Initiative"?

The original and a new temporary structure will be swapped this weekend. Photo courtesy of Caltrans.

While the bridge is closed, from 8 p.m. Thursday to 5 a.m. Tuesday, crews will cut and roll away a 300-foot-long section of the east span of the bridge. In its place, a new section will be moved in, which will connect to a temporary half-mile-long detour. The detour will allow crews to complete work on a permanent replacement structure, which will eventually be used to connect the new east span of the bridge to the Yerba Buena Island tunnel. The Bay Bridge website has an excellent video explaining this weekend's construction work.

BART will be running trains hourly overnight on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday to 14 stations. There will be no overnight service in the early hours of Tuesday, even though the bridge will still be closed. There will also be additional ferry service across the Bay during the bridge closure, and AC Transit will reroute its transbay routes to meet the BART stations at Coliseum/Oakland Airport, MacArthur, North Berkeley, and West Oakland after making the regular East Bay stops. Muni's route 108 to Treasure Island will operate regular service. The Caltrans Bicycle Shuttle, which normally runs only on weekdays, will add weekend service during the closure, via the Golden Gate and Richmond San Rafael Bridges. A complete list of transit options during the closure is available at 511.org.

For some livable streets advocates, the bridge closure is inspiring a certain curiosity about the impact it will have on the burgeoning Rincon Hill neighborhood in South of Market, which has grown significantly over the last decade, but which is also stifled by streets designed for Bay Bridge traffic. "It's going to be interesting to see what the Bay Bridge closure means for South of Market streets - will the Bay Bridge traffic be replaced by Peninsula traffic or Marin traffic," Cheryl Brinkman of Livable City wondered. "And why are the streets South of Market designed to handle peak rush hour traffic with little or no consideration given to the other 22 hours of the day?"

"The bridge is a permanent fixture; the design of our streets is not," said Brinkman. "We've got the space; we just need to re-allocate how we use it."

On Friday, Brinkman is organizing an alternative Critical Mass of sorts, with a ride through South of Market that will take advantage of the calmer streets while Bay Bridge traffic is absent. The ride will start at the southwest corner of Spear Street, at Folsom. Riders will meet at 5:30 p.m. and depart about a half hour later. In the spirit of calmer, more livable streets, the event will be a mellow ride to the AT&T Park area. "Aggro types need not apply," said Brinkman.

There has been no shortage of proposals from livable streets advocates to improve the Bay Bridge's impact on pedestrians and bicyclists, including adding bike access to the bridge and calming the streets around the bridge's western touchdown. If rerouted traffic doesn't spoil it, Friday could offer a glimpse of what a calmer SoMa would look like.

Have your own plans for taking advantage of a calmer SoMa over the next four days, or other ideas about what impact the Bay Bridge closure will have? Let us know in the comments section below.

Click to enlarge: A map of Muni lines that displaced BART commuters can consider taking during a strike. Photo courtesy SFMTA.

AC Transit spokesperson Clarence Johnson said the BART strike could be "a real nightmare" for people who need to cross the Bay. Unlike nearly every other agency in the Bay Area, AC Transit does plan to provide some additional service, depending on how many extra buses and drivers are available. Johnson said the agency doesn't have "a whole lot of extra buses" or drivers though, and it won't be adding any new routes to substitute for BART service. Johnson said he isn't sure how long AC Transit could handle the extra strain caused by the BART strike.

While it won't be providing extra service, Muni will prioritize service along routes that duplicate BART service, including the 14 Mission, 49 Van Ness-Mission, J Church, and N Judah (to and from Caltrain at 4th and King.) This will mostly be limited to making sure these lines run on schedule and runs aren't missed, however, so these routes are still likely to be packed.

Caltrain, VTA, Golden Gate Transit, and SamTrans will all operate regular service.

Bicyclists who need to cross into the city from the East Bay may be best off taking a ferry. Most ferry providers will operate additional service, and some already have extra capacity available, so East Bay commuters may want to consider the ferry over other means of travel. AC Transit is also an option for bay-crossing bicyclists, but their buses will likely be full to capacity, and only carry two or four bikes per vehicle (though additional folding bikes are welcome on board if there is space.)

Randy Rentschler, spokesperson for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, said residents should plan ahead, since the capacity provided by "BART can't be replicated" by other agencies, especially given current budget constraints.

