Mayor Ed Lee walks to school with students from Marshall Elementary in the Inner Mission. Photo: Marianne Szeto

Yesterday marked the first Walk to School Day since San Francisco began installing 15 mph speed limit signs near dozens of schools, and thousands of students were a little safer from speeding cars as they made their way to class.

“The new safer speed zones will calm traffic in neighborhoods throughout the city and help more people enjoy walking,” said Walk SF director Elizabeth Stampe, who joined students from Marshall Elementary in the Inner Mission on a “walking bus” along with Mayor Ed Lee, D6 Supervisor Jane Kim, Recreation and Parks General Manager Phil Ginsburg, and SFMTA Director Ed Reiskin.

Fourty-four schools around the city yesterday held Walk to School Day events involving over 7,000 students. According to the SF Department of Public Health, 56 percent of students at Marshall walk to school, and 70 percent live within one mile. School re-assignments this year allowed more students to attend schools in their neighborhood, close enough to walk or bike.

“Providing safer streets throughout San Francisco is a top priority for the SFMTA,” said Reiskin. “As we continue our work to install new speed-limit signs around schools like Marshall, we are collaborating with the Police Department to educate surrounding communities of the significant, but necessary change that will help keep our students safe.”

The SFMTA plans to install 15 mph signs at 213 K-12 schools by December 2013.

A Marshall Elementary parent speaks with Mayor Lee, Supervisor Kim, SFMTA Director Reiskin, and Rec and Parks' Ginsburg behind. Photo: Marianne Szeto

Sen. Tom Coburn has an axe to grind with bicycle safety. Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images

It’s unclear how we went from a House determined to cut spending levels by more than 30 percent to a House unanimously committed to passing a bill with current spending levels. It’s unclear even that this unanimous vote plan will work. Republican party discipline isn’t what it used to be, what with the Tea Party revolt just loving to accuse House Speaker John Boehner of being a tax-and-spend liberal.

However, rumor has it that House Republicans are being told that the extension’s spending levels don’t change the appropriations levels the House is willing to approve, and that’s $27.7 billion for the year for highways and $5.2 billion for transit. So if the extension authorizes $19.8 billion for highways for the first six months and $4.2 billion for transit, that’s fine: It just means that for the whole second half of the year, highways would only get $7.9 billion and transit would only get $800 million. Those are deadly cuts, but it appears that transportation leaders are putting off that fight till later in order to pass an extension now.

Meanwhile, if the extension bill doesn’t pass the House by unanimous consent, the House will need to follow normal rules of order to pass it by majority vote. That means it’ll need to wait a full 72 hours between the posting of the bill and the vote, and that would mean a Wednesday vote. It could also open the door to a messy amendment process.

Speaking of amendments: In the Senate, Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn is planning to file an amendment to cut Transportation Enhancements from the six-month extension. It’s good news that he’s doing it as an amendment and not a hold on the bill, since a hold is a unilateral move to force the Senate to utilize a much more time-consuming process to vote on the bill. His amendment will likely fail, since many senators who would normally vote with him to cut bike/ped funding are committed to passing a clean extension, with no amendments.

If Coburn’s amendment does fail, he can lose graciously — or he can try to filibuster. It’s unclear whether he plans to do that. While the House is hoping to have 100 percent support for the bill, insiders fear that in the Senate, the bill could fall short of the 60 percent majority it needs to overcome a filibuster.

The Senate hasn’t yet introduced a (six-month) surface transportation and (four-month) FAA extension bill to replace the four-month surface transportation extension passed by the EPW Committee last Thursday. It won’t go through the same process – the extension will be filed as an amendment attached to an enormously popular bill that House Majority Leader Harry Reid has reportedly been holding on to for just this purpose – as a vehicle to get more controversial measures passed by adding them as amendments. The bill itself deals with sanctions against Burma, a cause dear to Republican Leader Mitch McConnell’s heart.

So, the transportation extension will be an amendment attached to the Burma bill, and Coburn’s TE cut will be an amendment to the transportation amendment. Clear enough?

Meanwhile, according to our sources, Sens. Boxer and Inhofe of EPW agree that any amendment – even to the six-month extension – would be a violation of their delicate bipartisan deal on the two-year reauthorization. They require a clean extension.

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.

There is more to walking than walking. Photos by Jan Gehl.

Editor’s note: Streetsblog San Francisco is thrilled to present a three-part series this week by renowned Danish architect and livable streets luminary Jan Gehl. The pieces are excerpts from his book, “Cities for People” published by Island Press. This is part two. Donate to Streetsblog SF and you’ll qualify to win a copy of the book, courtesy of Island Press.

It is a big day when at about one year of age a child takes that first step. The child’s eye level moves from the vantage point of the crawler (about 1 foot) above the floor to about 2.6 feet.

The little walker can see much more and move faster. From now on everything in the child’s world — field of vision, perspective, overview, pace, flexibility and opportunities — will move on a higher, faster plane. All of life’s important moments will hereafter be experienced on foot at standing and walking pace.

While walking is basically a linear movement that brings the walker from place to place, it is also much more. Walkers can effortlessly stop underway to change direction, maneuver, speed up or slow down or switch to a different type of activity such as standing, sitting, running, dancing, climbing or lying down.

A city walk illustrates its many variations: the quick goal-oriented walk from A to B, the slow stroll to enjoy city life or a sunset, children’s zig-zagging, and senior citizens’ determined walk to get fresh air and exercise or do an errand. Regardless of the purpose, a walk in city space is a “forum” for the social activities that take place along the way as an integral part of pedestrian activities. Heads move from side to side, walkers turn or stop to see everything, or to greet or talk with others. Walking is a form of transport, but it is also a potential beginning or an occasion for many other activities.

Many factors impact on walking speed: the quality of the route, the surface, the strength of the crowd, and the age and mobility of the walker. The design of the space also plays a role. Pedestrians usually walk faster on streets that invite linear movement, while their pace falls while traversing squares. It is almost like water, which flows rapidly along riverbeds but moves more slowly in lakes. Weather is another factor. People move more quickly when it is raining, windy or cold.

Life takes place on foot in Amman, Jordan.

On Copenhagen’s main walking street, Strøget, pedestrian traffic on cold winter days is 35 percent faster than on good summer days. In summer there are many pedestrians in the city promenading and enjoying the process, while pedestrian traffic in winter is considerably more targeted. When it’s cold, people walk for warmth. On average the walking speed in summer is 14.2 min per km/23 min per mile, corresponding to 4.2 km per hour/2.6 mph. Corresponding winter walking speeds are 10.3 min per km/16.6 min per mile corresponding to 5.8 km per hour/3.6 mph.

A walk of 450 m/0.3 mile takes about five minutes, while a walk of 900 m/0.6 mile will take about 10 minutes at 5.4 km per hour/3.4 mph. Naturally, these time estimates are only valid if the area is uncrowded and people can walk without obstacles or breaks.

An acceptable walking distance is a relatively fluid concept. Some people happily walk many kilometers/miles, while even short walks are difficult for old people, the disabled and children. Walks of 500 m/0.3 miles are mentioned frequently as a distance most people are willing to walk. However, an acceptable distance also depends on the quality of the route. If the pavement is good quality and the route interesting, a considerably longer walk is often acceptable. Conversely, the desire to walk drops drastically if the route is uninteresting and thus feels tiring. In that case a walk of only 200 or 300 m/0.12 to 0.18 mile will seem like a long way, even if it only takes less than five minutes on foot.

A distance of 500 m/0.3 mile as an approximate goal for acceptable walks is supported by the size of city centers. By far the majority of city centers are about one km2/0.39 sq mile, corresponding to an area of 1×1 km/0.6 x 0.6 mile. This means that a walk of a kilometer or less will bring the pedestrians around to most of the functions in the city.

Huge cities like London and New York have corresponding patterns, as they are divided into numerous centers and districts. The magic one km2 center size can certainly be found in these cities. The acceptable walking distance does not change just because the city is larger.

This street sign in Poland discreetly recommends that people keep their arms close to their sides

An important prerequisite for a comfortable and pleasurable walk is room to walk relatively freely and unhampered, without having to weave in and out and without being pushed and shoved by others. Children, older people and people with disabilities have special requirements for being able to walk unhindered. People pushing strollers, shopping carts and walkers also need plenty of room for walking. Groups of young people are typically the most tolerant about moving about in crowds.

