Heleana Zambonino conducting a basic bicycling skills class at Sunday Streets in Guadalajara, Mexico, Sept. 2009.

In Guadalajara last September I met dozens of cycling activists from around Mexico, and one remarkable woman from Quito, Ecuador, Heleana Zambonino. While riding in a big Critical Mass in Guadalajara, she told me about the cycling scene in Quito, and her organization CiclóPolis. Her story left me inspired and a bit embarrassed. They’ve accomplished a great deal more in a half dozen years in Quito than we have in 20 years in San Francisco!

Art from one of a half dozen thriving bike activist groups in Quito, Ecuador, Andando en Bici Carajo.

Todas en Bici logo.

Heleana Zambonino:

CC: What is the bicycling movement like in Quito, Ecuador right now? What are the regular events? What are the other advocacy organizations besides CiclóPolis, if any? Publications? Radio or TV shows?

HZ: The bikers movement in Quito city grew a lot during the last decade. Nowadays we have several advocacy organizations such as CiclóPolis, Biciacción, Andando en Bici Carajo (ABC), CicloPUCE, Ciclismo Politecnica, Cicletadas el Rey and SENDA among others. It is beautiful to see more urban cyclists on the roads. These organizations offer a wide range of activities. For example, CicloPUCE, which is the cycling club from Universidad Católica, goes on biking tours every weekend. They organize huge bike rides near Quito as well as other beautiful places in Ecuador. They go biking to the beach, on the high mountains and to the forest.

Inside the city there are weekly events such as bike polo offered by Bike Polo EC, Biciacción sponsors “Bicipaseos patrimoniales,” which are rides to the colonial treasures here in Quito (Quito is officially part of the Cultural Heritage of Mankind since 1972). They also lead a ride called “VDP” or Viernes De Pedales (Friday of Pedals) which is a Critical Mass that rides around the city making bikers visible in the face of traffic jams. ABC organizes the alleycat competitions and the “piques,” where the fastest biker wins the competition. They also support the ghost bike campaign to honor bikers killed while riding in the city. SENDA runs workshops to introduce women to mountain biking—they practice in Metropolitano Park which is one of the larger greenbelts we have in the city. At the end of 2009 Radio Pedal was launched, where cyclists have the opportunity to express their opinions, concerns and doubts about the predominant automobile addiction that Quito dwellers suffer from.

Bike culture graffiti in Quito.

The international movement to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere to 350 ppm or less was embraced by CiclóPolis too.

CC: What about the CicloVias (dedicated bike paths) in Quito? How were they decided on? Who pushed for them? Can you tell the story about how the first implementation was rejected by the cycling movement and the city had to rebuild new CicloVias? How were the new ones different from the first ones?

HZ: The CicloVias are another major achievement. Since the CicloPaseo started, more and more people decided to start biking through the everyday traffic jams. That became very, very dangerous, but it made more visible the need for a dedicated lane for bikes. This bike lane was born as a “Vida para Quito” project (this is a private governmental corporation that takes care of environmental quality). There were several disagreements while building the lane. The neighbors that love going by car to the corner store opposed it, so part of the bike lane was built on the sidewalk. Unfortunately this layout of the lane didn’t have another solution (Japon St., north of the city). The municipality decided that they would take advantage of the sidewalk to avoid disturbing motorists with bikes alongside. They also built a bike lane on the Amazon Ave. sidewalk, one of the main city arteries. Fortunately, there was so much pressure to make bikers visible, and the municipality did want to contribute to the bike movement, so they realized their mistake. They rebuilt the bike lane on the side of the road with its own traffic signals. This was a big win for us bikers. Then the CicloVias were extended further (both longer and covering more of the city), so we have more bike lanes that connect the north with the south and an east-west lane that connect the two major universities zones. It’s called “La inter U’s”

CC: Do you have Do-It-Yourself bike repair cooperatives or collectives? (In Italy they are called “ciclofficine”) Can you describe the cycling economy in Quito in terms of for-profit businesses, non-profit or anti-profit groups, and advocacy groups? Are there lots of old bikes in the trash, or is everything getting used and re-used?

HZ: Unfortunately here in Ecuador we don’t have any initiative like the ciclofficine or LA Bicycle Kitchen, but we have pretty good bike workshops such as Construbicis, managed by Carlos Tacuri. In this workshop you can recycle your bike. If you ask to do an internship you can help and learn about building bikes from start to finish. The cycling economy regrettably is a bump on the road if you want to bike. There is no non-profit or anti-profit organization that could help people to get a free bike. It is the next step I hope. People trash their bikes only when it is pure scrap. So it is difficult to find parts to recycle bikes. Everything with bikes is used until it really doesn’t work anymore.

CC: How do cyclists get along with pedestrians in Quito?

HZ: It is a pretty good relationship. Pedestrians and cyclists interact the most on Sundays during the CicloPaseo. There is a respectful attitude both ways. During regular days most people walk, bike and share the bus, the 65% that don’t own a private car.

CC: What are road conditions like in Quito? Are there dedicated bike boulevards during normal work days?

HZ: Well, road conditions throughout Ecuador are a shame. Quito is not an exception. Unhappily there are no bike boulevards, just the CicloVias. I wish there were just one.

CC: There is an oil industry in Ecuador. Do they campaign for cars and oil and against bicyclists? Do bicyclists make common cause with the indigenous protesting the exploitation of Amazonian lands for oil exploration? Can you describe any demonstrations like that?

Me wearing the CiclóPolis windbreaker, while Heleana helpfully displays my book, Nowtopia!

HZ: Correa had changed his mind dramatically. As the topic before, I’ll be writing about him… grrrrr….

CC: What’s the best time of year to come for a visit? (Visit SF in May or September-October!)

HZ: Well, Ecuador is a beautiful country. It has everything: rainforest, cloudforest, pristine beaches, mangroves, high mountains, active volcanoes and the uniqueness of the Galapagos Islands. In Quito you can find anything you want about South American art, colonial art, the most beautiful sights and mysterious paths to the pre-Columbian cultures and the magic of the land of the sun. I’m in love with the middle of the earth and its biological, cultural and ethnic diversity. I’m really short in words to describe it! And the best season—well, since we have just 2 seasons, summer and rainy summer… any time of the year is pretty to come.

July 2009, Critical Mass circles Union Square

In the following months, the ride grew steadily, hitting a couple of hundred by February 1993, and still there was no police presence. I think there may have been one motorcycle cop who came upon us during those months and just rode on. In April 1993 it changed though. The ride had grown to several hundred cyclists, and those of us who were publishing the monthly "Critical Mass Missives" and preparing proposed routes with maps, writing flyers, handing out stickers (all under the happy neologism of "Xerocracy") were already worried about the culture of the ride. Too many people were bleating that Orwellian chant "Two Wheels Good, Four Wheels Bad!" and admonishing motorists in an entirely unpleasant self-righteous moralistic tone.

Behaviorally, we already had identified the "Testosterone Brigade" as a problem, young men who seemed to be looking for confrontation, perhaps exercising unresolved anger with their parents by taunting motorists or deliberately riding into oncoming traffic. Another group was dubbed the "snails" because no matter how often we stopped at the front to give everyone a chance to "mass up," a bunch of folks would just dawdle way at the back and never catch up. This led to long stretches of thinly-occupied streets, where just a few cyclists were noodling along. In April 1993 in just this kind of scenario, a motorist tried to cross Market to Guerrero and when cyclists surged in front to block him, he hit one girl. Her bike was totaled, ending up under his car, which careened into a hydrant on the corner while he was trying to escape. The girl was not physically harmed luckily, but her boyfriend, not knowing that she wasn't under the car, reached in and took the keys out of the ignition. The cops came up and arrested the girl and her boyfriend and let the motorist go, treating him as the victim, even though it was widely felt by all present, including bystanders on the street, that he had behaved with homicidal intent.

The 16th birthday ride in Sept. 2008, here on Polk Street.

In June 1997, rumor has it Mayor Willie Brown got stuck in his limo during Critical Mass. He was soon fulminating in the press about how something had to be done! He tried to bring Critical Mass representatives into a meeting (I was invited and refused to go) and managed to get some SF Bike Coalition board members to show up. His pet supervisor at the time was Michael Yaki, and it was Yaki who appeared on the steps of City Hall after the meeting impersonating Neville Chamberlain in 1938 ("peace in our time!"), waving a piece of paper which he claimed was an agreement with Critical Mass (impossible by definition) about how the ride would proceed on the following Friday.

What happened was beautifully documented in Ted White's documentary "We Are Traffic!" which you can see online. The police and Mayor Brown put up a sound system and stage and had the gall to welcome the riders to our own event. They were roundly booed. Brown, realizing that he had not managed to co-opt Critical Mass, decided to unleash the police. They were happy to oblige and a mini-riot took place in mid-Market where several cyclists were arbitrarily pushed to the ground, violently arrested, and their bikes impounded. Critical Mass had split into dozens of groups roaming the city's streets for hours, in what was probably one of the most chaotic evenings in Critical Mass history. The police could not get a handle on things, in spite of their license to repress, and it wasn't until very late that night that they corralled one of the mini-masses still riding, surrounding them in the financial district and arresting them all. The day after the Chronicle's false headline was "250 cyclists arrested!" The actual number was about 112, and most of them had been in the illegal roundup. Howard Besser, one of the arrestees, filed a suit against the police and won, and won a second time when the city appealed, and was awarded about $1,000 in damages. No one was ever convicted of any crimes that occured that night, because there had been no crimes!

The following month, August 1997, after a month of torrid bad press, online flame wars (much like you we still see on the SFGate) denouncing all bicyclists, and a remarkably one-sided representation of what had happened (no mention of Mayor Brown's land-swap shenanigans with the Transbay terminal property that was going on behind the scenes during the same summer), about 5,000 bicyclists showed up in defiant celebration at their own monthly gathering. This time, anticipating a very heavy-handed police presence, the plan was to follow the Good Soldier Schweik approach, that is, ride to rule. Each cyclist would ride as if it were a motor vehicle, obeying all laws, stopping at every light and sign, signaling every turn, etc. That held for the first hour or so, and the traffic downtown was MUCH WORSE than it had ever been before. Thousands of cyclists filling the streets, obeying the traffic laws, turned out to be much more disruptive than following the safe and predictable method of Critical Mass that had evolved over time. 

From that time forward, a kind of truce developed with the police. The ebb and flow of policing over the ensuing years has been unpredictable, going back and forth between angry belligerence and benign tolerance. Sometimes a bunch of bicycling cops joined us, sometimes there were hardly any police at all, and sometimes a whole bunch of motorcycle cops and paddy wagons would come. They've never made any mass arrests, but they do ticket riders on occasion, usually in a somewhat punitive fashion if they see someone they particularly want to inconvenience (it's generally for running red lights, or impeding traffic, or other normal Critical Mass behaviors). When they do, like a few months ago on Broadway coming east out of the tunnel, it led to a half hour traffic jam blocking the streets. Critical Mass riders don't always stop in solidarity with every rider who gets hassled by the cops, but when they do, it raises the costs to the city in terms of traffic blocked and the number of officers who gather to secure the area while a traffic infraction ticket is written.

It is a useful reminder to all that the best approach (usually the one taken by the cops when they're being reasonable) is to facilitate the ride moving continuously through the city until it's finished.

Police repression, when it comes, is part of a larger culture war between those who think the American Way of Life is fundamentally about cars, business, and private property (almost always a strong bias of individual police) and the growing movement to shift into a new way of organizing our lives, based on ecological principles, reduced resource use, and a more convivial, publicly-oriented cityscape. Most of us riding in Critical Mass are not out to break the law or antagonize anyone, but we do feel strongly that we have to demonstrate firmly and directly a different way of life. To those of us committed to a life with a greater sense of conviviality and a commitment to a public sphere, the childish and antagonistic behavior that a few cyclists bring to the ride has been dismaying.

Unfortunately, the old xerocracy mostly died out (with the notable exception of the 10th anniversary ride in 2002--four different beautiful posters were made and put all around town, dozens of stickers and flyers were distributed at the ride, a book was published). Once or twice a year someone shows up with a flyer addressing the culture of the ride, or prepares a suggested route, but in general, cultural production, once so essential to the experience, went into hibernation. After more than a decade the transmission of the culture from oldtimers to newbies has broken down. People riding in Critical Mass these days might have been infants when we started it 18 years ago!

Sadly, some people show up because they believe all the media lies about this big anarchistic confrontational experience, though they are tiny in number. Still, when they behave badly they get an inordinate amount of attention, not just in the media when it deigns to address this ongoing cultural phenomenon, but weirdly, from other cyclists. There's a mentality that has been shaped by our profit-driven media: when it bleeds, it leads. I'm afraid all too many people on all sides of Critical Mass tend to fall into this same mental trap, focusing their attention on the tiny few who behave like jerks, rather than the overwhelming thousands (and not just here, but across the planet in over 300 cities worldwide) who manage things well, extend courtesy and kindness to bystanders, have joyful interchanges with people briefly stuck in buses and cars, and are greeted exuberantly from neighbors in their windows as we roll through central city neighborhoods.

Now the police seem to be threatening Critical Mass again, but to what end?

It's a small thing, lasting 2-3 hours a month, inconveniencing lots of people for a short time, but keeping an important cultural space open. In that space, a different kind of life is in gestation, where new friends and networks continually discover one another, where we experience radical direct democracy, rolling through the streets. And it is available to all comers. Historically it's been self-managed, and recently a new website and discussion list have been started to remedy the fact that the culture hasn't been handed down well between generations of riders.

As for what could work, I'd suggest that Chief Gascon start by removing all motorized vehicles from accompanying the ride, send whatever police he deems necessary on bicycles, and reiterate that Critical Mass is a cultural fact of life in San Francisco. Anything else is likely to make things worse and cost the city a lot more money over the long haul.

Photo: Matthew Roth

Democracy in action, I suppose. Long-time bicycle advocates from the East Bay and San Francisco converged on this meeting, hoping to convince the Bay Area Toll Authority (BATA) to support using some of the new tolls ($5 on all bridges as of July 1, with $6 congestion pricing on the Bay Bridge during rush hour, and for the first time, a half-price toll for carpoolers) to fund a new west-span bicycle/pedestrian/maintenance/safety lane to make the bridge safer, and to finish the transbay route for bicyclists and pedestrians too, not just motorized vehicles. But that effort was bureaucratically sidetracked before this meeting even started.

Surrounding the MTC hearing room were bicycle advocates from around the region. Photo: Chris Carlsson.

