Streetsblog San Francisco

A proposal to reconfigure the Phelan Bus Loop as part of the Balboa Park Station Area Plan received a major boost today with the announcement that the Federal Transit Administration has awarded the SFMTA more than $6.8 million for the project.

In a statement, the FTA said the project "paves the way for landscaped open space, new retail space, and new affordable housing, all next to public transportation, and within walking distance of both a major transit hub and San Francisco City College, one of the nation’s largest educational institutions."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also issued a statement praising the project and the federal funding. "Today's announcement highlights San Francisco's continued leadership in the realm of livable communities and transit-oriented development. It will increase public transportation options, while reducing congestion and our dependence on foreign oil."

John Katz, the project manager for the SFMTA, said it will probably take several months before the funding is in hand, but the reconfiguration would be the first major public project under the Balboa plan, and under a best case scenario, would be on target to begin construction a year from now.

"It's great news for the community in San Francisco. This is a project that has been worked on, at least in concept, for the last 7 or 8 years and it looks like it's going to become a reality now," said Katz. "This project is really a catalyst for a lot of long-needed community improvements." 

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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."

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The BP oil spill goes on. And on. We watch the oil on live web cam pouring into the Gulf of Mexico. And we watch. Political rage is muted, practical responses even more distant. What to do? How do we “take action” on something like this? How can individuals meaningfully respond to this catastrophe? Stop driving? Boycott one brand of gas? Stop buying things made of plastic? Let’s not flatter ourselves. A few folks I know are planning to go to a local ARCO gas station (owned by BP) to protest, which will surely be a big moment for the minimum wage employee in the cash booth, and probably an irritant to the half dozen or more motorists waiting to fill their cars.

The numbing impotence we feel is painfully calibrated to our inability to affect what’s happening. Consumer choices we might make will have zero impact on this disaster, and can’t shape the larger dynamics of a globe-spanning, multinational oil industry either. Just listen to Democracy Now on Friday morning to hear how Chevron has destroyed thousands of square miles of the Nigerian delta in its incessant exploitation of the oil there, or how the Ecuadoran Amazon too is covered in vast lakes of spilled oil.

The deeper questions about technology and science are far from our daily lives. The world we live in is embedded in complex networks of technological dependencies, which none of us have chosen freely. Nor do any of us have any way to participate directly in deciding what technologies we will use, how they will be deployed, what kind of social controls will be exerted over private interests who organize and run them for their own gain, etc. (supposedly the federal government regulates them in the public interest, but that is clearly false as shown YET AGAIN by this disaster). The basic direction of science is considered a product of objective research and development, when it has always been skewed to serve the interests of those who already have economic and political power. Public, democratic direction for science and technology is not only non-existent, we really don’t even discuss it as a possibility!

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The Ford Foundation, created seven decades ago by a U.S. car industry
scion, notably diverged from its past today by announcing a new, $200
million grant program aimed at promoting the local integration of
transportation and land use planning and a movement beyond auto-based
development.

The foundation’s president, Luis Ubiñas, revealed the move in a
speech to local community leaders gathered at the White House to discuss
the future of the nation’s once auto-dominant cities.

Ubiñas cited several examples of existing transit and urban
development projects that would be good candidates for the foundation’s
five-year grant program. The Bay Area’s residential-commercial "transit
villages," Detroit’s public-private M1
light rail plan, and New Orleans’ push
to rebuild its Claiborne Avenue corridor topped the list.

“When we look at metro regions and see pockets of serious
unemployment
but also pockets of employment opportunity, and disjointed transit
systems that
fail to connect people to the services they need and the jobs they seek,
it’s clear that a different approach is needed,” Pablo J. Farías, a vice
president at the foundation, said in a statement on the grants.

The foundation was established
in 1936 with an initial gift from Edsel Ford, son of the automaker
Henry Ford, and managed by members of the Ford family for several
decades after its founding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Obama administration’s awarding of $1.5 billion in competitive transportation stimulus grants on Wednesday sparked elation in cities such as Kansas City and New Orleans. But those celebrations were more than just anecdotal evidence of the so-called TIGER program‘s urban impact, according to a new analysis from the Brookings Institution’s Rob Puentes.

Writing on The New Republic’s Avenue blog, Puentes notes
that the nation’s top 100 metro areas — which collectively generate
three-quarters of U.S. GDP, according to the U.S. Conference of Mayors
– got more than 70 percent of the total TIGER funding.

Meanwhile,
the stimulus law’s $48 billion in formula-based transportation spending
continues to give disproportionately short shrift to major cities.

Puentes
found that as of the end of 2009, the top 100 U.S. metro areas had
received about 59 percent of total infrastructure stimulus spending.
That number masks a greater urban-rural imbalance in highway stimulus
money, just 50 percent of which went to America’s biggest — and often,
most economically productive — cities. (See the chart above for more
details.)

A July analysis
by Streetsblog Capitol Hill reached a similar conclusion, focusing on
the top 20 U.S. cities and finding them getting 28 percent of the $787
billion stimulus law’s highway money, compared with 61 percent of its
transit funding.

So what can be done to help give major
cities a share of infrastructure recovery aid that’s commensurate with
the scale of their economic needs? For Puentes, the answer is simple:
Use TIGER as a model:

As Washington considers the additional steps
needs to retain and create jobs, the TIGER’s recognition of the
economic primacy of U.S. metropolitan area should be illustrative.

At today’s debate on conservative support for transit, developer Chris
Leinberger had a modest proposal for lawmakers who are desperately
seeking new transportation financing strategies in an era of diminishing gas tax returns: Ask real-estate developers to pay for projects that will increase their profits.

The
concept is often referred to by the wonkish term "value capture,"
evaluated by the University of Minnesota in a groundbreaking study last fall. But Leinberger, an active player
on land-use issues who founded the group Locus to help make urban
planners part of the federal transportation debate, kept his case
simple and accessible.

Many developers are willing to "share part of our financial
upside" to ensure continued local investment in transit and mixed-use
development, Leinberger said. "We in the private sector need to be at
the table because, a) we need these systems, and b) we have the
financial means to pay for it."

Leinberger’s approach, which
attracted vocal interest today from House transportation committee
chairman Jim Oberstar (D-MN), would not solve the problem of uneven
federal support for roads — which are funded through an 80-20 split
between Washington and local governments — and transit, which tends to
receive a lower 50-50 federal match.

"If we need to lower the
federal match, that’s fine," Leinberger said, as long as private-sector
buy-in could be counted as part of a locality’s contribution to transit.

Yet
despite value capture’s increasing presence in transportation financing
debates, it has a long way to go before members of Congress could
consider enshrining it in legislation. Increased property taxes are one
established method of requiring land owners to contribute to transit
construction, but cities such as Portland have attempted a largely
opposite approach by offering property-tax exemptions to developers who build up in walkable areas.