Streetsblog San Francisco

Katy Tang was sworn in Wednesday as the supervisor for District 4, comprised of the outer and central Sunset. Tang, who grew up in the district, was appointed this week by Mayor Ed Lee to replace Carmen Chu, who Lee recently picked to serve as the city’s assessor-recorder. Chu spent five years on the Board of Supervisors, during which Tang served as her legislative aide.

Streetsblog caught up with Tang at a publicity event yesterday, where she and Lee visited merchants on mid-Irving Street and spoke with reporters. When asked about her priorities for improving transportation in the Sunset — from Muni to pedestrian safety to bicycling — she touched only upon the issue of curbing Muni switchbacks.

Switchbacks are often used by Muni managers as a way to re-distribute vehicles to other areas on the system where managers determine they’re needed most. In SF’s outer neighborhoods, this often forces Muni riders off their train, where they are told to wait for the next one, which, according to Muni, should be no more than five minutes behind.

Here’s what Tang had to say on the matter:

As you know, the Sunset District is one of the furthest districts away from the center of the city, so transportation is obviously a very important issue that is ongoing. I think that the issue of switchbacks has been a continuing problem that we need to work on with the MTA, and making sure that when our residents are trying to get home, for example, after a long day at work that they aren’t abandoned at Sunset Boulevard, midway. So I think that’s very important, but I think it’s also very important to make sure that we’re working together with MTA on this.

While Tang’s focus on Muni switchbacks falls pretty much in line with Chu’s limited record on transportation issues, her district has plenty of other livable streets issues to tackle, like rampant sidewalk parking and calming traffic on deadly motorways like 19th Avenue, Sunset Boulevard, and Lincoln Way. With its excessively wide streets, the Sunset also has plenty of room for improvements like protected bike lanes, bike boulevards, and more pedestrian space to help liven up its commercial districts.

Cars littered on San Francisco’s sidewalks are a painfully common sight. The problem is perhaps most prevalent in outer neighborhoods like the Sunset and Bayview, where, for decades, homeowners with residential garages have paved over their front yards. The pedestrian environment on these streets is left degraded, with swaths of dead space where families and people with disabilities are often forced to walk around an obstacle course of cars and driveway ramps.

Make no mistake: It’s illegal to park on any part of a sidewalk or in a “setback” between the sidewalk and a building. The practice of paving over front yards was also banned in 2002.

Yet conditions in these neighborhoods make clear that the SF Municipal Transportation Agency does not enforce sidewalk parking on sight (though officials have claimed that’s the policy). Meanwhile, the Planning Department says it only fines homeowners who pave their yards when someone files a complaint. The issue recently got some attention in an SF Chronicle article last week, as well as the latest segment of KRON 4′s People Behaving Badly.

With all this space physically molded for car storage — practically every last inch on many streets – Livable City Executive Director Tom Radulovich said cleaning up San Francisco’s car-littered sidewalks will take more than getting parking control officers to hand out tickets. The Planning Department — which has no staff to proactively enforce rules against illegal setback pavings, according to the Chronicle — would have to crack down on violators, reversing decades of institutional tolerance for the practice.

“The city has turned a blind eye for so long that they have created a de facto entitlement” to illegal parking, Radulovich said. “City agencies have created an uncomfortable dilemma for themselves – start enforcing the law and deal with the fallout, or continue to ignore the problem and watch it grow worse.”

The setbacks, side yards, and backyards required in the city’s planning code ”were intended to create usable open space and/or gardens, not open parking,” said Radulovich. Greenery lost to pavement also means more stormwater flowing into the often-overloaded sewer system.

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The Great Highway, the motorway that divides Ocean Beach from the Outer Sunset and Richmond, is set to get some bike lane and pedestrian improvements north of Lincoln Way as part of a nine-month re-paving project started this week by the Department of Public Works.

The 6-foot painted bike lanes planned between Lincoln and Cabrillo Street would be an addition to the original SF Bike Plan [PDF], which only called for bike lanes north of Cabrillo and along the length of Point Lobos Avenue. Last Friday, the SF Municipal Transportation Agency gave preliminary approval at a public hearing to extend the lanes south to Lincoln past Golden Gate Park, and the project is expected to receive final approval from the agency’s board of directors at an upcoming meeting.

While much more remains to be done to create a safer, less car-dominated Great Highway (see SPUR’s long-term vision, which includes fewer traffic lanes and a two-way, protected beach-side bikeway), the bike lanes and pedestrian refuge islands will provide some improvements in the meantime.

SF Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Leah Shahum praised the SFMTA’s adjustments to the Bike Plan, calling it “a great example of city staff working together to layer bicycling, walking, and traffic calming improvements into a repaving project, so that the benefits are tripled.”

“If this project is approved by the SFMTA Board of Directors, we will have a much more ‘complete street’ along this section of the now-intimidating Great Highway, and all road users will benefit,” she said.

The road space for the bike lanes will be created by narrowing the Great Highway’s four traffic lanes. Point Lobos Avenue, which runs by the Cliff House, will go on a road diet under the Bike Plan, with two of its four traffic lanes replaced with median space and a buffered bike lane in the northbound direction. The southbound, downhill traffic lane is only slated to receive sharrows.

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