The BATA's legal advice from a prior meeting was that they have no authority to allocate toll monies toward this new path, in spite of language in the law that allows for maintenance and safety improvements, which the new path unambiguously represents.

Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates has asked for a second legal opinion from the State Legislative Counsel, which he said will take 2-3 months to get. Moreover, he followed the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) chair's admonition to the assembled cycling advocates to save their comments for another time (since the question of funding and building a new west-span side path would not be addressed in this meeting), by stressing that the fight was no longer at BATA or the MTC but had moved to the state Legislature in Sacramento.

It's hardly a surprise that the MTC wanted to duck this issue and pass the buck to Sacramento. The 15-member MTC is a lopsided status-quo minded entity. That was revealed again today when San Francisco Supervisor Chris Daly, responding to several public commenters who were casual carpoolers and feared the new toll would wipe out the phenomenon, proposed the $2.50 carpool toll be reduced to $2.00. A roll-call vote went 13-3 against the proposal, only Daly, Tom Bates, and Bay Conservation and Development Commissioner Ann Halstedt voting for it.

One comment from an employee of the Bay Area Air Quality Control District pointed out that casual carpooling reduces congestion, saves money for those who do it, AND builds community, but the majority of the commissioners were not inclined to tinker with their staff's proposed new toll schedule. Nor did any of them choose to question the formula by which truckers have new tolls phased in over 3 years, denying the bridge budget $60 million according to their own calculations (recreational vehicle owners also showed up to challenge their being classified as trucks for purposes of bridge tolls, which will raise their bridge-crossing costs by 150%).

There is a long and charming local history of bicycle advocates who have pushed BART, Caltrain, the Golden Gate Bridge, and local bus systems for greater accommodation for bicycles and cyclists. It's a thankless, Sisyphean task, and we can all be thankful for those folks who have stuck with it.

That said, I've always been astonished at the eager sincerity a lot of people bring to these governmental processes. As far as I can tell the system is deeply broken. The inordinate emphasis, even at this very late date, on automobiles, freeways, "level of service," etc., seems to always trump common sense efforts to promote the incredibly modest beginnings of a new infrastructure. After all, there are state laws mandating major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. How is that going to be achieved without an alternative as obvious as a Bay Bridge bike path?

It was Jason Meggs and some stalwart friends a decade ago who rode bikes across the Bay Bridge to dramatize the absurdity of denying access to a central transportation artery. But most of the energy these days goes into attending these hearings with homemade signs, with earnest behind-the-scenes message making so as not to offend the commissioners, or become unseemly or too aggressive.

The urgency of altering how we live day to day gets quite lost in these processes. The moods of commissioners, the technical language in obscure appropriations bills, the muscle-bound lobbying strength of corporate behemoths, together become the focus of political action, rather than the terrain of our daily lives. I like the slogan "Bridge the Gap" just fine, but I couldn't help but feel that the real gap needing bridging at today's hearing was between the building trades workers out front clamoring for "jobs" and the bicycling advocates inside who were firmly but cautiously seeking support for a maintenance lane to be added to the west span.

I wondered if anyone had spoken with the building trades folks about supporting the bike/ped/etc. lane? Or has thought to propose a much broader alliance on local projects? (And what is it with union workers and their leaders that they always abdicate control over deciding what work is worth doing to those with the purse strings? Shouldn't workers be central deciders in how their work is employed in our communities?) What about a massive overhaul of local roads and bridges, adding Copenhagen-style bike lanes on every street and span? Think how much work that would be! Oh but we can't pay for it is the immediate rejoinder.

And if you accept the narrow constraints of institutional political reality as it is, then the argument is lost. But what about repealing Prop 13, at least as it applies to major corporations in California? What about ending the U.S. empire's military bases in over 100 countries around the world? Why is the U.S. spending as much on guns and bombs and death and mayhem as the rest of the world combined? Why did the federal government give away $1.5 trillion to the wealthiest owners of businesses instead of embarking on the much-promoted "Green New Deal" that if done honestly, might have provided resources for just this kind of drastic and dramatic reorganization and rebuilding of our urban physical infrastructure?

Common sense is trivialized and marginalized in the public process.

The west-span bike lane is a pipe dream for now. But by making it contingent on a massively expensive new lane being added to the existing bridge (and done under the design and control of the brazenly anti-bicycle Department of Highways, oops, I mean Caltrans), aren't we shooting ourselves in the foot?

A bike/ped/safety/maintenance lane could be put on the top deck of the Bay Bridge in two weeks if we had the political vision to do it. Here's how: Admit that traffic on the inbound west span rarely exceeds 30 mph and make that the new speed limit during rush hour. It's a pretty drive anyway, who cares if you have to go slower? And most of the time you can't get near 30 mph anyway, given the congested traffic. Narrow the five lanes from 12 feet to 10 feet, take the new 10 feet of space and barricade it with a cement railing. Voila! You have a bike/ped/safety/maintenance lane. The other five lanes are open during rush hour, but only 4 lanes are open the rest of the time, leaving a buffer lane next to the bike/etc. lane for additional safety. When traffic is light and only four lanes are open, the existing 50 mph speed limit can prevail... If we wanted to do it, we don't have to wait 3 months for a new legal opinion, and then another 2-plus years for another toll increase, and then 5-7 years for design and building of this new lane.

We could do it by March 1. Why not?

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.

He skirted Market Pond and made his way up to the Wiggle. Passing through a green arching gate he rolled along next to a long aging wall that had seen better days. On the other side of the wall used to be some kind of warehouse or big store. Now it was a grassy knoll sloping down to Market Pond.

On the crumbling 110-meter long wall was an old mural from the late 20th century. A clever mural within the mural showed the city, starting from a pre-deluge downtown full of cars and bikes and heading past itself to show Hayes River turning into a path to the west to the beach where a huge snake became a bicycle tire track. The mural was considered a civic treasure from the time before and a lot of trouble had been taken to save it after successive quakes and major storms.

At the end of the wall he went over the rushing creek and the high-arching Sans Souci Bridge, steering clear of oncoming cyclists. The veloway followed the winding course of the Hayes River, willow and laurel trees studding the banks, along with impatiens and lupine bushes. Many spots along the creek were open to the surrounding homes, mostly old Victorians that had elegantly stood along this waterway since it had been buried in cement culverts long ago. The lush gardens that filled the small valley gave off a wild variety of sweet and organic smells in the moonlight.

--from After the Deluge, A Novel of Post-Economic San Francisco (Full Enjoyment Books: 2004)

I wrote that passage in my novel a few years ago, set in San Francisco 150 years in the future. Imagine my pleasure when I found out that an ornamental portal to the Wiggle is the first project envisioned by some activists along our much-loved route. A week ago I sat down on the Wiggle at Bean There Café with Morgan Fitzgibbons, one of the instigators behind the new Wigg Party, whose mission is to have the folks who live and ride and eat along this route “become the leading community in America in the transformation to sustainability.” Recognizing what more and more people are coming to grips with, that we’re on the cusp of a dramatic change in how we live in cities, and on earth, the Wigglers want to lead the way, taking action one community at a time, anchored in place. Given the high mobility and transience of so many young San Franciscans, a focus on a local neighborhood as a site of transformation is immediately encouraging.

The incipient Wigg Party doesn’t yet have a website or an office, but about 15 people have come together after Fitzgibbons started some sustainable business consulting, and the ideas snowballed. It started to become a more comprehensive vision just this past July, as the group is organizing more consulting, an educational effort they’re calling the “Great Re-skilling,” a “Gateway to the Wiggle,” and a local currency effort (wigg-bucks? Tender wiggles?).

Why not turn whole streets into a City of Panhandles?

"I’ve read the Transition Handbook, Rob Hopkins’ work. I’m familiar with the movement. We’re not connected with them even though I should… I kind of disagree that we have these twin peaks of peak oil and climate change and that’s where it all comes from. I took the Permaculture Design course in the fall with Kevin Bayuk… "

Imagine a transformed Wiggle:

“An edible foodway, sculpture gardens at some spots, see if we can get people on the Wiggle to participate in window box programs, and if we can get the Panhandle recognized as part of it. Then we can put all sorts of things there. If we can get the whole roadway opened up for art, maybe stencils…We’re going to take a lot of inspiration from City Repair (in Portland)… Maybe we could get the entire Wiggle closed during Rush Hour!”

The Wiggle Valley, 1860s.

Unlike a long tradition of San Francisco radicalism, Fitzgibbons, sees his own agenda as compatible with the business world. I pressed him on this, skeptical as I am of any future for the buying and selling of human time. Perhaps he is representative of his generation of post-Left, post-neoliberal activists, or maybe his youthful optimism hasn’t yet been tempered by years of frustration with the stupidity of the modern work-a-day world.

“I come from a social entrepreneurial world in a way. I try to overcome these distinctions between nonprofit and for-profit. There’s this new model emerging, and the idea is to be able to turn a profit on a business that is performing a social good. Then we can bring in money for some of these other good projects we have… the profit businesses are a backyard garden business and a home audit business…”

To be sure, we’re all compelled to make compromises with respect to surviving in a capitalist economy, and there’s nothing new (or wrong) with taking the money we DO make at work and channeling it towards something more humane and worthwhile. I’ve done as much throughout my life. But I balk at the notion of profiting from doing social good, the bedrock concept of “social entrepreneurialism.” In my opinion, profit is derived from one of two sources: squeezing the paid employees, or externalizing costs to the greater public. If you are in a new market niche where there is little or no competition, you can charge high enough prices to escape the iron hand of the market for a while… but once competition enters, the path towards profitability and survival is invariably lowering labor costs and lowering costs of materials, waste, distribution, etc.—what gets called “efficiency” in capitalism, but is as often as not a brutal process of reducing people’s standards of living, and/or dumping costs (transit, waste, etc.) on to an acquiescent public sphere.

The success of the Reagan/Thatcher neoliberal transformation going back well over a generation was to discredit government and the public sphere, to the point that a concept like “social entrepreneurialism” can sound progressive. But it reinforces a society that frames owners of wealth as social/historical agents and the rest of us as the silly putty with which they attempt to achieve their goals. In any case, Fitzgibbons and his cohort are very well-intentioned, and certainly in tune with a rising social movement towards Transition and Resilient Communities. I’ll give him the last word:

“That’s really the whole game, is to get people to reorient their priorities and change the world… I’m a philosopher, and I have a new world view that allows for a new kind of faith that makes sense, based on evolutionary metaphysics. I think we’re in an evolutionary process. The question is where is it going, and more specifically what are we to do? And the answer is we don’t really know what the telos is. We don’t know the ultimate answer, so all we know is we have to create sustainable cultures, so the people can come behind us and have a better answer than we do.  And that gives our lives meaning, to create that culture, that’s what we have to do.”

Wigg Party meetings on 2nd Wednesdays, next: February 10, at 1571 Fulton Street, the “Sunshine Castle,” social 8:30, meeting 9… morganfitzgibbons@gmail.com

Bicycle traffic jams ahead on the Wiggle!

2010 is a big year for Mexico!

I just completed another visit to Mexico, once again starting in Guadalajara, but then doing a 9-day driving trip through the heart of the country. This new year is Mexico's bicentennial and centennial (independence from Spain and the revolution, respectively), and signs denoting the historic routes of the country's history have sprouted up all over the place.

Our trip took us through a lot of the old colonial center of Mexico, with special mention for Patzcuaro and its surrounding region, and our amazing trip to the wintering grounds of the Monarch butterfly high in the Michoacan mountains. But for Streetsblog readers, there is a city in Mexico that is a must-see: Guanajuato!

View down into the center of Guanajuato.

We took a funicular down the hill into town, one of my favorite forms of transportation!

This was the view westward from our funicular window.

I didn't know much about Guanajuato before I went, except that there were mummies there, and it was a former mining capital, built in the mountains. It was once a prosperous capital of the Spanish colony, and later during the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, it had a second glory period as the mines again became a source of great wealth. I learned a lot about the history of Mexican independence, which starts here in this region. The father of Mexican Independence, Miguel de Hidalgo, led about 80,000 farmers and miners to this city in 1810 to attack the Spanish authorities. He was captured a few months later and his head hung with some other rebels on the outside of the granary (today the same building is a great museum of Mexican Independence, well worth a visit). But years of guerrilla war ensued, and by 1823 Mexico was independent. Interesting to contextualize Mexican independence in the same period with the French Revolution, the Haitian revolution, and not long after the U.S. emerged from British colonialization; also, this region, Guanajuato-Bajio, was the economic powerhouse of Mexico in those times, so it's little wonder at the birth of capitalism that the successful merchants and mine owners would contribute to the political movement against colonization.

Historic image of Guanajuato, from the Museum Alhondiga (the old granary, shaded in orange.

What I didn't know before going, and found breathtaking and inspiring, is that Guanajuato today is largely a city for pedestrians, flaneurs, and loiterers! It's a bustling Mexican city, but unlike most urban centers in our southern neighbor, the city was never bulldozed to make way for a modern street grid.

It was the New Year weekend, but locals assured us it was common for the streets to be this jammed in Guanajuato.

Somehow, urban planners in the 1950s had the foresight to realize that the charming alleys, stairways, plazas, and narrow streets should be preserved and enhanced. Today, Guanajuato is a designated World Heritage Site by the United Nations, and it retains an incredible old-world charm, reminding me more of an Italian city than anything I'd previously known in Mexico (though on this trip I discovered Patzcuaro, another place that retains a good deal of its historic beauty and charm).

Modest plazas are everywhere, and heavily used by locals.

Gorgeous views everywhere of the beautifully painted homes adorning every stairway and alley.

A walker's paradise!

There are almost 300 taxis rolling around, and tourists are strongly advised to avoid driving in to the city center. Because not only is the city a crazy, delightful labyrinth of alleys and stairways, with few thoroughfares for cars and even fewer places to park, but underneath the city is a surprising network of tunnels that seem to have a life of their own. Pedestrians walk in there, cars go through four-way intersections with barely a pause to just miss each other, and the urban ritual of waiting for parking places (precariously tucked into the side of the tunnel rights-of-way) can quickly back up traffic in the dimly lit subterranean tunnels.

These cars are emerging from the subterranean tunnels. Such ramps appear suddenly and are well-used by locals. Not much place for cars to go once they emerge, though!

A tunnel entrance.

I wonder if anyone stays down here all day?

A better shot of the tunnel's inside.

Starting in 1946, the local government began to refurbish the state college, and soon after embarked on an extensive effort at rehabilitation. Due to the city's location at the bottom of a canyon, it had been subject to flooding from time to time, being completely submerged in 1905 (signs everywhere indicate the level of inundation). The main river was in a tunnel under the city, but as part of the 1950s planning, a dam was built and the river diverted, opening the tunnel as a transit space. More tunnels were built during that decade and into the 1960s, so that the city above was preserved while cars were shunted below.