If we look at photographs from 100 years ago, pedestrians are often shown moving freely and unimpeded in every direction. Cities were still primarily the province of pedestrians, with horse-drawn carriages and trolleys and a few cars merely as visitors.

In step with the car invasion, pedestrians were first pushed up along building façades and then increasingly squeezed together on shrinking sidewalks. Crowded sidewalks are unacceptable and a problem worldwide.

Studies of urban streets in London, New York and Sydney illustrate the problems of narrow sidewalks for large crowds of pedestrians on streets where most of the area is designed for car traffic, despite the fact that the number of drivers is far lower than the number of pedestrians crowded together on the sidewalk.

The pedestrian traffic on sidewalks moves in columns that are pushed and shoved, and everyone must move at the speed dictated by the pedestrian stream. The elderly, the disabled and children cannot possibly keep up.

Various limits are suggested for what is considered an acceptable amount of space for pedestrian traffic, depending on context. Based on studies in New York, William H. Whyte proposes up to 23 pedestrians per minute per meter/three feet on the sidewalk. Studies in Copenhagen propose 13 pedestrians per minute per meter/three feet of sidewalk, if the limit for unacceptable crowding on sidewalks is to be avoided.

If walking is to be comfortable, including acceptable distance and pace, there has to be room to walk without too many interruptions and obstacles. These qualities are often offered in dedicated pedestrian areas, but seldom on sidewalks on city streets. On the contrary, it is impressive to note how many obstacles and difficulties have been incorporated into pedestrian landscapes over the years. Traffic signs, lampposts, parking meters and all types of technical control units are systematically placed on sidewalks in order “not to be in the way.” Cars parked on or partially on sidewalks, thoughtlessly parked bicycles and undisciplined street displays complete the picture of a pedestrian landscape where pedestrians have to maneuver like skiers down a slalom course in order to move along sidewalks that are too narrow in the first place.

The high priority given to car traffic and parking have created unreasonable conditions for pedestrians all over the world.

Enough space for walking is impor- tant to all groups of pedestrians, but especially children, the elderly and the disabled.

Walking in urban landscapes can present many other petty annoyances and difficulties. One is pedestrian fences intended to keep walkers confined to crowded sidewalks. Barriers erected on pavements at intersections to keep pedestrians away from corners extend some way down the street, causing more detours and annoyance

Interruptions in sidewalks to provide cars with uncomplicated access to garages, driveways, delivery gates and gas stations have gradually become a natural part of the street scene in car-dominated cities.

On Regent Street in London, 45 – 50,000 pedestrians daily force their way through 13 unnecessary sidewalk interruptions, and in Adelaide, South Australia, streets in the city center offer pedestrians no fewer than 330 unnecessary sidewalk interruptions.

In addition to these meaningless interruptions that force pedestrians, wheelchairs and strollers up and down curbs at garages and gates, there are many unmotivated interruptions where small streets run into larger ones. In almost all of the situations mentioned, the sidewalk should be led unbroken through entrance ways and side streets as part of a general policy of inviting rather than discouraging pedestrian traffic.

The combination of inadequate space and annoyances large and small is supplemented by endless waiting time at stoplights at city intersections. Pedestrians are typically given low priority and thus face long waits at red lights followed by short green-light periods. The green light often only lasts seconds before being replaced by blinking red signals meaning that it is now time to run to avoid delaying the traffic.

When walking resembles an obstacle course (Sydney, Australia).

In many places, particularly in the UK and other areas inspired by British traffic planning, crossing the streets is not a basic human right but rather something pedestrians have to apply for by pushing a button at intersections. Sometimes they even have to press three times to make it through the maze at complicated intersections. In these cities any thought of being able to walk 450 meters/1,476 feet in five minutes is a fantasy.

The center of Sydney has many pedestrians, as well as many intersections, many stoplights, many pushbuttons and long periods of waiting. Here pedestrians can easily spend half of the total walking time waiting for the “walk” signal. Waits of up to 15 percent, 25 percent or even 50 percent of a walk are common on many traffic streets in cities around the world.

By comparison, the waiting time on a one-kilometer/0.6 mile walk on Copenhagen’s main walking street, Strøget, is only 0 – 3 percent of walking time. A goal-oriented walk through the city via Strøget can be done in 12 minutes, but many people spend far more time because the walk is so interesting.

Another special walking phenomenon has been noted on sidewalks where crossroads streets and light signals cause pedestrians to stop frequently. Pedestrians move in clumps and therefore always in crowds, even at times when there isn’t much pedestrian traffic.

Every time the pedestrian stream meets a red light the pedestrians stop, and the slightly slower walkers have time to catch up with the main field, after which everyone is once again amalgamated into a clump. When the light turns green, the clump moves forward again, but disperses slightly before the next stoplight, where everyone  is gathered once again. Between clumps, the sidewalk is typically almost devoid of people.

Urbanites all over the world are highly energy conscious when it comes to saving their own energy when walking. They cross streets where it is most natural for them, avoid detours, obstacles, stairs and steps, and prefer direct lines of walking everywhere. When pedestrians can see the object of a walk, they rechart a course along the shortest line. Their pleasure from direct walks can be seen clearly in city squares, by their footsteps after a snowfall and on countless tramped paths worn across lawns and landscapes the world over.

Walking directly to your destination is a natural response, often in an unfortunate and almost comic conflict with architects’ rulers and the resulting right-angled urban projects. These right-angled design projects look neat and proper until the corners, lawns and squares are trodden on in every direction.

It is often easy to foresee the preferred lines of walking and to incorporate them to a reasonable extent in the design of complexes and landscaping. Preferred lines often inspire fascinating patterns and shapes.

Many cities have consistently allowed entrances, garages and side streets to interrupt sidewalks. However, cars should yield on side streets, allow- ing pedestrians and bicycles to continue on without interruption (Regent Street, London).

A standard traffic solution in Copenhagen.

About 500 meters/1,640 feet is a distance most pedestrians find acceptable. This is not an absolute truth, however, because what is acceptable will always be a combination of distance and the quality of the route. If comfort is low, the walk will be short, while if the route is interesting, rich in experience and comfortable, pedestrians forget the distance and enjoy experiences as they happen.

The “tiring length perspective” describes the situation in which the pedestrian can see the whole route at a glance before even starting out. The road is straight and seemingly endless, with no promise of interesting experiences along the way. The prospect is tiring before the walk is even begun.

Even a long walk feels short along a curved road with plenty to see (Cartagena, Colombia).

In contrast, the route can be divided into manageable segments, where people can walk from square to square, which naturally breaks up the walk, or along a street that winds enticingly, inviting the pedestrian from one section to the next. A winding street does not have to twist much to prevent the walker seeing very far down the street, but is constantly walking towards corners and twists, where new vistas open.

Copenhagen’s main pedestrian street, Strøget, is a good kilometer/0.6 mile long and runs almost directly from one end of the city center to the other. Countless twists and turns along the way keep the spaces closed up and interesting. Four squares further divide the route and make walking the length of the city center psychologically manageable. We walk from square to square, and the many twists and turns make the trip interesting and unpredictable. Under these circumstances a walk of one kilometer/0.6 mile or more is no problem.

Street patterns, the design of space, rich detail and intense experiences influence the quality of pedestrian routes and pleasure in walking. The city’s “edges” also play a role. We have plenty of time to look as we walk, and the quality of the ground floor façades we pass close by at eye level, is particularly important to the quality of the tour. The section on lively cities proscribes “small units and many doors” for streets frequented by pedestrians.

The principle of narrow units and many experiences is also important along pedestrian routes that don’t have shops and stalls. Front doors, building details, landscaping and greenery in front of housing, offices and institutions can make a valuable contribution to interesting experiences on walks. If buildings also have a primarily vertical façade expression, walks seem shorter and more manageable, whereas buildings with powerful horizontal lines underscore and reinforce distance.

Walking up stairs is harder than walking on a flat surface, and we avoid stairs whenever we can. And for many groups in society stairs are a direct barrier.