A BART strike will test the region's ingenuity, especially given that BART has 85,000 more daily riders now than it did in 1997, when its last strike occurred. "The people of the Bay Area have shown to be resourceful and resilient," said Rentschler, who also encouraged telecommuting, carpooling and flexible work hours.

If bicycling or walking to work is not an option, we wish you luck navigating a BART-less Bay Area. 511.org has more exhaustive information about each transit agency's plan and other commute options during the strike.

What have we missed? Please add it in the comments section. And how do you plan on getting to work Monday morning without BART?

The lights on Market are timed so that Muni's buses and streetcars stop at red lights, load and unload passengers, and move on when the light turns green. But when cars stop in front of them on a red light, buses can't pull up to the island, and must wait until the light turns green to pull into the transit island. By the time they've finished loading and unloading passengers, the light is red again.

Such violations are rampant in San Francisco, based on interviews with Muni bus and streetcar operators, who insisted on anonymity, and observations by Streetsblog San Francisco.

Driving in a transit-only lane is an offense subject to a $60 fine, according to the city's traffic code. But ask a Muni driver whether they ever see cars in the city's 17 miles of transit-only lanes, and you'll likely hear an unequivocal response: "Oh yeah, all the time." That, more or less, is what nearly every Muni driver surveyed for this story said when asked whether private automobiles get in their way on stretches of streets like Market and Mission that have transit-only lanes. "That's the norm," said one operator.

Cars are in the transit-only lanes on "every run," said another Muni operator, who drives the 71-Haight and uses the transit-only lanes on Market Street. "People want to go on time. How we going to be on time? How can you be on time when all these people are in the bus lane?"

Many of the drivers attributed the rampant violations to a lack of enforcement. "There's no police around. They're supposed to be taking care of that, especially the motorcycle police," said one bus operator.

The San Francisco Police Department's Traffic Company and Muni Response Team are in fact responsible for enforcing transit-only lane violations by moving vehicles.

A bus trails a driver on Mission Street who has ignored the transit-only sign.

Muni operators we spoke to are split on whether they've ever actually seen a motorist ticketed or warned for driving in transit-only lanes. Many F-line historic streetcar operators said they had witnessed occasional stings on Market Street. Nearly all Market Street and Mission Street bus drivers said they had not witnessed officers giving tickets for such violations.

The SFPD does conduct "focused enforcement" operations "several times per year," in areas that receive the most complaints, said Sgt. Wilfred Williams, a police department spokesperson.

Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City, said Muni is dependent on the SFPD to enforce cars driving in the transit-only lanes. "Those are moving violations, and we don't know how big a priority the police make of enforcing those lanes."

The Municipal Transportation Agency, Muni's parent agency, is not authorized to ticket moving vehicles, but it has taken steps to crack down on vehicles parked in transit-only lanes. In January 2008, it began a pilot program that allows Muni to place forward-facing cameras on the fronts of its buses to detect parking violations in transit-only lanes, and issue $250 parking citations based on video evidence.

"The authority of the pilot is granted only until January 1, 2012 and requires that the City and County of San Francisco present an evaluation to the transportation committees of the Legislature on or before March 1, 2011," MTA spokesperson Judson True explained in an email to Streetsblog. As of June, 636 citations had been issued.

The MTA could not provide statistics on transit-only lane enforcement or violations, but former SPUR transportation director Dave Snyder said it isn't hard to see there's a problem. "Just based on what I see out there, I think it matters a lot on the street, like enforcing transit lanes on Market Street, where you can sit there and watch buses not get a chance to pull into the bus stop because there's cars illegally in the transit lane. That's obviously a problem."

In 2004, as part of its Market Street Action Plan, the San Francisco County Transportation Authority (TA) recommended the bus-mounted camera pilot program, which is now underway, as well as transferring responsibility for transit-lane moving violation enforcement directly to the MTA by February 2006. That would require legislative action, and has yet to happen.

The good news for enforcement is that, as Streetsblog reported recently, the MTA and the SFPD recently came to an agreement giving the MTA more control over the SFPD's Traffic Company, meaning the MTA could prioritize transit lane enforcement, though it still cannot enforce moving violations directly.