This is the view across the city, back at the top of the funicular line on the opposite hill.

The cascading pastels and brightly painted homes that rise on either side of the city center are as delightful as the beautiful views across the steep valley that the intrepid walker earns on an ascent. But what took my breath away over and over again was the experience of turning a corner, or popping out of a stairway, and finding myself in one of what must be well over a hundred charming pedestrian-only plazas that seem to be everywhere. Guanajuato's residents clearly know how to enjoy city life together. Every possible corner and available space has been made into a plaza, usually with benches, trees, and often a fountain or a sculpture to anchor it.

This is a plaza far up the hill in a residentail area with limited car access.

It rained on us but we couldn't stop walking and marveling at the endless plazas!

Nearer to the center, this one had a lovely fountain too...

An extended sidewalk in front of a small market becomes a plaza too.

We were going crazy with the reflections on the wet pavement and the colors, not all of which are adequately captured on camera, obviously!

Well, no. We’ve had a great run in the 2000s. Averaging between 750 and 3000 riders on any given month, the birthplace of Critical Mass keeps going strong, in spite of the total lack of promotion or organizing during this past decade. But many of us long-time riders have been dismayed to see the persistence of silly, aggressive, and counter-productive behavior that makes the Critical Mass experience worse for our natural allies on buses, on foot, and even folks in cars who might join us in the future. Not to mention that it makes it worse for us cyclists too, to the point that many former regulars have stopped riding. Part of the frustration for us long-time riders is that we went through all these issues quite intensively back in the early-to-mid 1990s, and to see them cropping up again is a harsh reminder that we’ve done a piss-poor job of transmitting the culture, the lessons learned, from one generation to the next. Plenty of current Critical Massers were under 5 years old when we started it, and the ride’s culture has been more loudly and consistently transmitted by distorted representations in the mass media than it has by those of us who put our hearts and souls into it for years.

To address this, a few of us launched a new blog dedicated to San Francisco Critical Mass.

Online for only a couple of months, it has already reprinted a well-digested list of “do’s and don’t’s”, and a rumination from a long-time former Masser on the hard work it takes to keep a space like Critical Mass open and inviting and pleasurable, as well as a look at the Budapest, Hungary Critical Mass and an always provocative look at bike helmets. It’s a moderated blog with a limited number of contributors, but it’s open to a wide range of comments including some markedly negative ones, while it also seeks to keep the discussion constructive and insightful.

Critical Mass, Budapest, Hungary. (Photographer unknown)

When Critical Mass began in late 1992, over two dozen individuals spent a lot of time thinking and talking about this new experience, and the culture that was emerging with it. Part of those discussions involved how to spread the idea to other cyclists, and eventually to other cities. That led to a publication in those pre-World Wide Web days that was called “How to Make a Critical Mass", which went far and wide and probably had a bigger effect than we ever dreamed.

June 1996, Critical Mass heads west on Howard Street at 4th. (photo: Chris C.)

During a bit longer than the first two years, some of us published a monthly newsletter called “Critical Mass Missives,” but after April 1995 we ceased and more or less stopped being a “secret cabal” behind the tone and etiquette of the ride in San Francisco. Critical Mass was growing very large by then, reaching well over 1,000 riders, and by mid-summer 1996 the ride was drawing several thousand riders. Already in 1995 several of us early instigators had grown bored with the ride, feeling that it had lost some of its early vibrancy. The political space we had so jealously fought for and guarded seemed to wither away all by itself as hundreds and thousands of new riders joined in.

During late 1995-early 1996 one guy tried pretty hard to “take over” Critical Mass, doggedly printing hundreds of posters, promoting long rides that stretched out to the far western edges of the city, even inaugurating what became for a few years an “annual ride to Sausalito.” His preference for elaborate routes that went to hills and ridges all over the city, and required endurance and sometimes speed to keep up, seemed to many of us regulars to be an unwelcome departure from the convivial purposes of Critical Mass. It wasn’t meant to be a road race, an endurance test, or a contest to see who could ride the furthest or climb the most hills. It was supposed to be a place where we met once a month on bikes and “road home together,” enjoying a leisurely pace through town conducive to conversation, political and philosophical discussion, and meeting new people, usually ending in a park or a bar.

Happily, a newer group of riders coalesced with the purpose of overthrowing this lone nut’s temporary reign over Critical Mass route planning. Alternative routes began to appear. A concerted effort was made to steer the ride back to a friendlier and more celebratory experience, and redirect the emphasis towards the social and away from the athletic. This effort was largely successful and a series of rides with a rediscovered joie de vivre took place over the 1996-97 months, leading to the infamous confrontation engineered by then-Mayor Willie Brown in July 1997. (See Ted White’s documentary “We Are Traffic!" for a good account of it.) The following month saw thousands returning to ride in the “Good Soldier Schweik” ride, where we “rode to rule,” following as many traffic rules as we could, which predictably made downtown traffic MUCH worse. 

After that, the police mostly backed off, realizing that leaving us to conduct ourselves through the streets was a better crowd control strategy than confronting us and harassing us. Tickets were occasionally written, but in general, over the years that followed, a tacit truce has prevailed. In the decade since, the ride has percolated along, often quite euphoric and fun, but in the past two years or so, taking on a distinctively repetitive quality.

August 1999, Critical Mass huffs and puffs up Potrero Hill. (Photo: Chris C.)

August 2007, Stockton Street. (Photo: Chris C.)

Most of these dynamics can be altered by simple courtesy and smart behavior. Treat motorists with respect, thank them for waiting! They are people like us, and they might want to join us in the future if they are invited. Cars that get stuck in the Mass should be helped out to the right if possible. If Mass is fragmented and dispersed, organize a stop at a red light and regroup. People in the front are hugely responsible for stopping regularly, far more than feels comfortable, but it’s the only way to keep the Mass together. Don’t “cork” intersections where the Mass is broken and only a few bikes are trickling through. Better to stop the bikes on the red light and regroup. These are simple lessons we learned years ago to make for a better Critical Mass experience for everyone.

Halloween 2008, Broadway in North Beach, a party pause! (Photo: Eduardo Green)

You may not care if you’re winning hearts and minds, but overall, the point of Critical Mass is not a fraudulent “class war” between cars and bikes. We started Critical Mass to be a new kind of public space, and to help promote a different way of being together in city streets. Rolling along on bikes, tinkling bells, chatting and discussing, smelling an exhaust-free atmosphere, listening to humans instead of motors, and feeling the city’s geography in a wholly new way, is exhilarating and liberating—not just for us riding, but for the thousands of people we pass by. Our pleasure is infinitely more inspiring AND subversive than any amount of angry posturing, self-righteous taunting, or childish tantrums. Critical Mass is for adults of all ages, and encourages the brave young radicals who want to FSU to take it to the other side of town during Critical Mass, and don’t use us to hide behind as you work out your unresolved anger with your parents!

August 2008 in the Marina District. (Photo: Adam Aufdencamp)

Cycling chic in Copenhagen, and this is a cold day in December!

I caught Mikael Colville-Andersen's inspiring talk on urban cycling from the Copenhagen context at San Francisco's SPUR on the last Friday of October. I suggested we could do an interview when I came to Copenhagen in December and he graciously agreed, stepping outside into the drizzling snow at a December 10 awards ceremony he was hosting. (The title of this post is a quote from him when he was on stage at the ceremony, and is a new tag line on his blog too.) They were handing out prizes for the best new designs for the next generation of Copenhagen's bikeshare program. He is well known for his blogging at Copenhagenize and Copenhagen Cycling Chic. The photos throughout were taken by me in Copenhagen during the last couple of weeks there.

Chris Carlsson: What was your experience in San Francisco? Did you have a good time there?

Mikael Colville-Andersen: I had a brilliant time. I just blogged a film with three of my friends, about Critical Mass.

C: Did you get in to the Halloween Critical Mass?

M: Oh yeah, all the way!

C: I saw you wrote some vaguely critical comments about Critical Mass in general.

M: I have done… it’s just that marketing thing. You’re not selling it if you’re pissing people off. Riding around… I didn’t see any bad behavior. There were so many people at that Critical Mass that it was more tame?

Bike parking takes up incredible amounts of space throughout Copenhagen. This is adjacent to the back of the main train station. Note the two cyclists passing on the separate bikeway. Such sidepaths are ubiquitous in Copenhagen.

This great bike counter is on the Norrebro Bridge, and is the most heavily bicycled street in the world, according to Colville-Andersen. The day before I passed it around 9 pm and there had been 12,126 cyclists that day, and as the bottom number shows, over 2.1 million since June 2009!

On her way in to demonstrate on December 12, this mom and her kids were briefly impeded by the motorcycle cops.

Another busy bicycling intersection, the bridge to Christianshavn. More cycling chic too!

C: In terms of the politics of bicycling, I love your presentation, it’s just great... this notion of subcultures and bicycles: you’re kind of on a rampage about that, it seems, to try to mainstream bicycling. What’s the turning point? Because Copenhagen didn’t have a bike culture all along right? There’s a point where, it happened maybe when you were quite young, suddenly a municipal administration decided to put in the infrastructure?

M: It was there before. You see archive footage, archive photos. We’ve always had masses of people, far more in the 1940s and 50s. And then it started dying off, we started killing it off by expanding roads and taking away separated infrastructure, which we used to have back 100 years ago. So we had to reinvent it. That’s when I was young (I’m 41) in the 1970s with the oil crisis. We had a popular uprising, people in the City Hall square, 20,000 cyclists. These were just regular people on bikes, saying we want better security on the streets, we want separate infrastructure again. And that’s where it all sort of started again. We were killing it off and we  resuscitated it. That’s the angle here.

In the city museum there's a nice small exhibit of cycling past and present, with photo sets like this one, showing 1940s and the present.

A bike bloc organized a DIY shop at the Candy Factory in northern Copenhagen, readying themselves for the big Dec. 16 effort to breach the COP15 perimeter.

The yard at the Candy Factory.

Winter Cycling Chic.

M: You’ll buy it, anyone would buy it. Even if you’ll never look like the most elegant fashionista here in Copenhagen on a bike, it’s still an inspiration. I can just wear my clothes. Open my closet, it’s filled with cycling clothes. It’s definitely happening in North America, in the big cities: New York, Washington, I’ve got loads of photos of regular people. Helmetless as well. The sight of helmetless cyclists is a good sign too no?  Forget about the helmet issue, it’s a sign that you’re doing something right. People are feeling safe, safe enough to make their own decision. You see that and you’re on your way. There’s not that many helmets in San Francisco is there?...

C: No, I’m a big anti-helmet guy in San Francisco. People ride up to me and tell me to get a helmet, or yell out of their car “get a helmet!” This whole mentality is born of this basic idea that you as an individual have to be a good consumer and buy a product to solve the social problem of bad engineering. That’s fucked up! Who thought of that? Because no Americans think critically about the commodification of life. I will never wear a helmet so I can always have this argument.

M: I’m also very stubborn about this.

C: You don’t really need one here. There’s such a lot of courtesy. I haven’t seen any bike-on-bike crashes here. In SF now we have the problem of us long-term wreckless riders whizzing through intersections and having near misses with each other! I’ve had about 5 really close near-misses in the recent past.

M: I’ve been staring at this thing we call bike culture for the past 3 years every single day and I’ve seen 3 or 4 accidents total. There was a bike messenger on the busiest bicycling street in the western world. I didn’t’ see it, I had my back turned. He went over the hood, landed on his shoulder and up again, really aggressive, and the lady was on her way out of the car to check if he was ok, but WHOA she stayed in her car because here he was coming at her with all this aggression and adrenaline. Obviously, he’d just been hit by a car! What happens in the meantime is that 3 or 4 cyclists had rolled up to the stoplight, and one of the girls says to the messenger “you ran the red light!” and another girl said “I saw it too!” and they were defending the motorist. The messenger just shrunk, and the lady was so relieved in the car, and they pulled off and exchanged details. She’s at fault since she’s in a car, but there’s no way you’d have that in your country, where cyclists would be defending the motorist… In three years I saw a few people falling off their bikes on to their bums… you never see bike-to-bike crashes, we don’t go fast enough for that shit.

C: How is it that they sent you as a diplomat? Did you pitch them to hire you?

M: No, they pitched me because of my blogs. Because of the global interest in our bicycle culture, and the City of Copenhagen is a cycling capital. This is all spawned because of my blogs. The whole global fashion bicycle movement is because I took a picture one day and put it on the fucking internet! It’s wild. And Copenhagenize advocacy and a lot of opinions on it and well they came to me.

A Christiania bike crosses in the blue cycling lane.

C: I was so happy when I found your voice of reason here in Denmark. The bike culture here benefits from these things that are reasonable within the context of living in a culture that’s fundamentally Social Democratic. There’s this notion of public goods and public space, and taking care of each other, and kind of being knit together in a slightly tighter way. You’ve seen how we are in the U.S.: We’re completely atomized from each other. Everything is dog-eat-dog, I’m in it for myself, get out of my way, it’s my road, I’m not paying taxes for anything. I think the bike culture has embedded in it the possibility of a more convivial, sharing culture at the heart of it. But you can’t even make that argument overtly in the U.S. without running into weird political problems.

And now, thanks to Elizabeth Press and our sister site Streetfilms.org, a lovely video featuring Mikael Colville-Andersen!

In Stockholm, Sweden, a fascinating political intervention has been taking place during the past few years. Starting originally around 2000-2001 in an anarcho-syndicalist youth organization, Planka.nu is a surprisingly innovative and effective transit activist group. Today it is still an entirely volunteer organization without paid staff, but they have a comfy office tucked on the western end of the Stockholm island of Sodermalm, just a hundred steps or so from the target of their activism, the Tunnelbana, or local subway system. 

Paradoxically they openly advocate gate-crashing (the name Planka refers to that process, especially when getting in to a concert or something like that) or fare evasion, but thanks to a clever redeployment of capitalist entrepreneurialism, they invented a "ticket fund" which insures planka's dues-paying members against fines they incur if they ever get caught by transit police. They have been so successful that about 50% of the organization's revenue is derived from the surplus accumulating in their insurance fund.

We found the system easy to use and on the line we mostly rode there was always plenty of room, but here you can see a local who is not too happy at being crammed in to the crowded car!