Stairs and steps are another area that clearly illustrate pedestrians’ major interest in saving energy. Horizontal movements are no big problem. If the telephone rings in a neighboring room, we just get up and answer it. However, if the telephone rings on another floor, we shout to ask if someone else will answer it. Going up and down stairs and steps requires new movements, more muscle power, and walking rhythm has to be changed to climbing rhythm. These factors make it more difficult to go up and down than to move on the same plane, or alternatively, to be transported mechanically up and down. At metro stations, in airports and department stores, people stand in line to take the escalator, while staircases next to them are almost empty. Shopping malls and department stores built in several stories rely on escalators and elevators to move people from floor to floor. If the transport breaks down, people go home!

It is interesting to study daily life in multistory housing. In almost all cases, the bulk of activity takes place on the ground floor. Once you have entered the living room, you naturally tend to wait before going upstairs again. Children bring their toys down into the living room, where they play with them all day until their parents take them back up again at bedtime. The lower floors are almost always more well-worn than the upper ones. Second-or third-floor rooms are almost always used less than those on the ground floor, and roof terraces are used far less than outside space with direct access without climbing stairs. The heaps gathered on the bottom steps waiting to be taken upstairs speak volumes about the physical and psychological problems related to internal stairs.

Stairs and steps definitely represent a genuine physical and psychological challenge for pedestrians. If possible pedestrians certainly will avoid them. However, like street length, staircases can also be disguised to make the trip seem more doable. If at the foot of a five-story building we could see the entire staircase with its seemingly endless steps, most people would find it impossible to crawl to the top, unless their lives were at stake. In situations like these it is interesting to see the wide- spread use of elementary “staircase psychology.”

If we can see the staircase all the way to the top, we find the climb all the more tiring.

Staircases are angled to wind from landing to landing, dividing the climb into shorter segments. It is like moving from “square” to “square,” and the climber never gets the chance to see the entire course of stairs in its exhausting length. That way we are enticed into the building, even if we have to climb. Even when the enticement is utterly convincing, it is the elevator that is the most used if there is one. Naturally staircase psychology is also used successfully in public space, where examples like the Spanish Steps in Rome demonstrate that a climb can be beautifully combined with interesting experiences.

With regard to visions of lovely urban space that invite people to walk as much as possible, the conclusion is actually very simple. Stairs and steps are genuine obstacles — in principle to be avoided wherever possible. When a necessity in the pedestrian landscape, stairs and steps must have comfortable dimensions, and visual interest and staircase psychology must be used purposefully. Ramps or elevators are estab- lished for rolling pedestrian traffic and people with reduced mobility as a matter of course.

If we consider situations where pedestrians are free to choose between ramps and stairs, we see that they clearly prefer ramps. Walking rhythm can be maintained if height differences are evened out by allowing the terrain to rise and fall slightly or by using ramps. Children, the disabled and rolling pedestrian traffic can also complete their walk without interruptions. Ramps are not always as full of character as stairs and steps, but they are generally preferred.

Marathon preparation in Venice means ramps instead of stairs.

Shoppers have a choice of ramps, stairs and escalators at this shopping center in Beijing, China.

In the early years of the automobile invasion, from the 1950s to the 1970s, road engineering focused uncritically on increasing capacity on the roads and preventing accidents to pedestrians. The solution to both problems was often to segregate traffic and lead pedestrians under or over roads by means of pedestrian underpasses and bridges. This meant subjecting pedestrians to stairs on either side of the crossing. Planners quickly learned that pedestrian underpasses and bridges were exceedingly unpopular and only worked if tall fences were also built along the roads, so that pedestrians literally had no other way out. This still did not solve the problem of strollers, wheelchairs and bicycles, however.

Pedestrian underpass systems had the additional disadvantage of being dark and dank, and people generally feel insecure if they are unable to see very far ahead. In short, the often expensive pedestrian underpasses and bridges were in conflict with the basic premises for good pedestrian landscapes. Seen in the perspective of current visions of inviting people to walk and bicycle more in cities, clearly pedestrian underpasses and bridges can only be solutions in those special cases where major highways must be crossed. Solutions must be found for all other roads and streets that allow pedestrians and bicycles to stay on street level and cross with dignity. An integrated traffic model will also make city streets friendlier and safer as cars will have to move more slowly and stop more often.

Today the world is full of abandoned pedestrian underpasses and bridges. They belong to a certain time and a certain philosophy.

in Japanese cities the overpass- es are intertwined into larger systems. Level of difficulty: great. Chances of interesting promenades: small (Sendai, Japan).

Naturally pavements play an important role in pedestrian comfort. In future the quality of pavement and surfaces will be particularly important in a world with more senior citizens and pedestrians with reduced mobility, more rolling pedestrian traffic and more people wanting to take children to the city. It is desirable for surfaces to be even and non slip. Traditional cobblestones and broken natural slate stones are full of visual character, but seldom live up to modern requirements. In places where the character of the old cobblestones has to be maintained, bands of flat granite have to be added to enable wheelchairs, strollers, small children, senior citizens and women in high heels to move in relative comfort. This type of pavement, combining old with new, is used in many cities and can be designed as elegant floors for public space, while paying history its due.

As far as possible, a good city for walking must function all year round, day and night. In winter it is important that snow and ice are cleared, and, to use the Copenhagen model as an example, pedestrian areas and bicycle paths should be cleared before roads for car traffic. On cold days when pavements are icy, pedestrians have a far greater risk of injury than do car drivers, who typically drive more slowly and carefully. In all parts of the world and in all seasons, ensuring dry nonslip surfaces for pedes- trians is an important part of whole-hearted invitations to walk in cities.

Lighting is crucial once night falls. Good lighting on people and faces and reasonable lighting for façades, niches and corners is needed along the most important pedestrian routes to strengthen the real and the ex- perienced  sense of security, and sufficient light is needed on pavements, surfaces and steps so that pedestrians can maneuver safely.

Please walk — around the clock all year round.

A man tries his best not to surprise drivers today while crossing Lincoln Way. The SFMTA has removed car parking at other crossings on Lincoln to improve visibility. Photo: Aaron Bialick

Making eye contact with a driver while walking across an intersection is important, but what if a driver’s line of vision is obscured by cars parked within a few feet of a crosswalk?

“There have been times when people make the turn really quickly and they don’t see you and don’t have enough time to stop,” said Ryan, an Upper Haight resident, as he walked home along Lincoln Way from his job in the Inner Sunset.

“I see street corners all the time that are blocked by cars that make it really hard for folks to know if they can cross safely,” said Walk SF Executive Director Elizabeth Stampe. “It also makes it hard for drivers to know if there are pedestrians waiting to cross.”

The conditions are common at many San Francisco intersections but the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is trying to change that with a relatively simple solution known in the transportation world as “daylighting”. The pedestrian safety measure involves removing the most hazardous car parking spaces closest to crosswalks.

“Daylighting is an excellent low-cost strategy to help drivers and pedestrians see each other and make our intersections safer,” said Stampe. As one of the lowest-hanging fruits in the toolkit for safer streets, it requires only the funds and local outreach needed to paint parking-prohibited red curbs.

The city’s Better Streets Plan (BSP), adopted last year, states that parking should be prohibited at a minimum of 10 feet from crosswalks, and the California Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices includes similar recommendations. However, outdated and short-sighted practices have left street users exposed to the dangers of allowing stored private automobiles to block visibility at intersections.

“In San Francisco, due to limited on-street parking supply and high demand, the practice has been to allow parking up to intersections unless there are location-specific grounds for parking removal,” says the BSP.

“The new 10-foot minimum guideline will be implemented on a case-by-case basis as resources allow. Priority should be given to intersections with safety issues, existing project locations, and locations where staff is conducting safety reviews,” it says.

SFMTA spokesperson Paul Rose provided a list showing 61 intersections where the SFMTA’s Livable Streets Divison has made improvements “in addition to the red zones and crosswalk enhancements that SFMTA’s Traffic Operations group routinely installs in response to public requests and engineering surveys.”

The list primarily includes dangerous expressways like Lincoln Way and Fulton Street bordering Golden Gate Park, Geary Boulevard, Alemany Boulevard, as well as Taraval and Noriega Streets in the Sunset and Mission Street.

“These locations were prioritized because they are on multi-lane or arterial streets, and may have speed limits of 30 mph or more,” said Rose.

“For most locations, we have also converted the existing marked crosswalks to continental or ‘ladder style’ and added yield markings and signage to further enhance pedestrian visibility and motorist yielding,” he added.