Will transit-only lane enforcement become a genuine priority for the SFPD's Traffic Company? Flickr photo: Thomas Hawk

Tony Parra, the SFPD Deputy Chief and director of Security and Enforcement for the MTA, said he's given instructions to the SFPD's Traffic Company to regularly enforce transit-only lanes. "I have given direction to [Traffic Company Commanding Officer] Captain Gregory Corrales, that our officers, throughout their daily patrol and when traveling to their assignments, are to keep the transit-only lanes open for Muni, and to enforce it as often as possible."

"What I'm trying to achieve here is regular maintenance. So not just the focused, or a canvassing of certain areas one time a year. I would like this year-round type of coverage. This should be a regular portion of the traffic enforcement's duties, and not just some type of enforcement blitz, and then we lax up on it in between."

Parra said he hopes to improve the Traffic Company's record-keeping on transit-only lane enforcement. "I oversee the Traffic Company as of July 1st this year, so we're just starting this, and their statistical personnel are looking at some of the specific requests I've made and I'm waiting to do some comparisons, 30, 60, 90 day comparisons, prior to my taking over the unit."

Though transit-only lane violations clearly remain widespread, Parra said he's received some positive feedback. "I have heard some compliments from some of the bus operators that they have noticed a difference."

As a model for enforcement, San Francisco might look to the East Bay. The Alameda County Sheriff's AC Transit division has gotten attention lately for aggressively enforcing no parking rules along AC Transit routes, and issued over $2 million in tickets last year.

For now, bus drivers are not optimistic that cars will be consistently kept out of the transit-only lanes any time soon. Asked whether more consistent enforcement might keep the transit lanes clear, a 14-Mission driver on his break near the Ferry Building laughed and patted the reporter on the shoulder. "That will be the day," he said.

Yesterday: San Francisco's transit-only lane network is an incomplete vision. 

Cars block a bus' progress on Market Street near Kearny, several blocks east of where Market's transit-only lanes end. Photo: Michael Rhodes

The Transit First policy was adopted in 1973 and the crux of it was transit lanes. When it passed, "within six months, Muni was supposed to come back to the Board of Supes with a proposal for a comprehensive set of transit lanes," said Tom Radulovich of Livable City. "So, it's an old policy in San Francisco that transit should be given priority over traffic on city streets, and that means, in many instances, dedicated lanes."

Today, there are 17.41 miles of transit-only lanes in San Francisco (see the complete list in PDF format.) About two-thirds of that lane mileage prohibits private automobiles at all times, and the rest is peak-only. The result is a patchwork that is both essential to Muni's operation, but woefully incomplete and often times confusing.

"In practice, a lot of the Muni planners have always complained that the traffic engineers will not allow them to have transit-only lanes on streets," said Radulovich. This is "out of concern of actually keeping traffic flowing."

MTA spokesperson Judson said the Transit Effectiveness Project recently completed by the MTA "recommends transit-only lanes as one technique for reducing transit travel time. TEP market research found that after reliability, Muni customers are most concerned about travel times." If the transit lanes are not available to function as intended, he said, "then Muni service cannot benefit from them."

One F-line historic streetcar driver was not afraid to offer a transit-first suggestion for how tourists who are confused by San Francisco's signs should deal: "If they're confused, then they shouldn't drive," he said.

True said the agency "recently completed an upgrade of the transit lane signs, the traffic signs that in conjunction with the street painting alert motorists to the bus only lane."

But the Municipal Transportation Agency, Muni's parent agency, admits the signs on the road aren't always clear.

New transit-only lane signs are intended to be less confusing for motorists. Photo courtesy MTA.

While many motorists could still be seen straying in and out of the transit lanes on a recent weekday, True said the new signs have improved the situation. "The before and after study conducted by our traffic engineering staff at four key intersections showed transit lane compliance improved at those locations on average nearly 40 percent. The intersections monitored, 1st and Mission, Post and Grant, 4th and Mission and 3rd and Folsom, were all monitored during PM Peak hours on weekdays."

Market Street's transit-only lanes may be the most troubled of all. They run in the center lanes from 12th Street to 5th Street inbound, and 8th Street to South Van Ness outbound. On a recent day, not only were many motorists in the transit-only lanes illegally: east of where the lane restrictions end, many motorists still appeared confused about whether they could drive in Market's center lanes. In the short period observed, many motorists swerved out of the center lanes soon after entering them, apparently believing it was unlawful to use them. This last minute swerving created a dangerous situation for other vehicles.