In this video, you can see how they handle the various barriers that the Tunnelbana has used to enforce fare payments. Towards the end, the green-vested monitors approach the planka gate crashers to admonish them and insist that they go back and pay. But these monitors are not police and have no legal authority to detain anyone, something that the planka activists know well and encourage others to understand. So you can just ignore them and there's nothing they can do. Obviously quite different than the conditions we might face in San Francisco!

At the beginning of the idea some years ago, a great number of Stockholm youth were jumping turnstiles to ride the subway for free. But the activity was somewhat stigmatized, and they were doing it almost out of desperation, certainly out of necessity. The local culture refers to their own activity not as fare evading, or gate crashing, but affirmatively as "Free-Riding." In discussions among the anarcho-syndicalist youth there was a desire to find a political expression for this behavior. Moreover, they were part of a larger European-wide discussion about the new structure of work, often referred to under the rubric of "precarity." One of the founders, Christian, put it in context:

"The main political force in Sweden has been the workers movement, which has always focused on peoples' everyday lives. But there has been such changes in power in workplaces between the employers and workers. Nowadays people have temp jobs or are studying, and it's harder to have this traditional relationship to work or to the Social Democratic tradition. So that's when we turned to look to other parts of society, where we WERE in the same place (like the factories), but it turned out to be the subways, or the internet."

Two train bridges, a freeway, several major thoroughfares, along with some dedicated bikeways, and an estuarial waterway, make this spot in Stockholm an impressive transit viewpoint!

Simultaneously another local political formation was engaged in a study group, reading Harry Cleaver's "Reading Capital Politically," learning about the 1970s autonomist movement in Italy where "autoreduzzione" or "self-reduction" was widely employed by youth and housewives in festivals of proletarian shopping, taking things for free. As it happens, both the anarcho-syndicalist youth and the activists in the study group were hanging out at Kafe44, an anarchist cafe in eastern Sodermalm, and their circles were cross-pollinating. Taking action around shared experiences on public transit was one idea that emerged. Another was the now-infamous Pirate Bay, which sought to extend and reinforce the digital commons based on peer-to-peer free sharing, and the like.

Before long the idea took shape to create the ticket fund/insurance policy. As the city raised fares on monthly passes, more people were looking for ways to avoid paying. Instead of buying a 400 Swedish kroner monthly pass (now it's up to 700 a month) you can pay 100 a month to the Ticket Fund. If you are "controlled" by the police and given a ticket, the fine is 1200 Swedish kroner, and Planka pays your fine. Thanks to the relative lax enforcement after you cross the gates in Stockholm, the finances of this system work well, as most members are never controlled. The surplus funds go into furthering the work of the organization, which is now expanding into a larger range of transit-related activities in Stockholm.

Lots of bike lanes around Stockholm, not so many bicyclists during this cold December.

Nothing like a full bike lane intersection next to a busy street!

Plans by the city to build a new highway to the west of the city, bisecting 20 kilometers of relatively wild forest and opening the area to suburbanization, have already been approved. But Planka is actively campaigning to derail this plan, and thus far, the financing for this new road has not been allocated. Allies in the Green Party and the Left Party are campaigning to stop the plans, and support is building in the long-dominant Social Democratic Party. It's thought that the next elections, about a year hence, might well tip the balance of power towards those who oppose the road plan and support the expansion of tax-financed public, collective transport.

Because this is the heart of the conflict in today's Sweden: a vision of society based on their historic legacy of tax-financed collective goods, or the neoliberal shift towards a fee-based system of supporting public infrastructure. The museums here are all charging hefty entry fees now, but a few years ago were completely free.  As Planka's Alfred told me: "We want free public transit. Then someone will say, nothing is free, and we've been in this discussion quite a lot... We explain we want our fares to be paid by taxes. So we say, we want to pay, but we want to pay through our taxes and not through our fares."

Traffic calmed street in eastern Sodermalm, Stockholm.

Green parkway in middle of major boulevard in downtown Stockholm.

Another Planka activist, one of two guys named Christian I spoke with, explained: "The basic political problem is that in Sweden we used to have a tax-financed society, much more than we do now. But we have exchanged our tax-financed society for a fee-based system. And that's a problem because when you pay taxes, rich people pay a little more and poor people pay a little less. But when you pay a fee, everyone pays the same, and that's a problem if your goal is to flatten out society, to make it more equal."

I was interested to know if that was actually still the official goal of the Swedish government, to flatten out inequality, and I got a mix of answers. But it shows how different the discourse is in Sweden than in the U.S., that it's even a possibility that the government's goal is to flatten out income inequality through redistributive taxes!

All Scandinavian cities have major shopping districts centered on a pedestrian-only thoroughfare, and usually a number of cross streets with restricted traffic too.

Bike lanes as though they want people to ride bikes!

Returning to Copenhagen after some years away is always a pleasant shock. Few cities in the world feel as properly scaled as this lovely old Danish capital. My mother was born and raised here, so I've been visiting off and on over the years. No doubt my own visions of what San Francisco could be, in terms of a bicycling city, have always been shaped by my experiences here in Copenhagen.

The city is not a sprawling urban environment of single-family homes. Most buildings are five stories and the vast majority of the city's residents live in apartments. The density feels cozy rather than crowded, though. The streets are full of pedestrians, and after several decades of building a citywide system of dedicated side paths (few streets don't feature a pedestrian sidewalk, a curb down to a wide bike path able to handle two and three abreast, then another curb down to the street) Copenhageners are famous for being big bicyclists (20-40% of daily trips in the city are on bike, whether one is 8 or 88 years old!). At every intersection bicycles pile up in their lane awaiting their own phase of the signals, and often enjoy well-marked blue pavement as they cross the street. As a recently arrived guest, it takes a bit of adjustment to realize that you cannot blithely step off the sidewalk because there are usually bicycles approaching at a good clip.

Typical of the many church spires which are the dominant characteristic of the human-scaled skyline of Copenhagen.

Near the city's main pedestrian-only shopping street.

The streets in the center are not all closed to cars but even where they're not, the car is a subordinated transit form.

Of course, there are cars here too, and some of the avenues are crowded with vehicles, especially at rush hour. But the trains and buses are fantastic, and the bicycle facilities are probably the best in the world. The Danes have taken great care of their beautiful city and have disallowed high rises in most areas. A few glass towers were built on the periphery (including an office tower for Carlsberg beer, next to its now discontinued brewery, an architectural treasure in its own right), but the skyline of Copenhagen still features centuries-old church towers as the prominent landmarks. The oldest observatory in Europe was built in the 1200s in the "round tower" and is open to tourists to climb its spiral ramps up to a good observation deck, more or less at the same height as the spires that dot the city's skyline. Looking down into the historic city center the streets are mostly full of pedestrians rather than cars, though many of the avenues are not closed to automobile traffic.

Notice the pedestrian-filled streets beneath me, standing at the top of the Round Tower.

It's such a strange pleasure to suddenly be on streets where cars crawl at 5 mph and pedestrians and cyclists have full use of the street.

Bike shops abound in this city, and though most are work-a-day kinds of places, here's a fancy hand-made bicycle boutique we happened upon.

At Christiania, an old military base squatted in the early 1970s and still something of a free zone after all these years (though much less so than it once was), a freight bike was designed that takes its name from the community. Here is a a gallery of freight bikes, all commonly used by parents taking their kids to school, or even by the Danish post office to deliver the mail. They can be seen everywhere, as likely to be ridden by stylish women as blue-collar workers or commuting dads.

Nothing even slightly unusual about a sight like this in Copenhagen.

Freight bikes, or kid carriers as they are mostly used, are parked everywhere!

An old beater of a Christiania bike.

A more recent model, suitable for kid transport in bad weather!

They're not all wood anymore either!

All successful markets attract competitors... this fibreglass model has extra wheels under its carriage for easy separation and pedestrian use.

This "Nihola" brand was impressive.

Same bike from the front.

Jerichausgade, a charming residential street not far from the former Carlsberg Brewery.

Another view of the same street... notice how little is dedicated to cars and parking compared to other uses.

Our imaginations are often stuck in the assumptions imposed by the car-centric 20th century. It's exciting and inspiring to come to an affluent modern city and see how different it can be, from transportation and parks to streetscapes and skylines. It's helpful to remember, too, that the Danes are a lot like Americans in many respects, but have managed to avoid the degradation of civic life we tend to take for granted. Here the cyclists are generally very polite, signaling their intentions on the road and obeying the traffic signals that are designed to facilitate bicycling transit. On the buses, people readily yield their seats to seniors and disabled, and no one lets a mother with a carriage struggle to enter or leave a vehicle. Sure, that still happens on BART or MUNI sometimes, but that kind of day-to-day sense of being in it together is far less tangible in our lives than it is here in Denmark. Even more dramatically, people here are all housed, whether they are junkies or alcoholics, schizophrenic or just incompetent. I suspect there is a direct connection between that level of social solidarity and the everyday courtesies that characterize Danish public life, two things we have much to learn from.

A beautiful plaza in old Copenhagen.

With the rain falling in late November, and soggy unemployment statistics haunting our lives too, the idea of Depression lurks just below the surface. Depression has multiple meanings like so many concepts in the English language; in this case, I’m taking two of them: 1) mental depression that results from bad weather, personal trauma, emotional turbulence, etc., and 2) economic depression. I have a good coping mechanism for both kinds! It’s to take our local K2, i.e. Twin Peaks, by bike!

I was recently speaking with a close friend who is going through a break-up and gave her the advice that saved me the last time I faced a similar circumstance: develop a regular regime of walking or cycling every day. Get out of the house and out of your normal mental space and breathe the air, see the views, enjoy the beautiful city that is at your fingertips.

My trusty steed taking a break to graze on the way up Twin Peaks, January 2007.

Plenty of local cyclists are commuting and shopping these days, and there are those who tour the wide open spaces of the Bay Area in their free time. But I’m always astonished when I pass by the ubiquitous health clubs and gyms to see dozens of people huffing and puffing on treadmills and stationery cycles. We live in an incredible physical landscape, and instead of paying monthly club dues, you can just get out and walk and ride your bike and get as much of a workout as you want! If you’re facing a sudden drop in income, or perhaps you never had the dough to buy a health club membership in the first place, I want to recommend the Twin Peaks ride for your wallet AND your mental health.

View of South Peak from top of North Peak, Jan. 07.

I’ve been riding up to the top of Twin Peaks for about five years, trying to do it weekly but mostly making it twice a month. If I could I’d go every day, but like most people, I’m just too damned busy. Still, it only takes me about 30 minutes to get up there from my flat on Folsom in the Mission. I’ve tried every route from south and north. Straight up 24th Street leads to one of two routes from Hoffman and 24th: south to 25th and slalom up the very steep block to Grand View Avenue, cut further south to Clippper and take the bike lane to where it ends at upper Market. Alternately, an easier route is north on Hoffman until it intersects Grand View, then cut back south on Grand View to the circular ramp at Elizabeth, take it up to the first exit on the east side of upper Market, follow the sidewalk up and eventually cut across the street so you can zoom westward until you hit Twin Peaks Boulevard, close to where O’Shaughnessy Drive enters from the south.

This map shows several approaches from north and south.

One of the surprising treats in store on this route is when you’ve turned north on Twin Peaks Blvd., it takes a minute to pass the last residential intersection (Panorama) and then you enter a different zone. It’s as though you’ve taken off and are beginning to float above the city. Birds and bugs are the new soundscape, the wind and sun or fog greets you as you pass a cluster of invasive ivy and French broom, and continue the circuitous route around the hills to ascend to the South Peak. When I get to the southern end of the crazy eight/infinity ring road, I lock my bike to a sign post and hike up the100 feet to the top of the south peak where I’ve taken over a thousand photos of the city since I started doing this some years ago.

Once you've reached the top of Market Street this is how you leave the city below on Twin Peaks Blvd.

The other approaches from the east take a more northerly approach. Go to 17th and Castro and Market, have a coffee, and start riding up 17th. In a block or so, you’ll see Corbett Avenue leaving diagonally to the southwest, far more gradual than the vertical incline of 17th Street. Follow Corbett’s winding ascent until you hit Clayton, where you have two choices. You can take Clayton to the right (north) to where it hits the other end of Twin Peaks Boulevard a short ways up hill, but then you face a dauntingly steep climb to where Twin Peaks Blvd. leaves to the left, while the road you’ve been on continues straight ahead as Clarendon Blvd. (This is also a spot where you can take the wooden stairs to your right and pop out on to the top of Tank Hill, one of the city’s most treasured viewing spots.) From this intersection, the climb is steady but not horribly steep.

The other choice from Corbett and Clayton is to continue on Corbett, ascending slowly in a southerly direction, well above Market Street now, until you reach a steep short block called Hopkins Street to your right. Take that up to Burnett, turn right, and follow Burnett to the end where it intersects Twin Peaks Blvd. (it’s a bit steep towards the end of this ride too)… Now you follow Twin Peaks Blvd. as it winds up the northeast face of Twin Peaks and brings you to the north peak and/or a turn into the tourist-bus-filled parking lot with the typical views.

Red route is steeper, blue route meanders more, taking Corbett to Hopkins to Burnett before intersecting Twin Peaks Blvd.

Crystal clear view in Feburary 2007 from the South Peak.

It's always a bit odd to have a view like this a "routine" experience! But you can if you get to the top of Twin Peaks regularly.

I recommend locking up and hiking to the top of either peak, and sit and contemplate the city in all its grandeur. I find nothing clears my mind and calms my qualms like a bracing 20 minutes at the top of Twin Peaks. On clear days the views are spectacular in all directions, taking in the Pacific, the Golden Gate Bridge, downtown the bay as far south as you can see, San Bruno Mountain and Montara Mountain across the peninsula to the south, Mt. Davidson and even Lake Merced. Twin Peaks itself is part of what some are claiming as the San Miguel Hills Bio-reserve, which ultimately seeks to create open wild corridors connecting these hills with the Presidio to the north and San Bruno Mountain to the south. As a relatively isolated bit of San Francisco's natural ecology, Twin Peaks still provides habitat for a number of birds, butterflies and flowers.

Blooming lupine on Twin Peaks in March 2007, an important butterfly habitat.

Anise Swallowtail butterflies like the rocky summit of the south peak, seen here in October 2009.

Small mammals make this landscape their home, which in turn provides food for raptors and coyotes who also make regular appearances on Twin Peaks.

Swooping in for dinner, June 2009.

On the hunt in June 09.

Once you’ve burned all those calories and calmed all those nerves, you have the great pleasure of hurtling back down the hill on a route of your choice. All paths down are a blast, so get out there and enjoy one of San Francisco’s greatest assets, entirely free to use as often as you like!