The projects could remove the dangerous element of surprise that’s so often present crossing the streets by any mode of transport.

“Let’s get them out there, and let’s get them out there quickly,” said Stampe, highlighting the possibility for the valuable space at street corners to be used for other amenities. ”Could we see planters, bike corrals and other traffic calming measures on these corners in a way that doesn’t clutter the sidewalk further?”

Without such additions, daylighting can actually backfire if not planned carefully.

“The whole idea of effective traffic calming means narrowing a street,” said Stampe. “I want to make sure that we make it safer and not more dangerous in some ways. Sometimes after clearing away these obstacles, people think they can drive faster, and that would be counterproductive.”

Image: SFMTA

San Francisco could be headed on a course toward transportation sustainability, granted it’s the politically popular thing to do.

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) recently released its 2011 Draft Climate Action Strategy [pdf], laying out a progressive blueprint for how the city should tackle reducing its greenhouse gas emissions from one of their leading sources: driving.

“The Climate Action Strategy is a citywide plan, but since the SFMTA is responsible for the streets, arguably we have the biggest part in all of this,” said SFMTA Director Cheryl Brinkman.

Transportation makes up 36 percent of the city’s emissions, says the report, and 89 percent of that is from private automobiles. The SFMTA’s goal is to cut transportation emissions to half of 1990 levels by 2035 by reducing the current share of driving in half to a mode split of 30 percent of trips by car, 30 percent by transit, and 40 percent by bicycling and walking.

From parking regulations to transit-oriented development to complete streets, the plan recommends the most effective measures to take and perhaps most importantly, the political processes required to fund and implement them. But while the SFMTA staff and directors may seem mostly on board, support from other agencies will be crucial to cause a major shift in the city’s transportation and land use policies.

“We need to hold the line on our transit-first policy,” said Timothy Papandreou, SFMTA Deputy Director of Transportation Planning for the Sustainable Streets Division. “It’s something that we’ll continue to be challenged on, but that’s really our major policy move.”

The most politically challenging strategies, said Brinkman, include reallocating street space to dedicated transit and bicycle lanes as well as implementing the parking and congestion pricing policies that will be the key to funding projects.

“We know what it takes to make buses run efficiently,” she said. “But we can’t just snap our fingers and make public transportation this amazing option when we’ve spent the past fifty years making private automobiles this amazing option.”

“We’re going to need the support of the supervisors and the Mayor,” said Brinkman, who is optimistic the support is there. ”We also need the support of the citizens, which I think we have. When I look at the numbers of households that own one car, or less, it’s big.”

According to the report, 30.3 percent of households in the city don’t own cars while another 40.8 percent own only one car. The average automobile trip within the city is 2.8 miles, compared to 2.3 miles for bicycles, and the most driving is shown to come from residences and employers in areas with low density, separated uses and streets that most heavily favor automobile speed.

Projected Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) for residences and employers. Image: SFMTA

A promising step already launched last week is SFpark, a first-of-its-kind venture to collect data on parking demand and price it accurately. The program is expected to help reduce car congestion from drivers circling for parking, clearing up the streets for bicycles and transit and improving safety for pedestrians.

Coupled with enforcing new and existing ordinances against under-priced parking in the city’s garages, the plan names demand pricing as a crucial component for providing more revenue to improve walking, cycling and Muni, as well as providing less incentive to drive.

As one early step, Brinkman highlighted the need to eliminate “early bird” discounts given to drivers by private parking garages during the morning rush hour. “These garages have a pricing strategy that is encouraging people to drive right when it’s most important that our buses move efficiently,” she said.

Livable City Director Tom Radulovich praised the plan’s progressive view on city planning, though he says seeing it through will require better coordination between the current “three headed creature” of city planning agencies: the SF Planning Department, the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, and the SF Redevelopment Agency.

“It’s great to see land use questions and parking issues called out in this report, I think for the first time, as climate reduction strategies,” said Radulovich, praising recommendations such as eliminating minimum parking requirements, enforcing employer benefits to non-driving commuters, pursuing better Muni fleet maintenance and expansion, and implementing the Transit Effectiveness Project.

Absent from the report, however, are maximum parking limits in new developments and a plan for dedicated bus lanes, he noted. Brinkman also pointed to bike sharing systems as a strong strategy that should be included.

The SFMTA is currently meeting its goals of reducing emissions from Muni vehicles, notes the plan, but automobiles remain the biggest hurdle. However, car owners in the city could start paying their fair share to fund the Climate Action Strategy.

A mitigation impact fee of $50 to $150 per car would raise $24 million to $72 million a year, says the report, as well as an off-street commercial parking fee of $100 to $300 per stall of free parking, which would raise $6 million to $17 million anually. The plan says SFMTA staff should evaluate the fees and report to the agency’s board before June 30, 2012.

Even if the economic justification for such measures is apparent to some advocates and city officials, educating the public to move the political process forward will be a major challenge.

“Change is really difficult, and a few people can slow things down by being very upset,” said Brinkman. ”Whether or not the involved public process is something you love or hate, it’s the reality of San Francisco. People aren’t stupid, they need to see why it’s going to work and how it’s going to work.”

Different vehicles shape a different streetscape in Peru.

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

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

We entered Peru on a bus from Ecuador, crossing the Macará river.

Crossing the river, that's our bus.

We rode from Cuenca, Ecuador to Chiclayo, Peru, which took about 22 hours.

Bus travel was a big part of our journey in Peru, though we took a plane from Chiclayo on the north coast all the way to Cusco in the southern Andes. The beginning of our time in the country finished our descent from the Ecuadorian Andes to the stark desert of northern Peru. Our international bus arrived in the Peruvian city of Piura, which I hadn’t heard of before, but it’s a good-sized city of a half million or so, sitting amidst a heavily irrigated desert of citrus farms and more. The most surprising discovery as we rode in on the dusty streets was to see countless moto-taxis and freight tricycles. They outnumbered autos, filling the streets with the canopied three-wheelers.

This was our first view of vehicular traffic in Piura, Peru.

Motorcycles dominated, both individually and as motors for rickshaws.

We changed to another four-hour bus ride from Piura to Chiclayo where we grabbed a plane after a few hours of sleep in a hotel, having been on buses for about 22 hours. Once we made it to Cuzco we delighted in the ancient capital of the Incas. The incredible stone-masonry of the Inca culture is incomparable, and what a fun surprise to find one of the original streets of their capital still functioning. It’s called Antisuyo and the massive granite blocks, so perfectly fit to each other, have survived centuries of earthquakes that crumbled lesser structures. The narrow, pedestrian friendly streets on the slopes of Cuzco are a walker’s paradise.

Here I am standing on Cuzco's Antisuyo, an original street from the time of the Inca Empire. The anti-seismic granite construction is visible in the amazing stonework here and in many places throughout former Inca territories.

From Cuzco we went on one of the world’s famous “walks” on the Inca Trail. Four days, three mountain passes (the highest being 14,000 feet!), and a great deal of it on the thousands of original steps that make up the well-trodden Inca Trail. We learned a bit about the Inca Empire along our journey, and knew that their road system equalled the Romans in terms of engineering, management of water and drainage, and perhaps even sheer extent. Inca Trails extended from the capital in Cuzco all the way to Colombia in the north, Chile in the south, and encompassed a population of millions.

Here I am slowly making my way to a 14,000 foot pass.

It's hard to describe the historic resonance of hiking a road built centuries earlier and used heavily during an entirely different culture and time in history.

After an amazing four days that got us to Machu Picchu we caught a bus from Cuzco to Arequipa, but our “bed bus” was a broken down second-tier bus rather than the luxury ride we thought we were buying. The views of snow-capped mountains and endless green valleys in the Altiplano were stunning, and after about 8 hours we arrived in the high plains town of Juliaca. This town depended even more on pedicabs and freight bikes than we’d seen in the north.

The altiplano as seen from our bus out of Cuzco on the way southwest to Juliaca.

The relatively comfortable bus terminal in Juliaca, Peru.

Street scene in Juliaca, Peru.

There's something so charming about pedicabs!

Great to look out the bus window and see more pedicabs and freight trikes than cars and trucks.