It also raised a question: Why aren't Market Street's center lanes transit-only all the way to the Embarcadero? "It might not be the obvious reason, which is because they didn't want to restrict cars, because they were being too friendly to cars," said former SPUR transportation director and Streetsblog contributor Dave Snyder. "It could be that they have a lot of buses in the right lane as well, and they thought it would be better to spread the cars more than shove them all in one lane. To my eyes it makes more sense to shove them all in the one lane, because they back up both lanes completely, so you might as well have one lane free."

Even though taxis are allowed to use transit-only lanes, and Market's transit-only lane ends several blocks west of here, this cab driver swerved out of the way at the last moment, apparently playing it safe. Photo: Michael Rhodes

The MTA didn't indicate any plans to add such features to Market Street, but it noted that planned Bus Rapid Transit lines on Geary Boulevard and Van Ness Avenue will be physically segregated from lanes open to private automobile traffic.

Whether the city is successful in implementing bolder transit-only lanes will depend on political leaders' support for transit over automobiles, which has long been shaky and conditional. "It goes back to that old debate: we're a transit-first city in a policy sense, but are we a transit-first city in practice?" Said Radulovich. "And that is an open question."

Tomorrow: Drivers face little risk of getting ticketed in SF's transit-only lanes.

A new report on the costs of aging roads [PDF] has gotten a lot of attention over the past week, with both Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and the Washington Post touting its conclusion on the danger of "deficient roadways."

On its face, the report sounds like an argument for prioritizing road repair and modernization over new construction, which is certain to be a flashpoint as Congress works on a new federal transportation bill. But some of the upgrades that the authors suggest rely on outmoded assumptions about driver safety -- not to mention pedestrian safety, a concept never mentioned in the report.

Here's an excerpt:

Numerous solutions -- some simple, some complex -- could help make the roadway environment safer for users. These improvements include structural changes such as adding or widening shoulders, improving roadway alignment, replacing or widening narrow bridges, reducing pavement edges or drop-offs, and providing more clear space in the area adjacent to roadways.

Adding or widening shoulders for bike lanes or pedestrian paths is one thing, but the notion that driving can be made safer by widening and straightening roads (or "improving roadway alignment," as the report puts it) has been debunked by "Traffic" author Tom Vanderbilt, transportation planner Eric Dumbaugh, and others. In fact, making roads more complex and curvy can often serve as a deterrent to unsafe driving practices, particularly on urban streets.

But the report, commissioned by the Transportation Construction Coalition (TCC), seems to have concluded that urban areas don't need to be considered separately from interstates.

"Although this study did not break out costs by class of roads, interstate highways are built to higher safety standards than other roads," the authors state -- as if a new four-lane freeway through Chicago or Brooklyn would be a reasonable safety-enhancement move.

Roger Henderson, an engineer at Henderson Consulting in North Carolina, said the report made a solid attempt to link transportation and public health but made "a critical mistake" in treating all roads in the same way.

The report seems to argue, Henderson said in an interview, that "federal money should be spent to cut down trees and move poles away from the roadway. I agree completely when it comes to interstates, but this is the wrong study to make conclusions in any urban setting."

The report's sponsorship may have had an effect on its conclusions, Henderson added. Indeed, the TCC is an alliance of unions and trade groups that -- as as the Post succinctly put it -- "has a vested interest in funding for road construction."

Taking its origins and questionable assumptions into account, however, two maps in the report tell an interesting tale of the regional toll exacted by traffic.

The map above depicts road-related crash costs for every million vehicle miles traveled on state roads, and the map below depicts road-related crash costs for every existing mile of roadway.

The southeastern states of Louisiana, South Carolina, and Tennessee rank in the top 10 on both maps, earning them the status of "worst road-related crash problems," according to the TCC study.

By contrast, California and most of the northeast corridor rank high in crash costs per roadway mile (see below) and much lower in costs per million VMT (see above). The study's authors, who hail from the Pacific Institute of Research and Evaluation, attribute the trend to "traffic density" -- making a powerful argument for giving special attention to expanding transit options, including high-speed rail, in California and the northeast.

Still, without an alternative to driving in highly developed areas, simply repairing roads isn't enough.

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