Fog is often blocked at the summit of Twin Peaks, or so it seems from the eastern neighborhoods. Once up there, its embrace can be exciting and inspiring!

Sometimes there's nothing to do but give up to the elements... good for the brain and soul!

October 24, 2009, Bay Street in San Francisco: Riders traverse one potential future shoreline

I'll be leaving in ten days for Scandinavia, and will be sending reports to sf.streetsblog on the upcoming Climate Change conference (known as COP15) and the massive demonstrations that are expected to surround it. I've been to Copenhagen (my mother was born there) so I'm excited to return to a place where bicycles reign and the political culture is surprisingly reasonable compared to anything here in the U.S. COP15 will be joined by most of the world's nations, while outside its perimeter, a range of political organizations and ad-hoc political cultures will also converge, bringing memories of Seattle a decade ago, and the half dozen other dramatic confrontations between protesters and police at G8 or IMF summits since then.

Anthropogenic climate change is well underway, with polar ice caps, glaciers, and arctic tundra all melting at unprecedented rates. In San Francisco's mild climate, where we still enjoy abundant fresh food, water, and easy transportation and communications, it's hard to feel climate change as an imminent disaster. In fact, according to recent polls, U.S. residents are increasingly skeptical about climate change and more resistant to remedial actions. (On a local note, I was distributing my new red global warming bicycle license plates at the last Critical Mass and had two unrelated young men go off on me, each claiming that global warming is a government hoax! Apparently we get some Glen Beck fans on bikes even at Critical Mass!)

Global warming license plates! No bike should be without one!

But the know-nothing approach will not sustain itself. Droughts and desertification are increasing in some areas, torrential rains and floods in others. Oceans are sure to rise, some say as much as 10-15 feet in the next few decades, inundating coastal regions where a large percentage of the world's population lives in large cities. As glaciers that supply most of the world's fresh water continue to shrink at alarming rates, a future with diminishing supplies of fresh water seems certain. Biodiversity is another casualty, as one of the great extinctions in Earth's history continues to gather momentum, worsened considerably by the destruction of habitat that the aforementioned consequences of climate change are causing.

It's all too easy to despair at the accumulating news. Let's face it, the facts are very very bad. But all is not lost. Human beings are resilient, and it's not impossible for us to reorient our lives towards a more harmonious and integrated approach with the logic of nature. But it's difficult to reconcile the enormity of the crisis with the individual choices we can make, which are important but seem so small. After several decades in which "the personal is political" got turned into a series of marketing slogans, we have the opportunity to make this tired old cliche something profound. Our individual behaviors are the starting point, and a necessary piece of the puzzle. But it's when they start merging with one another, when new communities emerge in our practices, when we can start envisioning a different way of life based on these different choices, that we start getting somewhere. (Ultimately the work we do every day has to be redirected to a completely different way of life, an argument I make at length in my book Nowtopia.)

Still, even if thousands of people start cycling, recycling, eating less, using less water and energy, living better, etc., the real power in this world still sits outside and above us. Corporations and governments collude in reinforcing a system that focuses narrowly on profits and accumulation of wealth in a tiny few's hands. Their power is what impedes a thorough-going reinvention of life. Copenhagen is one of those moments when the global culture comes face to face with itself, with the institutions that are actually running things, and the cavernous gap between their agenda and one that might actually address the planet's predicament.

One fraction of the population that has perhaps greater responsibility than most are the technicians, professionals, and bureaucrats whose labor reinforces the ideological and political power of these moribund institutions. All too often scientists and technical professionals abdicate any responsibility for the consequences of their work, basically doing what they're told to do to keep their cushy lives intact. But occasionally social movements benefit from those who refuse to quietly go along to get along. A couple of days ago a Berkeley couple who work as attorneys at the San Francisco office of the U.S. EPA, Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, appeared on Democracy Now!. They have been told by the EPA to take down a 10-minute video they made called "The Huge Mistake," in which they take on the current climate change legislation in the U.S. Congress that promotes a scam called Cap-and-Trade. They got to tell their story quickly on Democracy Now!, and it's well worth checking out the original video too.

Once you start thinking about it, what we don't see is a much bigger category than what we do see. But what we don't see ON PURPOSE is a really interesting category. When you add to the mix mobility, walking or riding or driving through city streets, not seeing can become a mysteriously dangerous stew indeed!

In The Botany of Desire food scribe Michael Pollan gives a history from the point of view of four plants: the apple, the tulip, the potato, and marijuana. In his description of human response to marijuana he describes what he calls the "cannabinoid system," a system of nerves and chemicals in our brains (somewhat analogous to a nervous system) that serves to screen out extraneous information. I had always been puzzled by the effects of marijuana on most people, but this helped explain it. Not only does it make you feel good, it also tends to make it difficult to multi-task for most people. Your ability to concentrate is impaired. Or is it? Pollan suggests that marijuana's psychoactive ingredient, Tetrahydrocannabinol, enhances the effects of the cannabinoid system, screening out even more than usual, leaving us with all our senses filled with whatever is front and center-a bowl of ice cream, sex, a visually stimulating movie or art show, or what have you…

"Miéville has given us an extraordinary meditation on otherness. Whether we gaze out from our nation on the peoples of the world and see something less than we are (we're #1?), or we walk past the homeless person sprawled in their own vomit, we are all adept at not seeing."

The City & The City is a complete departure from the twisted nightmares of his famous triology. But his grasp for the fear and horror that lie at the edges of our daily lives haunt this book in more subtle, but perhaps more powerful ways. Instead of an imaginary world of inexplicable species and uncertain rules of physics, in this book we get a thrilling murder mystery. The setting for this story is what takes it out of the realm of the run-of-the-mill and into a Kafka-esque puzzle palace equally political and psychological as it is a criminal. It starts out with the discovery of a dead woman's body in a derelict corner of the city of Besźel. Inspector Tyador Borlú is our hero and narrates most of the tale. Based on these proper nouns alone, we strain to figure out where in the world we are. Serbia? Bosnia? Maybe Bulgaria or Moldova?... But before long we find out that Besźel has a neighboring city called Ul Qoma, a name that sounds Arabic, leading a casual reader to think we must be in the Balkans somewhere. But these fictional twin cities are actually in different countries, never named, and have an extremely unusual relationship that lies at the heart of the story.

"As I turned, I saw past the edges of the estate to the end of GunterStrász, between the dirty brick buildings. Trash moved in the wind. It might be anywhere. An elderly woman was walking slowly away from me in a shambling sway. She turned her head and looked at me. I was struck by her motion, and I met her eyes. I wondered if she wanted to tell me something. In my glance I took in her clothes, her way of walking, of holding herself, and looking.

With a hard start, I realized that she was not on GunterStrász at all, and that I should not have seen her.

Immediately and flustered I looked away, and she did the same, with the same speed. I raised my head, towards an aircraft on its final descent. When after some seconds I looked back up, unnoticing the old woman stepping heavily away, I looked carefully instead of at her in her foreign street at the facades of the nearby and local GunterStrász, that depressed zone."

What is going on? This is in the first twenty pages and immediately we are puzzled and trying to figure out what the author means… "unnoticing"? As the story progresses, we slowly get a more complete picture of an almost impossible urban space. Two cities, rigidly separated, but completely interpenetrating one another. Children taught from an early age how to not see. Here's a passage much later in the book, when Inspector Borlú is on the other side in Ul Qoma with his counterpart Senior Detective Qussim Dhatt, gazing from Dhatt's window:

"It was quickly obvious that Dhatt lived within a mile, in grosstopic terms, of my own house. From their living room I saw that Dhatt and Yallya's rooms and my own overlooked the same stretch of green ground, that in Besźel was Majdlyna Green and in Ul Qoma was Kwaidso Park, a finely balanced crosshatch. I had walked in Majdlyna myself often. There are parts where even individual trees are crosshatched, where Ul Qoman children and Besź children clamber past each other, each obeying their parents's whispered strictures to unsee the other."

Crosshatching refers to the overlapping parts of the city, where along one block some buildings are Besź and others are Ul Qoman. Public thoroughfares are also crosshatched, so that as you walk down the street you have to "unsee" people from the other side, but at the same time, make sure not to run into them. If you're driving on one of these cross-hatched streets you have to avoid "protubs" (i.e. vehicles from the other side) that are in your path but without actually seeing them, or mentally noting their existence.

"I'm sure you're aware of all the controversy around early artefacts in this region, Inspector. Bol Ye'an's uncovering pieces that are a good couple of millennia old. Whichever theory you subscribe to on Cleavage, split or convergence, what we're looking for predates it, predates Ul Qoma and Besźel. It's root stuff... You understand we know next to nothing about the culture that produced all this?"

More than half the book has passed by the time Borlú gets permission to pursue his investigation in Ul Qoma. Going over is a rare experience, and he hasn't done it for a long time. As a high-ranking detective he is given a fast orientation on his way across:

"Mostly, as with our own equivalents, the orientation course was concerned to help a Besź citizen through the potentially traumatic fact of actually being in Ul Qoma, unseeing all their familiar environs, where we lived the rest of our life, and seeing the buildings beside us that we had spent decades making sure not to notice…

They sat me in what they called an Ul Qoma simulator, a booth with screens for inside walls, on which they projected images and videos of Besźel with the Besź buildings highlighted and their Ul Qoman neighbors minimized with lighting and focus. Over long seconds, again and again, they would reverse the visual stress, so that for the same vista Besźel would recede and Ul Qoma shine.

How could one not think of the stories we all grew up on, that surely the Ul Qomans grew up on too? Ul Qoman man and Besź maid, meeting in the middle of Copula Hall, returning to their homes to realize that they live, grosstopically, next door to each other, spending their lives faithful and alone, rising at the same time, walking crosshatched streets close like a couple, each in their own city, never breaching, never quite touching, never speaking a word across the border…"

Miéville has given us an extraordinary meditation on otherness. Whether we gaze out from our nation on the peoples of the world and see something less than we are (we're #1?), or we walk past the homeless person sprawled in their own vomit, we are all adept at not seeing. The day-to-day invisibility of bicyclists and pedestrians is another all-too-common example. By making it an active process of "unseeing," Miéville's novel highlights the automatic quality of most of our own not-seeing. We mostly don't choose to not see, much like the citizens of Besźel and Ul Qoma don't have to choose because they've been inculcated in not seeing since earliest childhood. Maybe by being shown not seeing in such a stark and unexpected way we gain a better view of our own blind spots. We maybe have been trained to not see too, but there is no Breach to disappear us if we learn to see things as they really are.

The Emperor's New Clothes fell off Bush right away, but the new guy is still walking around like he's got a fine suit on, even though his nakedness is clearly apparent. The Orwellian world so many hoped had been left behind has only become more absurd as Obama fondles his Peace Prize while authorizing more missile strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan in his first 9 months than Bush did in three years. Seeing through the Spectacle of Power is one thing, but seeing what's really going on in our daily lives is another. Literary efforts like The City & The City cleverly illuminate our synaptic self-delusions while telling us a great story.

How often do we not see who or what is in front of us?

Stephen O'Brien has been coaxing an oasis out of a most unlikely environment for a long time: the small green patches at either end of the ground level Mission Street frontage of the Transbay Terminal. He started back in 1958, when the old Key System train tracks that used to bring East Bay electric streetcars to the Transbay Terminal were being torn out. The Transbay Terminal in those days was a crucial commuter hub, bringing passengers from all over the East Bay. If you've ever ridden the F bus from Berkeley to San Francisco, you've ridden on the descendant of the same-lettered streetcar that once transported you from downtown Berkeley to downtown San Francisco just a minute longer than BART does today!

O'Brien is having his last day working his gardens at the Transbay Terminal today. His company's contract with Caltrans has ended, and he has been transferred to the State Building or the PUC building grounds. He's almost 80 years old and if he doesn't like his new posting, he'll probably retire soon. It'll be hard to match the half century he's spent cultivating the quiet, almost invisible oases at the Transbay Terminal. I heard about O'Brien from my friend Susanne Zago:

"Every morning I step out of the Transbay Terminal, one of the ugliest places I've ever been, and I notice this small green space as I leave. Sometimes it was completely trashed, but the next day I'd look in and it would be restored to its pristine condition. I looked at the trees, surprisingly mature, wondering what was planned for them as they build the new Transbay Center. I started asking around, and no one knew. One day I met this man who was in the space and it turned out to be Stephen."

July 20, 1953, Key System train awaits on platform in Transbay Terminal. (Photo courtesy San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library.)

Passengers boarding Key System train, June 8, 1948.

A natural oasis at 1st and Mission.

Beneath this 45-year-old pine lies a hidden patch of nature, nurtured for a half century by Stephen O'Brien.

A garden flourishes in a forgotten corner.

Stephen O'Brien knows what's going to happen. His 52 years of nurturing these garden spots will be bulldozed with the rest of the old 1939 Terminal, making way for the new tallest building in San Francisco and a multi-billion dollar transit center. The project has been gestating for years. I once had an office at 37 Clementina, which is only about a block away, and I remember the original plan in the late 1980s to bring Caltrain into the city center at 1st and Mission in order to connect to BART and MUNI, establishing a true regional transit hub. The Caltrain extension was deep-sixed by transit planners. Years went by, during which BART was extended to the airport and MUNI extended its N-Judah by building waterfront tracks around to 4th and Townsend (massively subsidizing the Giants' "privately financed" stadium). Now they've resuscitated the Caltrain extension, in order to bring High-Speed Rail into the center of downtown. The profligate waste of resources is breathtaking. But as long as engineering firms and contractors and building trades workers are all keeping busy, it's good for the economy right?

Anyway, as we go through our daily lives it's easy to not see the little patches of nature struggling to gain a foothold in the aptly named concrete jungle. I spoke to O'Brien on Wednesday and learned a bit about his long service at this deeply layered historical site. He told me when he showed up in 1958 there were just brown patches where today there is dense foliage and tall trees. I went to look for old photos at the Main Library's online collection, and as you can see from these pictures, the spots that Stephen has been maintaining have always been "green," albeit nothing like what he's helped them become.

In this December 27, 1939 photo taken in the first year of the Transbay Terminal's operation, you can see the two garden spots laid out from the beginning. (Photo courtesy San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library.)

By August 10, 1964, Stephen O'Brien had been watering and attending this garden for almost six years. (Photo courtesy San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library.)

October 8, 2009, just months before demolition.