We had a dramatic late dusk ride along the sides of a huge lake called Lagunillas, as rain and thunder engulfed us on the way to Arequipa. The city’s night lights sprawled before us as we descended to it from the mountains. When we woke the next morning we realized we were still quite high (over a mile high) and in a surprisingly arid environment. Walking into downtown we found ourselves on Calle Bolivar, a pleasant pedestrian-centered avenue, which was a hint of something a little different in Peru’s second largest city.

Calle Bolivar-Sucre in Arequipa, Peru, a street recently reclaimed for pedestrians.

Here in the historic center of Arequipa (two huge volcanoes are obscured behind the cathedral by dense clouds) the traffic chokes the surrounding streets.

The historic city center’s streets were jammed with taxis and combis, which we soon realized was normal in Peru’s cities. Crossing the street was a continuous challenge but we started to get a handle on moving through the city (that video above captures the drama). We also found another street, Calle Mercaderos, which was closed to traffic and functioned like a long linear mall. In streets like this we see a different use of public space than we get normally in the U.S. Like the best European city centers, Peru too has taken important streets and dedicated them to pedestrians and public sauntering (and shopping of course).

Calle Mercaderes in Arequipa, a classic pedestrian zone mostly dedicated to shopping and people watching.

Finally we made our way to Lima, the country’s capital. Traffic is insane in Lima, but the city won us over for lots of reasons. For one thing we stayed just off Avenida Arequipa, which happens to have a lovely center median that has a bike way or “ciclovia” running down the middle. We were staying with a friend and had fun learning to navigate Lima by way of the ubiquitous “combis,” which come in all shapes and sizes and colors. The sing-song announcements of destination that the combi fare-takers used to help passengers decide which one to take was one of the pleasures of the ride. But the congested traffic, the bizarre competition between different combis to race ahead to get passengers at the next stop, and the generally aggressive driving by all vehicles presented an streetscape that was unmistakeably hostile to pedestrians.

This is the ciclovia on Avenida Arequipa in Lima, Peru, just outside the apartment we stayed in.

This is a pretty average scene of multiple competing combi lines jammed into traffic, each trying to get to the curb to get more passengers into its seats.

We found the combis pretty comfortable, always clean, and easy to navigate once you figured out where you were going. They only cost about 30 cents a ride too!

Lima is modernizing of course. They’ve put in a freeway that is locally known as “the Ditch,” but down the middle of it is one of several Bus Rapid Transit lines called the Metropolitana. Here’s a couple of shots of another Metropolitana line along one of the regular broad avenues in Lima.

The Metropolitana in Lima looks a lot like the Macrobus in Guadalajara, or BRTs in almost any city.

This is a shot back towards the arriving Metropolitana (at far right), while we sit in gridlock.

We were hapy to connect with local cycling activists, who hosted me giving a Talk on cycling and Critical Mass history. Cicloaxion got a boost from the World Naked Bike Ride a few years back, and now there are several different cycling advocacy groups in town.

Octavio, Edu, and Manu took us on a great ride around the historic center, teaching us how to navigate the insanity of Lima's traffic, and treating us to a great meal in Lima's Chinatown.

And ciclovias exist on a number of streets, along with barely used bicycle parking facilities.

Here's an underutilized Ciclovia in downtown Lima, used here as a parking spot for a couple of freight bikers.

Never did see any bikes parked here... Why do bike racks so often get put in places where they aren't used?

There are a lot of freight bikes rolling around Lima too.

There were lots of these guys rolling around downtown Lima.

Less than a month ago, Lima joined the growing world movement towards Sunday Streets with what they have dubbed “Ciclodia.” Thousands of Lima cyclists and joggers get out on Sunday morning to enjoy a six-kilometer stretch closed to all traffic on Avenida Arequipa. It was great to wake up on Sunday morning to the silence, after having been wakened each of our previous days by the roar of combis and their horns jockeying for position on the same street. So Lima, and Peru more generally, present a panoply of street uses, and a veritable menagerie of vehicles! Nothing jogs or imaginations or our fantasies like immersion in other cultures and other possibilities.

The crowds are emerging for Ciclodia in Lima, Peru, Sunday, March 20, 2011.

Street closed for Cycling Day, Lima Peru.

Lima is evolving and it was exciting to see the burgeoning cycling culture there too.

Chris Carlsson will be giving one of his four-hour bicycle history tours on local transit history, this Sunday, April 3, from 12-4 pm. Meet at CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission at 9th at noon, bring water and snacks. (A $15-50 sliding scale donation is requested to benefit Shaping San Francisco.)

SFMTA Chief Nat Ford presented his “State of the SFMTA” [pdf] report to the board of directors at a special workshop today, a mostly glowing assessment of the past few years but one that acknowledged the pains of its funding crises and the many challenges the agency faces as it looks to the future.

It was also the beginning of a process to update the SFMTA’s strategic plan and set a framework that will guide its sustainable transportation policies and goals.

“We are working hard to shift from planning for cars to planning for people,” said Ford, reading from prepared remarks. “Like the FDA’s food pyramid, too many carbs are not good for you. And so it is true for the mobility pyramid. Too many cars are not good for our city.”

Ford pointed out that San Franciscans account for the majority of auto trips being made, particularly within the northeast part of the city, but that overall vehicle miles traveled is down because of the economy.

A slide of the SFMTA’s mobility pyramid was displayed to the board which showed that the city would need to liberate itself from the private automobile, converting a vast majority of trips to walking and bicycling followed by transit, rideshare and car sharing. The pyramid was prepared by the SFMTA’s Deputy Director of Planning Timothy Papandreou.

“As it relates to a sustainable mobility goal, we need to advance from a 65 percent auto, 15 percent transit, 20 percent pedestrian/bicycle mode split to a 30 percent auto, 30 percent transit and 40 percent pedestrian/bicycle mode split to help with congestion and create a greener, healthier San Francisco, ” said Ford.

He said land use and infrastructure alone would not meet the goals by 2030, and a concerted effort would need to be made related to “parking, road pricing and other measures.”

The sustainable pyramid did not include private autos, which provoked skeptical responses from some directors, who called the goal of walking and biking as the dominant modes “unrealistic.” The remarks were prompted by a question from Bonnie Nelson of Nelson/Nygaard, who was moderating the workshop.

“Everything in the strategic plan derives from this vision,” said Nelson, referring to the mobility pyramid. “Is this the vision that you share for San Francisco, or are there things that you feel need to be thought about more carefully as the staff begins developing their more detailed goals in the strategic plan?”

Referring to the omission of private autos, Chair Tom Nolan remarked: “I’m not sure this would be widely supported in the city of San Francisco. You remember all the struggles we’ve had with the whole issue of trying to extend parking to the evening hours. That’s a very strong voice that was heard. People are going to continue to take their cars.”

“I share that view,” Director Malcolm Heinicke chimed in. “I think the notion that most trips in San Francisco are going to be taken by walk or bike is certainly aspirational if not super aspirational.”

“We want to be aspirational but not delusional,” Nelson responded to a chorus of laughter.

“Now that’s the humorous point,” Heinicke went on. “Now I consider myself a pretty, you know, relatively transit first person, but we have to use our car. I mean, my wife can’t get our infant to the pediatrician by transferring on three bus lines.”

Heinicke said “motorists have rights too and we are the agency that oversees parking, traffic regulation and motorists and I am not only concerned that a vision like this is unrealistic but that it also sends a message of hostility and indifference to motorists.”

Director Bruce Oka said he mostly agreed with Heinicke but believed driving is not a right.

“You really don’t need to drive if you live in a city. Our transit system would get you almost anywhere you need to go,” said Oka. “If we all learn, hey, I’m going to take my car maybe twice a week instead of four times a week. That helps, okay, and I don’t see enough of that happening.”

SFMTA Board member Cheryl Brinkman gives input on the strategic plan. From left are Bonnie Nelson, Nat Ford, Cameron Beach and Brinkman. Timothy Papandreou in the background. Photo: Bryan Goebel.

Cheryl Brinkman, a transit advocate who is a new member of the SFMTA Board, said she would like to see the transit block on the pyramid a little bigger.

“I like the sustainable transportation urban pyramid. I do agree that private autos are always going to have a little place at the top there,” said Brinkman. “I don’t think that cars are necessarily the most amazing and best choice for transportation. It’s just that we’ve conspired for 50 years to make them that.”

Brinkman said the goal would be not to make driving the convenient choice and that the strategic plan was a great opportunity to help make a shift to walking and bicycling. She noted that she is seeing a dramatic mode shift among families who are using bicycles to get their kids to school.

“If we have physically separated bike space for families and for children they’re going to be out there using it. I mean, Sunday Streets is a great example. We provide the space and boom, they’re out there.”

Although the goals will likely be revised based on the directors feedback, the SFMTA is encouraging the public to provide its own feedback by going to the agency’s website and taking a survey and outlining priorities. The SFMTA will begin to finalize the plan in the coming months.

Today’s state of the SFMTA report coincided with Nat Ford’s annual performance review, which the board discussed in closed session. Ford, the city’s highest paid employee, agreed to give back some of his salary last year and a raise is not currently being considered. There are also reports that he is also being wooed for the top transit job in Washington D.C.

States with the highest obesity rates also tend to be where the fewest people bike or walk to work. Image: CDC

Two
reports released last week underscored the increasing severity of
America’s obesity epidemic. And the eye-opening findings add to the
mounting evidence that stopping the spread of obesity and its attendant
health risks will require changes to the nation’s transportation system
as surely as it demands altering our diets.

A report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released Tuesday
showed the number of obese Americans has increased by 2.4 million since
2007. There are now nine states where more than 30 percent of the
population qualifies as obese — up from three states in 2007. (Just ten
years ago, no state had obesity levels above 30 percent). 

The following day, Gallup released a ranking
of the nation’s most and least obese states as part of a broader index
of well-being. By its accounting, a cluster of states in the southeast
– West Virginia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Arkansas, and South Carolina –
have the highest rates of obesity, while the thinnest states, mainly in
the west and New England, tend to have obesity rates about ten
percentage points lower.

In the CDC ranking of states (which varies slightly from the Gallup
ranking), Colorado and the District of Columbia are the only states
with obesity rates under 20 percent, making their rate nearly 15 points
lower than the most obese states. Their secret? During a press briefing, the CDC’s Bill Dietz speculated
that Colorado’s investment in biking and walking trails, as well as
District residents’ frequent use of public transportation, which goes
hand in hand with walking and thus burns more calories than driving, are
possible factors.

Indeed, if you look at rates of active commuting (walking and
biking) in the most and least obese states, a revealing correlation
emerges. Three of the five most obese states in the Gallup ranking are
also among the five states with the smallest percentage of people who
bike to work. At the other end of the spectrum, four of the ten thinnest
states are among those where people bike to work most frequently. (The
commuting rates come from Census data detailed in this League of American Bicyclists report.)

The relationship seems to hold up when you include walking. People
in the five most obese states make about 5.2 percent of all trips by
bike or on foot, according to data published recently in a 2010 benchmarking report
from the Alliance for Biking and Walking. In contrast, people in the
five least obese states made twice as many trips — 10.2 percent of them
— by bike or on foot. 

It seems unlikely that you can chalk this all up to coincidence,
but it’s worth noting that these are back-of-the-envelope comparisons
made without the eye of a trained statistician. And, as Dietz noted in
the press briefing, other factors (such as demographic differences)
surely play an important role.

For a second opinion, I checked with John Pucher,
a Rutgers University planning professor with ample experience crunching
these sorts of numbers. The relationship between a lack of active
commuting and obesity is absolutely real, Pucher said via email. In
fact, Pucher and colleagues have just completed a rigorous study of the
relationship in which they examined health and travel data for 14
countries, all 50 U.S. states, and 47 of the 50 largest American cities.

At all three levels, the researchers found a clear negative
relationship between active travel and obesity. Differences in
transportation choices account for nearly a third of the variation in
obesity rate among states, their analysis shows. Since the study hasn’t
been published officially, Pucher couldn’t reveal any more specifics at this time. But stay tuned: The full study will come out in the American Journal of Public Health on August 20, and we’ll have more details then.

Federal funding for pedestrian and bicycle projects reached a new high last year, according to a report released today by the Federal Highway Administration. In terms of dollars, federal investment in walking and biking more than doubled compared to the previous high, set in 2007, thanks largely to an infusion of $400 million in stimulus funds.

The share of all federal transportation spending devoted to bike-ped projects also rose to an unprecedented level -- all of two percent. Advocates for walking and biking applauded the trend while pointing out the potential for much greater federal commitment to active transportation.

"It continues to be an improvement, and it continues to be a tiny fraction of the money that's available to potentially be spent on biking and walking," said Andy Clarke of the League of American Bicyclists.

Subtracting the $400 million one-shot in stimulus funding, Clarke noted, yields a less impressive year-on-year increase. And part of the increase in reported bike-ped spending might also simply reflect better record keeping by state DOTs, as agencies document the construction of sidewalks and bike lanes as part of larger projects, according to Barbara McCann of the National Complete Streets Coalition.

The spending figures come from an update on the state of walking and biking that the feds release every five years. The original National Bicycling and Walking Study, released in 1994, set two major targets: to double walk and bike mode-share, from 7.9 percent of all trips to 15.8 percent; and to reduce pedestrian and cyclist fatalities by 10 percent.

Today, walking and biking account for 11.9 percent of all trips in the country, according to data from the National Household Travel Survey cited in the FHWA report. The safety target, meanwhile, has already been met, with pedestrian deaths down 22 percent and cycling deaths down 13 percent between 1994 and 2008.

In a post on the U.S. DOT Secretary's blog, Ray LaHood implied that the targets have to get more ambitious:

But, we are still talking about 4,378 pedestrians and 716 bicyclists killed in 2008. No matter how we look at the data, that is just too many.

One way to strengthen national goals for walking and biking, Clarke suggested, is to make them less open-ended and attach specific timeframes to achieve them by. "That performance metric is essential," he said, noting that the original 1994 targets were weakened by the lack of a deadline. "One could argue that we could have achieved [the mode-share target] years ago. We would say, let's recalibrate, so that by 2020 we need to reach 20 percent mode share for bike-walk."

The progress cited in today's report, said Clarke, highlights the need for a robust federal commitment to walking and biking in the next federal transportation bill. "States wouldn't have done this if left to their own devices," he said. "Without the federal leadership, without the funding and targets, we would not have seen movement voluntarily. We need that continued federal leadership in the next transportation bill moving forward. The states have not embraced it sufficiently for it to be left to chance."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rep. Jack Kingston (R-VA), left, in the "congressional ride" during March's National Bike Summit. (Photo: bikeleague via Flickr)

GOP Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (WA), Michael McCaul (TX), Jack Kingston (VA), and Steven LaTourette (OH) signed on to the letter, which was sent to LaHood late yesterday in advance of today's Bike to Work Day events in the capital.

Referencing LaHood's March policy statement urging state and local transportation planners to put cyclists and pedestrians on the same footing as drivers in designing new infrastructure, the lawmakers wrote:

We recognize, and appreciate, that your statement was not about providing equal amounts of funding to all forms of transportation, or prioritizing bicycling and walking over other transportation modes such as trucking, freight or public transit. Instead, your commitment to consider all modes clarified that to give citizens a choice, rather than forcing them into their car, we must make sure that bicycling and walking are as safe and convenient as other modes.

LaTourette's endorsement of that federal embrace of bicycling and pedestrian access is particularly notable. He initially echoed the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Trucking Association in chiding LaHood for the non-binding bike-ped statement, wondering "what job is going to be created" by bike lanes before later walking back his remarks.

A complete copy of the letter, also signed by House transport committee chairman Jim Oberstar (D-MN) and Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), is available after the jump.

Dear Secretary LaHood:

We would like to thank you for the Department of Transportation’s release of the “Policy Statement on Bicycle and Pedestrian Accommodation, Regulations, and Recommendations” announced on March 15. We support the policy statement’s declaration that bicycling and walking are efficient modes of transportation that have an important positive impact on our communities.

We were pleased to see the policy statement’s acknowledgment of bicycling and walking as an important part of the transportation system. Bicycling and walking serve as cost-effective solutions to many of the serious issues facing our transportation system, including traffic congestion, funding concerns and air pollution. Moreover, as 40 percent of trips taken in our country are two miles or less, bicycling and walking should play an important role in providing transportation options in our small towns, suburbs and cities.