O'Brien has an interesting history himself. He's got an Irish name but on his mother's side of the family, he has an English grandfather and a German grandmother. His English grandfather once owned a dairy ranch on the western slopes of Mt. Tamalpais before selling it off for $500! O'Brien grew up in Tomales Bay, and as a young man he jumped at the chance to purchase a lot in the newly subdivided Inverness back in the 1940s: $25 down and $25 a month until he'd paid off the $1,000 price. Today his lot is the only one left in Inverness that hasn't had a house built on it.

He told me about the barber who used to have his business inside the Terminal. After helping him sink his plumbing O'Brien got free haircuts for a long time. There used to be three different restaurants inside too, including the James Gray Company restaurant, and shoeshine and shoe repair were also thriving businesses there. Continental Trailways bus service once used the station in competition with Greyhound, just as other train lines once ran across the Bay Bridge along with the Key System, until the Bay Bridge was converted to motorized vehicles only.

O'Brien was in the basement a few years ago and saw that the vast underground space was still as good as new. Nevertheless, it's all coming down soon. He noted that the rebuilding of the Fremont Street ramps from the Bay Bridge had probably saved his gardens for an extra seven or eight years. The gnarly pine tree closest to First Street was saved from a nearby State Building, when O'Brien transplanted it from a discarded planter. It's grown to be 20 feet tall and while it's oddly shaped there's no denying that is seems to be thriving with its roots in the ground! The twin pines at either end of the Terminal were planted more than 45 years ago and though they've grown rather tall, they're dwarfed by the skyscrapers that have continued the southward march from downtown. O'Brien told me about the various birds, LBB's, gulls, hawks, and pigeons that have made this mini-habitat a resting spot. Varieties of butterflies have found a home here too.

The eastern end of the Terminal plaza.

The Millennium tower dwarfing the 45-year-old pine tree at Fremont and Mission.

To the west, this ungainly monster dominates a hearty pine tree that was saved from a discarded planter by Stephen O'Brien.

Who remembers that the highrise in the photo above was built on the site of the old arcade known as "Fun Terminal"? The same "Fun Terminal" that gave its name to the seminal album by local rockers The Mutants back in the early 1980s?...

Fun Terminal! Right across 1st Street from O'Brien's Garden back in the 1970s-80s.

Stephen was philosophical about losing his half-century's work. It makes him sad, of course. O'Brien's gardens have survived in surprised juxtaposition to the changing neighborhood that surround them. Easy to overlook, his gardens are larger examples of the persistence of nature even in a highly built environment. For those of us who haven't noticed the garden spots as we've scurried by, preoccupied with the day's work or the domestic dramas ahead, their imminent disappearance (they will no longer be maintained, but should stand for a few months more at least) might serve as a cautionary note. Shouldn't we stop and smell the flowers? And shouldn't we honor the essential work of the invisible toilers in our midst, people like Stephen O'Brien who has selflessly and without ulterior motive kept these little patches of urban greenery flourishing for decades? Stop by today and say thanks to Stephen O'Brien!

In 1953, pigeons had the roost of the lawn... (Photo courtesy San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

Going, going, ...

November 1965 view looking southeast over the Transbay Terminal. (Photo courtesy San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library.)

Terminal History

San Francisco’s Transbay Terminal was built in 1939 at 1st and Mission Streets as a California Toll Bridge Authority facility in order to facilitate commuter rail travel across the lower portion of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.  It was paid for by Bay Bridge tolls, which were then 50 cents per automobile.  At the time, the lower deck of the Bay Bridge was not only used for automobile travel, but also hosted two rail tracks on the south side. The rail portion was run principally through the Key System.

The Terminal was designed to handle as many as 35 million people annually with a peak 20-minute rate of 17,000 commuters that were transported in 10-car trains at headways of 63.5 seconds. In its heyday at the end of World War II, the terminal’s rail system was transporting 26 million passengers annually. After the war ended and gas rationing was eliminated, the Terminal’s use began to steadily decline to a rate of four to five million people traveling by rail per year. In 1958, the lower deck of the Bay Bridge was converted to automobile traffic only, the Key System was dismantled, and by 1959, the inter-modal Transbay Terminal was converted into a bus-only facility, which it currently is today.  (from the Transbay Center website)

Guadalajara, Mexico was host this month to the 2nd annual Congress of Cyclists in Mexico, a national gathering of bicyclist activists from around the country. I was invited to give a speech, which I somehow managed to do in Spanish (thanks to my media naranja for translating and coaching me!), detailing the history of cycling and Critical Mass in particular. I loved being at the Congress, meeting people from all over Mexico, a few old and new friends from the U.S., and one remarkable woman from Quito, Ecuador.

The city of Guadalajara is an ironic place for this conference. It is a town overrun with SUVs, streets jammed with cars, 6-lane, one-way boulevards, sprawling suburbs in five other municipalities making a metro area of 6 million or so. In spite of its obvious car-centrism, Guadalajara has a number of beautiful public plazas, several pedestrian-only zones closed to cars, both in its downtown and in a gentrified artsy-touristy neighborhood some distance from the city center. They've even installed a real European-style bike lane (or ciclovia as they're generally known in Spanish) on one of its major thoroughfares, with plans to extend a network of such lanes in several directions.

SUVs at an athletic club in Zapopan, a wealthier suburb of Guadalajara.

Six-lane roads all over, mostly jammed with SUV-heavy traffic. This is the norm in Guadalajara.

One of many pedestrian-friendly plazas in the center of Guadalajara.

I was surprised to find many streets closed to cars, full of pedestrians and shoppers.

The only ciclovia, or bike lane, in Guadaljara is on Federlismo... but it's a well-designed separate bikeway at the edge of the sidewalk, different pavement and plenty of room.

The same bike lane continuing towards a major intersection.

The Congress opened with several short speeches, a perfunctory welcome from the distracted mayor of Guadalajara (he left as fast as he could after his talk), and a much lengthier speech from the minister of culture. His talk was more informative and sounded very good, full of "new urbanism" concepts, favoring public transit (there is already a BRT system in part of the city), bike lanes, public spaces, denser and taller urban planning, etc. He explained that the city government could not provide the impetus for this agenda indefinitely, and in fact, that time may have already passed (far short of achieving any meaningful transformation of the city's transit priorities). He urged the audience, civil society in general, to take the lead and push for the changes it wants to see. An ecologist from the state of Jalisco, in which Guadalajara resides, spoke last and was quite adamant about how little had been achieved and how severe the impediments were.

Giving my speech in LARVA, opening morning of the Congress.

In fact, this was a common lament among the folks here (a couple of friends I made at the Car-free Cities Conference in Portland last summer made the effort to get me down here). The city is not only not advancing a sustainable transportation agenda, they are impeding it. Even if they were sincere in their efforts (which was not considered credible among most of the Congress participants) the common problem in Mexico is official corruption, where monies dedicated to any public infrastructure are often siphoned off into private pockets.

The Women's Panel on the 2nd day.

That said, the Congress itself was a great experience. Delegates from around Mexico showed up, representing such towns as Monterrey, Puebla, Mexico City, Queretero, Aguas Calientes, Ensenada, Xalapa, Tijuana, Oaxaca, San Luis Potosi, and more. The CACITA folks from Oaxaca showed up in a biodiesel bus packed with a dozen amazing contraptions, all pedal-powered appliances and tools, and had fun demonstrating them during the Congress. Lots of women attended and participated in spirited panels and discussions. Generally the delegates were under 30, but there were a few of us older geezers too...

The bici lavandera, or pedal-powered clothes washer.

The CACITA folks were great stencil artists too!

The gathering reminded me a lot of the old days in San Francisco, before the Bike Coalition had become so large and "official," when a strange amalgamation of personalities were pulling and pushing to build new organizations, to find ways to get the ears of local politicians and planners, and to finally make bicycling an everyday transportation option... and there were some of us--then and now--who wanted to see bicycling as a starting point for a much deeper transformation of everyday life. Here in Guadalajara, all these types were present, the organizers and control-freaks, the plain-old freaks and hippies, the efficiency-obsessed, the techies and tour organizers, the revolutionaries and velorutionaries, the bicycle merchants, and the hopeful, youthful, idealistic, naive, savvy, and inspiring individuals who were ready to be part of something bigger. To be sure, a bicycling movement is growing in Mexico. Bicitekas of Mexico City has been going for 10 years, but in the rest of the country, cycling activism is in its formative years. At the Congress the well-rehearsed arguments made their appearance of course: helmets or not? Bike paths or vehicular integration or bike boulevards? Are we accommodating everyone or commuters? Short trips, long trips, or both?... and so on...

Not everything was focused on the nuts-and-bolts of cycle activism. A poetic contribution came across the sea with Oscar Patsi, blogger at La Revolucion de las Mariposas. He's a funny, unprepossessing guy, late 40s or so, speaking with a gravelly voice as he smoked his way through his presentation. He gives the bicycle credit for restoring his mental health and self-esteem after a darker period of his life. "I ride my bike and I know my city," he told us, and that he is the "finder" among his friends. When they want to have a bite, or procure an object, he knows exactly where it is because as a cyclist he has a much more developed sense of where things are.

Oscar Patsi, blogger at Revolucion of the Mariposas.

No todos los bragas son principes
No todas las braguitas son princesas
Pero los culos mas hermosos todos van en bicicleta!

(loosely translated)
Not all briefs are princes
Not all panties are princesses
But the most beautiful asses are always on bicycles!

The Sunday Streets of Guadalajara.... but it's EVERY Sunday, on major central city thoroughfares!

Via Recre-Activa crowds.

Guadalajara has a "Via Recre-Activa" every Sunday, closing 12 kilometers of major boulevards through the center of town from 8 to 2 for free open use (similarly Mexico City has a big Sunday bicycling scene). Guadalajara has also established a fleet of free public white bikes, or bicipublicas. By many measurements, the Mexicans are WAY ahead of San Francisco, from the dozens of public pedestrian streets and plazas that are heavily used, to the free public bikes and the Sunday street closures every week. (Partly it's that Mexican culture has not been as thoroughly subsumed by the modern atomized life that prevails in the U.S., so it's still part of the fabric of life to go out for walks, to enjoy shopping in pedestrian zones, etc.) That said, there's a long way to go here, just as there is an even longer way to go in San Francisco.

Bicipublicas, or public white bikes. They have a fleet parked around Guadaljara.

A spirited Critical Mass took over the streets on Satruday night. Guadalajara has a First Thursday Critical Mass normally, which has recently reached 4,500 riders!

One of the most inspiring examples I learned about at the Congress wasn't in Mexico but in Quito, Ecuador. While riding in a boisterous Critical Mass through Guadalajara on Saturday night, I found myself next to Heleana Zambonino, an intense and dedicated activist making her first trip out of Ecuador. We started talking (she had very good English, thank goodness, since my ability to converse in Spanish remains terribly limited) and before long she started telling me about her work in Quito with a group called Ciclopolis. A quick summary: starting about six years ago, inspired by the idea of Critical Mass that they'd gotten wind of, they started a "Ciclo Paseo" every Sunday from 9 to 3 over 29 km, that is now drawing as many as 50,000 people to a ride! They have an email list in Quito of over 40,000 people! There are four different social-public rides EVERY week! They do bike games on sidewalks one day, a night ride once a week, and much more... Even more impressive is that they got 70 km of ciclovias put on city streets. The city installed the bike lanes on sidewalks at first, but after their group organized protests, they got the city to rip out what they'd done and do it all over again!! Amazing!

Heleana from Quito, Jorge (Aguascalientes), me, Mariana (Mexico City), Jesus (Mexico City), and Bob (Ensenada and Oakland)

All this is to underscore how slow and unsatisfactory our progress here in San Francisco is. How can we be having 4 blocks of Valencia rebuilt without having proper Copenhagen-style bike lanes installed... after ALL THESE YEARS?? How many more times are we going to have to settle for tepid, unsafe, ill-maintained painted bike lanes in the car door zone? Leaving the U.S., even just across the border to Mexico, I'm reminded again of how little progress we've made, how car-centric we continue to be (against all common sense and planetary ecological concerns), and how much further along many parts of the world are, but almost entirely invisible to us!

On our way in to the Congress on the first morning, we came upon this bicycilng panadero (bread man), making his rounds. The bicycle continues to be an important vehicle for many kinds of workers.

Famously, we live on a crack in the earth. The San Andreas Fault gets most of our attention, followed not too far behind these days by the equally ominous Hayward Fault. A major earthquake on either of these could alter local landscapes forever, and will certainly damage or destroy freeways, bridges, and the water system. That's one of our catastrophes waiting in the wings, and it's good think about preparing for such eventualities.

Less obvious, but just as much a part of our local natural landscape (largely obscured by asphalt and buildings), are the old waterways on which the city is built. The evidence for these underground waterways is in plain view as well as being represented in various public documents. Joel Pomerantz wrote "San Francisco's Clean Little Secret" a few years ago (first appearing in a book I edited "The Political Edge" City Lights: 2004) wherein he found in SF Water Dept. official reports the saga of the "Mighty Hayes River." Starting deep underground somewhere near Lone Mountain, the subterranean river flows southeast under Civic Center, and as you can see on this map, once surfaced around 7th and Mission.

1852 U.S. Coastal Survey Map of San Francisco, from Yerba Buena Cove at upper right to Mission Bay on right. Mission Plank Road is the long diagonal that clips the edge of the swampy wetlands at apx. today's 7th and Mission.

"With a hydromorphology not unlike Florida’s everglades, [the Hayes River] broadsides Market Street, encountering a long concrete subway tunnel that interrupts its gait. So copious are the waters of the Hayes that, to protect their investment from damage, BART runs “de-watering” pumps day and night in the Powell Street BART station. Removing, each week, 2.5 million gallons of tested, high-quality, potable groundwater (into the sewer!) the transit agency keeps the Hayes from flooding the tracks."

It's not far to the obvious subsidence at Natoma Alley just west of 7th where the street level falls at least 5 feet from the grade on the larger 7th Street.

Natoma Street, easterly, just west of 7th.

Same intersection of Natoma and 7th looking from east to west.

On Howard Street, a hundred or so feet south, two warehouses have been slowly sinking into the underlying marsh. Several efforts to cosmetically disguise what's happening have been implemented in recent years, but this latest version, painting the horizontal red boxes, seems to emphasize the effect.

Sinking warehouses on Howard Street opposite Langton Alley. Note the red horizontal boxes painted on the front of the darker warehouse... the second one noticeably angles downward. Note too how the stripes in the road indicate the dip.

Same warehouse straight on.

Extreme Pizza brick building on Folsom near Russ Street. Cracks in the facade have been patched, but there's no denying the building is slumping to the right, sinking into the marsh!

Just around the corner from the Pizza brick building, on Russ Alley, these cars highlight a sinking spot.

These buildings on Folsom between 6th and 5th show signs of subsidence too. The older ones are tipping back from the street, as the rear of the structures are sinking. Before a lot of new lofts were built in the 1990s in this area, many old warehouses were obviously sinking after the 1989 earthquake, on Folsom, Harrison and the alleys in between.

In an 1878 history by J.S. Hittell (History of the City of San Francisco and Incidentally of the State of California, cited in Nancy Olmsted’s Vanished Waters: A History of San Francisco’s Mission Bay. San Francisco: Mission Creek Conservancy, 1986) the 80-100 foot deep marshes presented a significant barrier to surface transportation. The first road to cross them was the Mission Plank tollroad, but there engineering problems right away.

“Mission Bay’s slender connection to Gold Rush San Francisco is the Mission Plank Road. (today’s Mission Street), which opened as a toll road in 1851. Its three-and-a-quarter-mile length ran into trouble for the contractors where it crossed the line of Seventh Street (shown but not named on the map).

Here they projected a bridge built on pilings, “but that plan had to be abandoned, to the astonishment and dismay of the contractor; the first pile, forty feet long, at the first blow of the pile driver sank out of sight, indicating that there was no bottom within forty feet to support a bridge. One pile having disappeared, the contractor hoisted another immediately over the first and in two blows drove the second down beyond the reach of the hammer… there was no foundation within eighty feet… pilings were abandoned, and cribs of logs were laid upon the turf so as to get a wider base than offered by piles. The bridge made thus always shook when crossed by heavy teams and gradually settled till it was in the middle about five feet below the original level… the cost of the road was ninety-six thousand dollars, about thirty thousand dollars per mile… the plank road company obtained another franchise for a road on Folsom Street… in 1854 a high tide overflowed the [Folsom] road between Fourth and Fifth and floated off the planking.”

J.S. Hittell observes that, although these marshy areas were called swamps, “They seem to have been for part of their area at least, subterranean lakes from forty to eighty feet deep, covered by a crust of peat moss eight or ten feet thick… When the streets were first made, the weight of the sand pressed the peat down, so that the water stood where the surface was dry before… More than once a contractor had put on enough sand to raise the street to the official grade, and gave notice to the city engineer to inspect the work, but in the lapse of a day between notice and inspection the sand had sunk down six or eight feet… heavy sand crowded under the light peat at the sides of the street and lifted it up eight or ten feet above its original level, in muddy riddges full of hideous cracks…it was also pushed sidewise so that houses and fences built upon it were carried away from their original position and tilted up at singular angles…”

The toll road to the mission probably would have gone out Market Street instead of trying to cross these soggy swamps, but in that era tall sand hills still dominated the terrain. The relatively flat Market Street we know today was blocked by an 80-foot sandhill between Second and Third Streets… What happened to all that sand? In the period 1859 to 1873, the "steam paddy" (or giant steam shovel—it was said to do the work of twenty Irish laborers at a single stroke) took south-of-Market sand to fill Mission Bay, establishing a century-long pattern of leveling hills and using the sand, rock, and soil to fill in nearby wetlands to "make land." It wasn't until the 1965 McAteer-Petris Act established the Bay Conservation and Development Commission that the pell-mell filling of the bay was halted.

Market and Powell are written in hand on this 1851 photo. This view is from apx. 2nd and Folsom. Note the very tall sand dunes to the left and in the distance. This is today's rather flat South of Market area!

Cities don't stand still. Going back at least to WWII, U.S. cities have been radically altered again and again. Economic restructuring has been part of it, as urban areas have shed manufacturing in favor of the so-called service sector: FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) and Tourism (restaurants and hotels plus retail and entertainment). Transportation changes have played a big part too, with the suburbanization of the 1950s-60s fueled (literally) by the interstate highway system and intraurban freeways, and the inexorable expansion of private cars at the expense of public transit. The populations that occupy various neighborhoods in cities, once relatively stable for generations, have moved away, leaving behind spaces whose character has changed with the arrival of new city dwellers, whether from other countries or just elsewhere in the U.S.

It's a long story, and every neighborhood in every city has its own tale to tell. During the past generation a populist opposition to urban gentrification has emerged. It probably starts with the bitter struggles to prevent the 1960s "urban renewal" programs from displacing whole populations (in San Francisco's Fillmore it became known as "negro removal," a precedent well-remembered by those now opposing the Redevelopment Agency in Bayview/Hunter's Point). But during the real estate booms of the 1980s and again during the dotcom boom at the end of the 1990s, right through the historically unprecedented housing bubble that finally popped in 2008, many progressives have worked to confront the forces of gentrification.

Gentrification as a term tends to conflate different "facts on the ground" though. Sometimes it defines a process of social displacement, usually class- or race-based, wherein a poorer population is forced out by rising prices and the steady influx of new residents who can pay those prices. To acolytes of the market, this all seems perfectly reasonable and fair, and the idea that there should be some kind of social restraint on such "efficient" "self-organizing" market mechanisms is anathema. To leftists and housing activists committed to defending the downtrodden and the poor, this system is a thinly disguised process of ethnic cleansing most of the time, and when the outcome isn't blatantly racist, it's still another chapter in a long saga of the rich screwing the rest of us.

Those of us who lean towards this latter way of seeing things are enjoying some schadenfreude today as the Lembi Group, one of San Francisco's most notorious landlords and exploiters of tenants, is sinking under a mountain of debt it incurred during the frenzied market conditions that only recently subsided.

Anti-Google, anti-gentrification graffiti popped up around the Mission a year ago or so. This is on 18th near Dolores.

On the other hand, folks fighting the displacement dynamics of the real estate markets in cities have sometimes fallen into a weird cul-de-sac where they seem to think keeping things seedy and decaying is a good thing, as if that were a way to ensure community stability. I can't cite anyone's public declarations to this effect, but I've certainly heard many friends and comrades tsk-tsking disapprovingly when they see someone painting their building, or putting in sidewalk tables and flowerpots, or any of a number of street-level neighborhood improvements. The sidewalk depaving and gardens I wrote about in January earned that response from some radicals I know too. I suppose the feeling is that if such improvements begin, it's only a matter of time before the Devil of Displacement rides in behind the ferns and wrought-iron ornamentation.

David Byrne, the New York musician (once of Talking Heads fame), has a new book out called "Bicycle Diaries," in which he travels to many cities around the world and the U.S., bringing his bike to help preserve his mental (and physical) health while touring. In his "Diaries" he ruminates on many interesting questions of the role of art, history, urban design, and decries the role of freeways in destroying inner cities and waterfronts among other things. But in one curious part he visits Pittsburgh, PA and has this to say about a clear-cut process of gentrification:

"About four years ago when I was here, [a friend] told me how the Heinz family was intent on bringing life (and eventually urban living) back into the downtown of this former industrial giant. Sometimes a rebirth can be started in one neighborhood and then it spreads to the surrounding areas--if they're not cut off or isolated. Artists move into a former factory district and soon cafés and grocery stores follow. A music club opens, a gallery and a bookstore. Developers turn the warehouses into luxury condos and the process begins again, somewhere else."

In other parts of the book Byrne is quite critical of the dynamics of modern capitalism and the results of unfettered market life on the quality of living it leaves in its wake. But here he embraces the building blocks of gentrification, a version of a life-cycle for urban neighborhoods. True enough, this has happened in many places, sometimes aided by the participation of the poorer residents who struggled to clear vacant lots and start community gardens, or who started street festivals when times were harder that have since become charming ethnic attractions.

To my thinking, the problem is not the efforts people make to improve their physical spaces. Of course there's always an issue of "taste," and what is cool and chic for some is cheezy and offensive to others. Some folks might be glad to see an influx of new cafés, while others would prefer the neighborhood remained forgotten (and thereby open to exploration and unmediated interventions) and "unimproved." The real issue is the right of folks who live in an area to make it their home, to have a sense of stability and comfort in their own communities. In the U.S., and in San Francisco, if you don't own property, you have no stability. With the property-trumps-all logic always hovering over city neighborhoods, tenants and the poor are regularly displaced when inflationary dynamics begin, especially if there is no rent control to stabilize their right to remain.

Conflicts arise predictably though, when an incoming population of hipsters, artists, gays, etc., are openly hostile to the population that is being displaced simultaneously to their arrival, often poor, black or latino, and dependent on the underground economy to sustain themselves. The wealthier new arrivals are naturally targeted for harassment and sometimes crime by those who see them as both invaders and insensitive boors with a disproportionate sense of entitlement.

I'm part of the CounterPULSE art/community space at 9th and Mission in San Francisco, where I curate public Talks on three Wednesdays a month. When we opened in 2005, the neighborhood had a lot of vacancies in the wake of the post-dotcom bust, and we felt lucky to find a place we could afford and get a long-term lease near to BART and transit. Within a block there are also numerous public agencies serving the transient poor and homeless, and the corner in front of CounterPULSE has a bus stop for both the always exciting 14-Mission, as well as several SamTrans lines, mostly used by working class commuters. By 2007, our place had been tagged countless times and our windows had been thoroughly wrecked by teen vandals with etching acid they used to graffiti the glass. Homeless addicts were often sprawled on our sidewalk, at or near the bus stop, for hours during the day, and our front doors were open toilets during the night. We worried about our vulnerability, especially at first, but over time we realized that there wasn't much actual danger, just the day-to-day reality of living in a central city area with a lot of down-and-out folks living on the streets.

CounterPULSE is at 1310 Mission, the turquoise and windowed facade to the right.

A couple of years ago in September we set up out front to enjoy PARK(ing) Day and were joined by dozens of neighbors from the buildings on our block. Together we decided to launch a neighborhood association (it has since gone into limbo) called "Planktown Neighbors," a name we chose to signify the fact that we were on a stretch of Mission that had originally been a plank toll road in the early 1850s. In our discussions we struggled to define our goals (to make our streets more beautiful, more comfortable, and safer, esp. vis-a-vis the car-dominated 9th and Mission Streets), but to be as inclusive as we could be. We were in no position to solve the homelessness drama on our two-block stretch of Mission, but we didn't want to be another NIMBY-ish group of small businesses and cultural organizations who called the police to shoo away "undesirable people." So for starters some of the group decided to invest in large planters to help beautify the block, and we all vowed to put more effort into cleaning the sidewalks and getting to know the people in and around our buildings. We all thought it would be smart if we could get enough of a street transformation under way we might be able to get a city grant, and we could pool resources to hire local street people to help maintain our new trees and sidewalk gardens.

A different planter next to St. James Infirmary, further west on Mission, nearer 10th Street.

One of the ongoing dilemmas for landscape architects, city planners, and yes, even transit geeks, is the chicken-and-egg question regarding public space. If you build it, will they come? Is there a “public” demanding wider sidewalks, public squares and plazas, pocket parks, and depaving, and who, exactly, are they?

Starting several decades ago, San Franciscans began to reassert a public life, famously highlighted by the early San Francisco Mime Troupe getting arrested in 1965 for performing free in public parks (initially permitted, the Parks Commission revoked the Mime Troupe’s permit when they disapproved of the play’s content). The Mime Troupe’s legal battles led the city to recognize a new notion of public commons with respect to its parks. This logic was extended further by the Diggers, an anarchic group that emerged from the Mime Troupe to make theater out of everyday life. They began by distributing free food in the Panhandle, and within a few months, a whole culture of “free” was proliferating a year or more before the “Summer of Love” put the Haight-Ashbury on the national map. Free stores, free concerts, free dope, free food, and for some, free love, pushed past the boundaries of the capitalist society.

Golden Gate Park Be-in, 1967.

People poured into San Francisco and especially the Haight in the late 1960s, milling about on the sidewalks, spilling into Haight Street, and even provoking police attacks to re-open the streets filled with people. The Golden Gate Park Be-in in 1967 was but one of dozens of events in those years in which tens of thousands of people filled parks and plazas, to celebrate the new culture with music and dance, or to protest the Vietnam War.

1971 demonstration in Golden Gate Park turns bacchanalian...

After the demise of this flowering era, public space fell into disuse. Big social events petered out, or were commodified in the form of pay-to-enter rock concerts. Missing the spirit and life of those times, some folks began organizing neighborhood street fairs. In 1978, the first Haight Street Fair was held, and over the years, the concept took hold and spread to many of San Francisco’s neighborhoods. One might quibble that these public fairs are basically “alternative malls” with free music, but they’re free, and they’re open, and they’re heavily attended.

Haight Ashbury Street Fair, 1979, photo by Robert Pruzane

Flash forward thirty years, and a new public space renaissance seems to be taking hold hereabouts. To be sure, it hasn’t emerged out of thin air. Food Not Bombs took up the free use of public space in the late 1980s, serving free food in the Civic Center, in Golden Gate Park, and elsewhere, enduring hundreds of arrests for not having a non-existent permit! In the past 17 years Critical Mass has been an important cultural reclaiming of city thoroughfares for political and social reasons outside the instrumental logic of political demands, or economic products/services for sale.

Whoops! Critical Mass on bikes meets Critical Mass on foot at gates of Giants-Rockies game, Aug. 28, 2009.

24th Street jammed with Sunday Streets enjoyment.

Slow Food Nation crowds enjoy Victory Garden in front of City Hall, August 30, 2008.

In the past two weeks the Bay Area has had two new food fairs bring thousands of people to public locations. In the Mission La Cocina staged a “Streetfood Festival” on August 22nd., jamming a one-block stretch of Folsom all day long as people came to eat and drink and talk to their friends and neighbors.

Streetfood Festival on Folsom Street, August 22, 2009.

Eat Real Festival, Oakland.

At Eat Real, a highlight was the Butchering contest, seen here from behind.

In 30 minutes two teams totally dismembered and prepared a quarter cow each. Amazing entertainment! Old-style butchery, a disappearing skill?

A more surprising and less mediated public space has erupted on the slopes of Dolores Park in the past year or two. I lived at Dolores and 19th in 2001-02, and as recently as that it was quite uncommon to see many people sitting on the slope facing Dolores Street between the tennis courts and 19th Street (homeless folks tended to sleep under the trees during the mornings). Nowadays, you can find a huge social scene on that same parkland every nice day. Hundreds of people have made this their defacto bar or café, a place to meet new and old friends, and to just enjoy a public space that has no further purpose than its own enjoyment.

The slope is the place to be... not Golden Gate Park's "Hippie Hill" but Dolores Park's "Hipster Hill" (or is that Fixie Hill?).

Sunny days guarantee a crowded Hipster Hill...

Dolores Beach has been a long-time fave of the gay community, near the 20th Street edge of Dolores Park.