We recognize, and appreciate, that your statement was not about providing equal amounts of funding to all forms of transportation, or prioritizing bicycling and walking over other transportation modes such as trucking, freight or public transit. Instead, your commitment to consider all modes clarified that to give citizens a choice, rather than forcing them into their car, we must make sure that bicycling and walking are as safe and convenient as other modes.

We also appreciate the recognition of bicycling and walking as useful tools to address many other issues facing our nation such as increased oil consumption, air pollution, and our growing national debt. Investments in bicycling and walking have been shown to bring significant economic development to communities across the country, and to help families lower their own transportation costs. We believe that communities should be able to move forward with projects they feel are most advantageous to them, including bicycle facilities and pedestrian infrastructure.

We hope to continue to see bicycling and walking as a central part of your livability initiative. Thank you for all of your hard work on this issue. We look forward to working with you in the future.

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

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

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

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

Adriana and Wolf discuss public life.

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

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

Beanbagging fun on Shotwell.

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

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

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

22nd and Valencia.

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

Karaoke erupts at corner of Hill and Valencia.

StreetUtopia is a new community organizing effort centered in North Beach. Launched by Hank Hyena and Phil Millenbah at an inaugural event in early January, they drew upwards of 150 people to an empty historic storefront at 1 Columbus Avenue, where they showed Streetfilms, had a small art exhibit, and conducted a survey of the folks who turned out. Hank Hyena explained his motivation in terms of European cities which are often greener, more bike-friendly, and with more pedestrian-centers than US cities. Along with several other parents of children at Yick Wo Public School, including co-instigator Phil Millenbah, a San Leandro city planner, they staged an inspiring evening of art, film, and conversation.

The questionnaire they handed out at the event started with a brief paragraph, assuming that we are on the cusp of a carbon-constrained transition to a future with far less cars:

The “modern” era brought television, automobiles and other technological changes. As part of this cultural transformation to the modern era and to support automobile use, society built millions of miles of paved roadway as both streets in urban areas and as highways connecting urban areas. The “postmodern” world is carbon constrained and the focus of transport is bus or rail and the old the roadway infrastructure is not needed in the same capacity. What should be done with the old infrastructure?

Then it asked a series of questions about whether or not Columbus Avenue should be closed to cars, if there should be “flex-streets,” if Washington Square should have a fountain, and what kinds of mixed-uses North Beach streets should have if cars weren’t the only priority?

Subsequently, I interviewed both Phil and Hank about StreetUtopia and their organizing, which you can read after the jump:

A hopeful vision of a future Grant Avenue.

Phil: Our idea was to create a place that was fun to share ideas of our visions of the city. Land use has gotten so contentious in San Francisco that we wanted to do something that was free of all of that. Instead of promulgating our opinions about how closing a street increases local business activity, we showed films from around the world where business owners told their stories of what great results came from closing a street.

There are two of us but there are others around who we talked with over time and the idea developed through these talks with others in the North Beach Community. Something we are also working on is quantifying the personal and cultural infrastructure of the community [with a] GIS database and series of maps for all of North Beach. We are going to go from building to building and note what happens at each place. We are also working with a senior group and mapping all of the seniors in North Beach. There is word that the COIT 39 bus is going away—a bus used by many seniors. We hope that our map would help us bring in a jitney service if needed and then we could route the service based on our mapping. This is all community internal stuff. We aren’t looking for press or anything, we just want to help the community. There is really an unintentional retirement community developing in North Beach—lots of people growing old in place—and they need special services, like having a place to meet and be social.

We found lots of people needing places to meet. Café Culture is nice but many people would just like to sit down and enjoy the day and not have to buy anything. We need a street farmers’ market or at least some more food sold on the streets. We would like to see more streets converted to pedestrian uses and we would like to see our local business people do well—and our residents have a great place to live.

Lower Columbus: an empty sea of asphalt, what a waste of space!

Hank, explaining some of the more than 100 responses to their questionnaire:

They did not want many things that I wanted, for example, they don't want a fountain in Washington Square. (I want one because kids like them, they are pretty, and in an Italian tradition) but the residents here really don't care for fountains. They see the water use as wasteful, plus it just attracts pigeons. The people surveyed were not interested in closing the main, touristy part of Columbus because they thought that would be detrimental to the tourist industry. However, they were interested in closing off lower Columbus, from Washington Street up to perhaps Broadway, making that section pedestrian-only. I am not sure why people suggested that—perhaps because it is a rather dead part of town and they thought pedestrian-only would liven it up. But they are amenable to making upper Grant auto-free. The main thing the survey revealed is that North Beach residents want more public space, park space, open space, places to mingle and gather.  There is interest in the "Poet's Plaza" space, closing off Vallejo to traffic, but there is impatience that it is taking so long. North Beach residents want things like more parks, community centers, and general open areas to gather and mingle, and this makes sense, because North Beach is very crowded with very little public space.

Phil: People seemed to like our “Flex-space” idea a lot. Flex space to us is space that is used at different times for different things. 25 percent of San Francisco is streets. People seem very open to closing some for human activities or what I call Postmodern street activities. I sold my car 3 years ago and am a full time pedestrian and transit user. I look at cars really differently now. I keep wondering who abandoned this big piece of metal on the street. Cars seem too wasteful and expensive and people keep putting a large share of their income into them. It is really self-indulgent that people expect to have a public place to move their big piece of metal around. We need that space for living life!

CC: By using the name StreetUtopia you probably inspire a lot of people to think more 'out-of-the-box' than they might otherwise. How has using the word/idea utopia helped or hindered you in your first public forays?

Hank: Phil and I are a good team, he is a city planner and he knows the nuts and bolts of enacting change, getting permits, paying fees, etc.  I am a futurist writer (for H+Magazine) and I promote notions like In-Vitro Meat, Nude Swimming for Longevity, and Robot Servants and SexBots. Utopia will be achieved one-step-at-a-time, and Phil is good at seeing the first step, while I am perhaps more interested in the year 2050. We are a mixture of pragmatism and imagination.

Phil: We want a happy place and some of these ideas are really axiomatic—they have been tried around the world and they work. I don’t see why there is this culture of unhappiness where so many people fight tried ideas for better spaces. Meanwhile our neighborhood is clogged with cars.

CC: You showed Streetfilms at your event, and had proposals floating to close all or parts of Grant Avenue to car traffic. What kind of responses did you get?

Hank: StreetFilms are great - the public really enjoyed the films! I think a lot of people were as shocked as I was to find out that cities like Bogota have more progressive urban planning than San Francisco.  Personally, I am interested in Grant because it is the oldest street in San Francisco; it has immense historical value and I believe we should honor and support the street, and work to revitalize it.

CC: How do bicycle boulevards and wider sidewalks fit in to StreetUtopia thinking? Are you inspired by Copenhagen or Barcelona or Paris or ...?

Phil: Barcelona inspired me. They have streets that are closed by the police in early evening with these nice, well-designed gates. Those streets are immediately full of people walking together and talking. Many mothers and children walking hand-in-hand, talking. Now that’s a good life! … I wish people would try more things. I remember Spiro Agnew said “I don’t believe in change for change’s sake.” I can’t make sense of that sentence, but I think that he is saying that he is afraid of new things, and many people are. I wish that we experimented more with our communities and if something didn’t work, fine, we do something else. But it almost seems like the outcome of an experience, such as the Mayor’s closing the Embarcadero a couple of times last year, needed to be determined before the approval was granted. I also think people need to focus more on design issues and not on just whether to approve or deny something.

Hank: I was very inspired by the "bike lifts' in Norway that took cyclists up hills, because many people often say that San Francisco can't be a bicyclist's town due to the hills.  Copenhagen is also very inspiring because they have inexpensive bikes that you can rent on the street and San Francisco should duplicate that. Honestly, I see North Beach as having more potential for pedestrians: it is very small and crowded and scenic.  There is a LOT of support for widening sidewalks because they are so crowded, almost impossible. I generally walk in the street, because there are so many dining tables and chairs on the sidewalks. North Beach also has many lovely interesting little alleys that should be developed for walkers, closed to traffic and beautified.

Telegraph Hill viewed from the Bay. High-rise apartments from an earlier era tower over Russian Hill further west.

As we have reported, Berkeley Professor Nicholas de Monchaux's Local Code proposal for activating San Francisco's "Unaccepted Streets" called for transforming the patchwork of 529 acres of underutilized alleys, street-ends, and pathways into a network of green spaces. Were San Francisco to build out the more than 1500 identified sites, de Monchaux estimates that the city would save $4.8 million in air pollution mitigation, $6.9 million in energy savings, and a staggering $1 billion in stormwater infrastructure.

From the proposal:

The final outcome of our proposal is a pedestrian network of places, and a virtual network of spaces as well. A focused web threaded through real and virtual fabric; our systematic interventions turn away from the idea of urban infrastructure driven by cars and highways to a more robust, and perhaps natural, notion of urbanity. Instead of the old metaphors of lungs and circulation, we propose a robust, networked logic of health and social welfare, a distributed immune system for the 21st-century metropolis.

While the project didn't win UCLA's WPA 2.0 design competition, Professor de Monchaux and the five other WPA 2.0 finalists were afforded an audience in late November with President Barack Obama's Director of the Office of Urban Affairs Adolfo Carrion and HUD Deputy Secretary Ron Sims, who both apparently showed great interest.

"My goal now is to initiate some of those conversations with local agencies," said de Monchaux. "I think a very interesting next step would be to implement some of the designs locally, create a community based laboratory to see how these designs would perform."

Livable streets prodigy Elli Giammona. Photo: The Missoulian

Elli is a 9-year-old in Missoula, Montana who a couple of years ago began to question why she couldn’t bike to school.
When her mother explained that it wasn’t safe because the road leading
from their home to Hellgate Elementary — a typical suburban arterial,
from the looks of it — didn’t have a sidewalk, Elli took action.

With
encouragement from her mom and the help of her younger sister and older
brother, she petitioned Missoula County, gathering signatures and
composing a letter explaining the benefits of a walkable Mullan Road. The Missoulian reports:

The letter is dated Jan. 14, 2009, around the time [county public works director Greg] Robertson was
looking for a project eligible for American Reinvestment and
Recovery Act dollars. Criteria? A quick turnaround, a project in
the urban area, and one uncomplicated by problems like right-of-way
negotiations and extra environmental reviews.

"Honestly, I didn’t have any other projects for consideration at
the time that would have met the criteria," he said.

Long story short: A new trail is expected to be finished in time for Elli to ride it to school next fall.

Not
only has Elli made it safer for herself and her neighbors to ride a
bike or take a walk, she’s also made plain how completely the stars
must align for something as simple as a car-free ribbon of asphalt to
become reality. (Even now, the planned Missoula trail won’t connect
with the school because of right-of-way costs.) Just a few decades ago
a kid riding or walking to school would be considered the epitome of
American wholesomeness. Now it’s a symptom of child neglect, in part because of infrastructure so obviously inhospitable that even a 7-year-old gets it.

Maybe,
above all, Elli Giammona and her family have given us hope for a future
in which full-grown adults get it too. One where it won’t take an act
of Congress to get a child to school safely.

A generation ago, nearly half of all U.S. kids walked or bicycled to school. Today, less than fifteen percent do, with the majority arriving at school in private automobiles. It’s no coincidence, then, that studies show more than a quarter of San Francisco’s children are overweight. But a new program hopes to change that trend, while reducing greenhouse gas pollution and increasing fun.

With the help of a $500,000 grant from the federal government, San Francisco has launched its own “Safe Routes to Schools” program, aimed at encouraging students and parents to walk or bike to school.

At Longfellow Elementary last Wednesday, October 7th, students joined parents on a “walking school bus.” Although the date was part of International Walk to School Day, organizers plan group walks to school every Wednesday—with the ultimate goal of walking to school every day.

Longfellow Elementary students make signs celebrating Walk to School Day. Photo: Jason Serafino-Agar

While the adults present may have been excited about the policy details - a $500,000 grant for five schools this year, 15 schools next year, and an opportunity to make strides in encouraging walking and biking to school - the children got the message loud and clear that walking, especially with hordes of peers, is fun business.

Warming up with a call-and-response cheer of "Longfellow: WALKS!", students welcomed guest speakers to the celebration, including Jacquie Chavez, co-founder of Walk to Win Wednesdays and mother of a first-grader at Longfellow.

"Remember, it's good for you, it's good for your community, it's good for the planet. Get out and walk to school," said Chavez. "It's actually pretty fun. I do it every day, not just on Wednesdays." Chavez organizes a similar walk every Wednesday: "I hope see you out there too," she told the crowd.

Block-long lines of kids walk to Longfellow. Photo: Jason Serafino-Agar

The Department of Public Health's Ana Validzic told the gathered schoolchildren that Safe Routes to School organizers are working "to make sure that everyone can walk and bike" safely, and have "a lot of fun while they're doing it."

Principal Phyllis Matsuno pointed out another benefit: "We can concentrate so much better in our learning," Matsuno said, when the day starts with exercise like walking or biking.

With the start of the school day fast approaching, the students got to hear one more short speech, from Supervisor John Avalos. He congratulated Longfellow and presented the school with a leadership certificate for its "efforts to promote active, healthy lifestyle, reduce pollution, teach children to walk safely, and make our streets safer for everyone, and address global climate change while reducing traffic on our roads."

Longfellow was among the five schools chosen for the Safe Routes to School program this year because over half of its students live within a mile from school, so walking or biking is a viable option. Today, instead of waiting in the usual block-long line of cars wrapped around the block, students discovered that the walkers were the ones having all the fun.

A day before Walk to School Day, block-long lines of cars waited to pick up students from Longfellow. Photo: Jason Serafino-Agar

Walking home from school with company. Flickr photo: Thomas Hawk

Walk to School Day has become a popular event at schools in San Francisco, regionally, and beyond, but with the two-year, federally-funded $500,000 Safe Routes to School grant, SFUSD aims to institutionalize and coordinate programs that promote walking. The grant is about "pulling together different programs that everyone already does in San Francisco, and to try to tighten them up and add in a more comprehensive approach," said Jason Serafino-Agar, the SFBC's Safe Routes to School program coordinator.

The program will start with five schools this year, expanding to fifteen next year, and is based on the "five Es": education, encouragement, engineering, evaluation and enforcement.

The education component will include classes for second graders on pedestrian safety, classes for fourth graders on bicycle safety, walk and bike maps for each school, and traffic safety information packets for drivers near the participating schools. On the enforcement end, SFPD will be doing targeted enforcement near the schools. There will be walk and bike audits to identify infrastructure shortcomings that need to be addressed, and officials will collect and analyze data on how schoolchildren get to and from school, and on parents' attitudes and knowledge about walking and biking.

Walk to School Day fits into the program's encouragement component, along with Bike to School Day and the annual ten-week Shape Up SF Walking Challenge.

To launch Safe Routes to School in the city and mark Walk to School Day, parents and students will be forming a "walking school bus" at the McDonald's parking lot at 5454 Mission Street tomorrow, departing at 8:10 a.m. and arriving at Longfellow Elementary School ten minutes later. At 8:40, a special morning outdoor rally will be held at Longfellow, with Supervisor John Avalos, Safe Routes to School coordinators, parents, kids who walked or biked to school and school administrators.

"It's exciting that we get to work to change the habits of a generation," said Serafino-Agar, "to show them what's possible and support them in the choices that they can make."

A pedestrian is in the hospital with life-threatening injuries after a hit-and-run collision yesterday. SFPD spokesperson Sgt. Lyn Tomioka said the collision occurred near California Street and Van Ness Avenue at 8:20 p.m. The driver was believed to be in a white pickup truck. A license plate number was not available.

Manish Champsee of Walk San Francisco said the intersection is in an area with a dangerous history for pedestrians.

"That area has been pretty problematic," said Champsee. The current configuration of the intersection, which is wide with incomplete pedestrian safety amenities, encourages "speeding and gives a feel of an expressway." Another pedestrian was struck and received life-threatening injuries just two blocks south on Van Ness at Bush Street in March.

Champsee would like to see traffic calming measures at the intersection, but for now, he is concerned about finding the driver. "I would encourage the person who did that to turn themselves in and do the right thing."

Streetsblog will continue to follow up with any further information that becomes available about the crash.

Anyone who witnessed the crash is encouraged to call SFPD's 24-hour anonymous tip line at (415) 575-4444.