Intrepid explorers of San Francisco regularly stumble upon the many ghost streets that still hide all over town, rewarding the patient pedestrian for their diligence. Mostly they are on hillsides where steep grades impeded road building at earlier moments in history, but they're still presented as if they were through-streets on the maps.

A tour begins with an old map and lots of photos below the break.

1909 map of southeastern San Francisco. Most of the streets here are still under water, awaiting a bayfill effort.

Other ghost streets can be found not on foot but by exploring old maps, where one can enjoy the strange city that extends well into the bay off the southeastern shoreline. I've heard rumors, or maybe I saw a story in the Chron decades ago, about families that continue to pay their property tax annually on parcels that are well into the bay and thoroughly under water. On this 1909 map of the Yosemite Creek area, streets going NW/SE are numbered and alphabetized but they later got real names. The perpendicular grid of alphabetized streets were eventually given real names (similar to what happened in the "outside lands" of the Richmond and Sunset). But on this 1909 map, Jennings, Ingalls, Hawes, Griffith, and Fitch (J, I, H, G, F) are followed southeast into the bay by E, D, C, B, and A streets, and five further blocks with the names, Ship, Dock, Tevis, Von Schmidt, and Pollock before arriving at "Water Front" boulevard. Obviously these streets were never created since the bayfill on which they depended never happened.

Spectacular garden adjacent to Harry "Street."

Harry "Street" in its forest.

Where Harry Meets Laidley.

My favorite ghost streets are short blocks, usually either bedecked with amazing gardens tended by loving neighbors, or else just odd stubs that continue to defy the rigid grid-imposing city planners of days gone by. In these small patches of nature, sometimes groomed, sometimes not, we can free our imaginations from the sterile symmetry imposed by endless blocks of asphalt crisscrossing the city. When we whisper to each other "One Lane for Food" or other equally "preposterous" depaving notions, the ghost streets echo back to us a knowing wink with a survivor's resilience. Probably the best patch of ghost streets in town is the Filbert Steps and its cross "streets" Napier Lane and Darrell Place. The Grace Marchant Garden that fills most of the Filbert right of way on the east side of Telegraph Hill is one of the true ecological treasures of San Francisco, home too to a big flock of much-celebrated parrots.

Filbert Steps on Telegraph Hill, Grace Marchant Garden to right in photo.

I live near 24th and Folsom which gives me a good staging area for visiting the ghost streets of Potrero Hill, Bernal Heights, and both Noe and Eureka Valleys. There are many more than I can fully list or display here, and yes, you can take that as an invitation to get out there and explore! But a couple of my favorites on Potrero Hill are Kansas between 22nd and 20th, and 19th Street between Rhode Island and DeHaro. Potrero Hill in particular used to be a favorite walk many years ago when you could walk up the hillside below McKinley Square and visit the amazing community garden at Vermont and 20th, or take this Kansas ghost path uphill, continue to 19th, and then go right (east) to the ghost of 19th, popping out above the high school and then skirting the Potrero Commons that once graced the slopes above the old Northwest Pacific railroad tunnel (the train's right of way makes another ghost of transit past, cutting diagonally northwest from Potrero Hill through the Showplace Square area before petering out in the confluence of Potrero, Division, 10th, and Brannan Streets...).

Kansas "Street" just north of 22nd Street.

View south from top of Kansas "Street".

19th "Street" at Rhode Island.

A real undiscovered treasure close to the intersection of Corbett and Clayton that I wrote about not long ago in the context of historic water wars and the charming garden that's been planted on the corner, is Al's Park. This curious ribbon of whimsy and nature rises from the mural on upper Market Street (next to the pink historic Joost House) and emerges on Corbett. My 1995 Thomas Bros. map has it labeled as 19th Street (multiple ghostly incarnations for 19th!) but Google's Satellite map doesn't show there as being any public right of way there. Enter Al's Park from Corbett and enjoy a strange, almost 19th century-feeling slice of eccentric San Francisco land use.

Al's Park along the thin red line between Market and Corbett. It is on some maps labeled "19th Street."

Al's Park or 19th Street?

The entrance to Al's Park on Corbett Street.

Al's Park is a veritable museum of oddities.

Al's Park boundary.

Market Street below Al's "19th Street" Park.

Not too far from Al's Park on the northern slopes of Eureka Valley is the ghost of Saturn street that plunges from a cul-de-sac where the street seems to end into a slope with view benches, two staircases, and a lovely landscaping that accompanies one down to Ord Street. Just a few hundred feet to the north are the Vulcan Steps, another of San Francisco's many amazing public stairways serving private homes with cool, inviting porches and elegant, tree- and flower-filled gardens.

Saturn "Street" with views across Eureka Valley.

Back on Bernal Heights, where hundreds of new stairs have been installed in the past few years, especially around the rim and the eastern slope, there's a long legacy of ghost streets. Peralta and Franconia both start and stop from north to the summit and in the case of Peralta all the way down to the Alemany Farmers' Market, punctuated by incredible views, stairways, and gardens all the way. An east-west street near the southern edge of the hilltop is Powhattan and it has its own ghost block between Gates and Ellsworth. Further to the southeast Tompkins Street also has a ghost block between Nevada and Putnam. And probably the best known ghost street on Bernal is Esmeralda, which has a brief life as a thoroughfare on the east side of the summit, but is one of the hill's most glorious stairways down the west side.

Esmeralda above Elsie Street.

I only found this ghost of Harrison Street beneath Ripley a few weeks ago, missing it for years on many walks up Bernal.

Tompkins and Nevada on southeastern slopes of Bernal Heights.

Peralta "Street" looking north.

Powhattan at Ellsworth looking east.

I joined the India Basin Neighborhood Association for a guided tour of their shoreline on August 8, and enjoyed the fantasies and plans of the neighbors juxtaposed to the designs of the Redevelopment Agency for that long-lost corner of the city. India Basin is a favorite haunt of mine, home to Heron's Head Park, India Basic Open Space, and the historic Albion Brewery. It's been the main access to the Hunter's Point Naval Base, but these days, with the rebuilding starting and the naval shipyards long gone, the area is just beginning its gentrification process.

Historic Albion Brewery, now a private residence.

Long-billed Curlew and Egret share some chow time along India Basin shore.

A big roadblock to full-scale upscaling are the dozens of 1940s barracks-style public housing projects at Westbrook and Hunters View. I was struck by the ghost streets here too, staircases filling the zone that could have been Fitch Street or Griffith Street. But out here the landscape is parched, the neighbors indifferent, and the possibilities of flourishing, permaculturally designed corridors along the stairs remote at best. Even as native species habitat it was pretty bereft.

Westbook Public Housing at Fitch Street above Innes Avenue.

Interestingly, the Neighborhood Association presented many ambitious development plans for the area, including a "restaurant row" along Jennings, more offices and shops near the open shoreline at the south side of the basin, and another idea that some of us found a bit disturbing: Hudson Street is a ghostly presence out there, like a derelict alley running east-west just north of Innes Avenue, the main boulevard. But where it should cross Innes and continue westward up the hill into the Hunters View Projects, there is only a fence to mark the city's "right of way." The slope here is a hotspot of native habitat, so aficionados of plants and insects of our original eco-niche are especially interested in saving this hillside from becoming a through street. The Neighbors, for their part, saw a through Hudson Street as a way of relieving the heavy traffic on Hunters Point Blvd and Innes Avenue.

"Hudson Street" (the fence) above Hawes and Innes.

From a quarter mile further west, looking back along Hudson Street towards same hillside as photo above.

"Earl Street" at edge of Hunters' Point Naval Shipyard.

Looking north along Earl from Innes.

On Sunday BART workers might strike, throwing Bay Area transportation into chaos. It's a tiny echo of the kind of warfare that used to erupt regularly a century ago on the streetcar lines of San Francisco. 1,500 streetcar men voted to strike for an 8-hour day, leading to "Bloody Tuesday," May 7, 1907, when gunfights exploded between armed guards and men shooting from nearby vacant lots, while strikebreakers housed in United Railroads carbarns opened fire on protesting crowds, killing two and injuring 20. By the time the strike was lost in March 1908, six had been killed in the violence, 250 more hurt, and over two dozen had died in accidents on the system while it was run by scab labor.

A decade later, almost exactly 92 years ago, streetcar workers struck again:

On August 11, 1917, at 9:45 p.m., one hundred "platform men" employed by the privately owned United Railroads (URR) streetcar service in San Francisco, abandoned their streetcars near the corner of Market, Valencia and Haight Streets, rapidly tying up many of the main lines in and out of the city center. Weeks of secret agitation had set the stage for a strong, well-organized walkout.

The SF Examiner (8/12/1917) details the strike's beginning:

"The strike's leaders... arranged with the crews of three cars to block Market Street and connecting lines at a certain hour. The crews were to run slowly so that when they stopped their cars a big blockade would result. The time was set at 9:50 o'clock. Five minutes before this Car 1534 of the Valencia street line stopped at the Market street junction. A Gough, Cortland car and a Market Haight car stopped at the same time. The cars following closely on each of these lines piled up quickly. The blockade was effective. The crews stood by their cars for a few minutes. Some removed their badges and mingled with the big crowd that collected. They all announced that they were on strike, that they were not satisfied with wages or hours or conditions.

Company officials and police arrived a few minutes later. Thirty or forty of the strikers left for the Labor Temple. They had been told to congregate there. On the way they tried to get the crews of several Sixteenth street and Mission street cars to desert. They were successful with the crew of one Sixteenth street car. Demonstrations took place in the street at this point. Poles were torn from the trolleys. A brick was hurled through a car window... It was an hour before the blockade was cleared... due in great measure to the fact that the striking motormen threw their controller bars away [and] the new crews had to hunt for the bars in the streets."

The strike spread, as URR workers quickly joined the strike and within just a few days over 1,000 were on strike demanding union recognition, $3.50 a day, and an 8 hour workday. Daily parades of strikers surged through the streets, all the way to the ferries and back up Market and Mission streets, exhorting those still working to walk off and join the strike. Mass meetings were held at the Redstone Building (at 16th and Capp), where delegations were selected to visit major industrial sites around town, such as the Union Iron Works, to rally workers to abandon the URR streetcars, while others headed for outlying carbarns to enlist more workers to strike.

Mobs repeatedly attacked scab streetcars throughout the city. On August 13 police dispersed crowds at Bryant and 24th streets in the Mission and at 8th and Market. By the 14th, the strike had spread so thoroughly that the URR was forced to shut most of its lines.

By 1934, during the famous San Francisco General Strike, streetcar workers had become civil service employees. When their union head, Edward Vandeleur, was made president of the General Strike Committee, Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins telegrammed him that there was nothing to worry about because the strike was led by conservative union leaders. True enough, at least in part. Vandeleur pressed the Strike Committee to exempt his streetcar men from participating in the effort, so as not to jeopardize their civil service status. After WWII, when the MUNI absorbed the remaining lines of the privately owned United Railroads (just when the war-time boom of ridership was about to drop off due to suburbanization and the postwar push for private cars), the workers were integrated into a cozy relationship with the transit management, leading to the peaceful and cooperative labor relations that have mostly prevailed since then. Efforts to undo the cushy work rules have been central to the "reforms" of the past two decades, as efforts have been made to impose market-like discipline on MUNI workers.

When BART started running in 1972, it was meant to function not as an urban transit system as much as a regional commuter train system, which is why it's held on to its cushioned upholstery and been so anti-bicycle and pro-parking. The workers were unionized from the get-go, and a mutual back-scratching relationship has mostly prevailed. Now we face a second strike in the past 12 years.

Already crowded highways will be jammed with commuters who have few alternatives to the BART system. We can predict that there will be a lot of anger directed at the workers, by inconvenienced commuters of course, but the corporate local media is sure to slant their coverage to portray BART workers as a greedy, already well-paid bunch of selfish workers. We can predict this because we already lived this particular drama in 1997, when BART workers struck to protect their wages and conditions.

The temptation is to delve into the details of contract negotiations and see which side is being "unfair" or demanding "too much." But it really doesn't matter who is taking which position. The bigger drama is that BART is a badly designed heavy rail system that we're stuck with, and the cost of maintaining it is borne by its users, not the management nor the workers. The employees of BART have the capacity to pursue an independent path, one that builds solidarity with the riders instead of pitting workers against riders.

But within the terms of existing trade unionism, a highy bureaucratic collective bargaining context, and the endless effort to maintain "middle class" living standards, it would take a mighty effort to rethink strategy and tactics. It's especially farfetched in the absence of a wider culture of solidarity and resistance, wherein workers in offices, schools, hospitals, restaurants and hotels, and the remaining factories around the Bay find common ground in rethinking the purpose of our overworked lives, and use the collective power of our labor to reinvent how ALL OF US meet ALL our needs, together.

I wrote about the 1997 BART strike in its time, arguing that:

If the BART workers were interested in gaining some real class-wide solidarity, their cause would have been far better served, and the strike would have been over in an hour or two, if they had merely continued to run the trains BUT REFUSED TO COLLECT FARES! Of course, BART's hated and idiotic fare collection system, which must waste thousands of human hours per year as we all struggle to feed paper money into its recalcitrant jaws, is really designed to prevent this kind of working class solidarity. With one station attendant at each gate area at most, a fare strike would be easily stopped by police intervention, unlike the MUNI, which is still designed to give the driver discretionary power over fare collection. Automated fare systems clearly have nothing to do with convenience or public service, and everything to do with pre-empting working class solidarity over the fare box and other types of popular resistance to unjustified and unnecessary fares.

BART workers could have promoted a class solidarity by contesting the direction of BART, resisting the absurdly wasteful expansion to the SF Airport, and insisting on integration with Caltrain, MUNI and other transit systems. But the unions are as afraid of that kind of larger political agenda, and in the case of BART unions in particular, the gravy train is pretty tasty, so why rock the boat? As BART commandeers more and more available transit funding in the Bay Area, there is more for BART workers, too, which is good for the bottom line of the unions that represent them, and their well-paid executives.

I hope the BART strike ends quickly, or somehow changes its spots and becomes a more generalized effort to challenge the way we live. Absent the latter rather unlikely scenario, I hope the workers will stave off the worst take-aways, and maintain their wages and conditions. In a culture hostile to the working class while glorifying work, it's only fitting that the people who actually have leverage succeed, even in the limited terms of a labor aristocracy, a trade union organized for its members betterment, not the broader class of which it's a part. Meanwhile, the rest of us, transit geeks, cyclists, and others, can take this opportunity to reflect on what a truly self-managed, reorganized transit universe might look like.