Sacramento's levees are rated "unacceptable" by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Photo from MoveOn.org.

The online nonprofit MoveOn.org is taking up the banner of infrastructure investment. Under the subject line “Can your photo create jobs?” the group just sent its 5 million members an email asking them to take a picture of an infrastructure project near them that needs doing.

“It could be a bridge, a school, a road, a dam—any piece of our infrastructure in need of repair,” they write.

They’re asking members to print a sign like the one held by the little girl in the picture above, highlighting the jobs that could be created if the government would address the nation’s infrastructure needs.

MoveOn isn’t troubling itself with whether the project is “shovel-ready” or whether it’s the right kind of infrastructure investment. They’re keeping it simple: “Stuff is crumbling and the people who can rebuild it are unemployed. What gives?”

This chart shows delayed maintenance for infrastructure across modes and time periods. Image: ASCE

Five months’ groceries for a family of four. A year’s worth of textbooks for a college student. One thousand sixty dollars: That’s how much inadequate infrastructure spending cost the average American family last year, according to a new report from the American Society of Civil Engineers, “Failure to Act: The Economic Impact of Current Investment Trends in Surface Transportation Infrastructure.” And it’s only projected to get worse.

The country’s roads, bridges and transit systems are deteriorating, but because of the gradual and diffused nature of the problem, the economic effects aren’t easy to recognize, ASCE asserts.

But make no mistake: deferred maintenance costs American families and businesses dearly. Deteriorating roads do damage to private and commercial vehicles. Extra miles are driven to avoid congested roadways. Unreliable transit systems and commercial trucking routes force users to allot additional time in case of delay, undermining productivity.

All this added up to a four-figure price tag for the average U.S. family in 2010. That’s a total of $130 billion for American families and businesses last year alone.

Looking ahead, things could get much worse, engineers report. If spending levels are held constant, by 2020, businesses would pay an extra $430 billion in transportation costs, household incomes would fall by $7,000 and U.S. exports would fall by $28 billion. This would be a tremendous blow to the economy. By 2040, losses in efficiency related to transportation investment are expected to directly result in the loss of 400,000 jobs — and that’s if spending levels are held constant, not reduced by a third, as Rep. John Mica (R-FL) has proposed.

The desire to reduce infrastructure spending in the midst of a debt crisis is understandable, but it will only make the crisis far worse. “You run a deficit both when you borrow money and when you defer maintenance that needs to be done,” said former National Economics Council Director Larry Summers. “Either way, you’re imposing a cost on future generations.”

Plus, many experts warn that what would be a cheap fix now will be a costly overhaul if infrastructure is allowed to deteriorate beyond repair.

“This report should serve as a wake-up call to policy makers and politicians alike,” said former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, co-chair of Building America’s Future, a bi-partisan group dedicated to increasing investment in U.S. infrastructure. “The consequences of inaction are quite clear: Failure to make smart investments in our infrastructure will erode our nation’s economic competitiveness and leave an indelible mark on the quality of life for every American.”

During the heavy rainfall season, San Francisco faces some daunting challenges: Draining the water, keeping the roads from getting slippery, and containing and treating the runoff. Some storms are so severe that the city can't keep pace. That's when we see flooding in the Muni tunnels and sewage discharges into the bay.

But the solution -- or at least part of the solution -- could be as simple as changing the material that we use to pave our streets.

The city considered a wide variety of low-impact-design techniques for managing water at community meetings held in 2007. Among the solutions was permeable pavement, a technique dating back centuries that fell out of favor during the fast-and-cheap highway booms of the last few decades.

As Miles Chaffee, President and founder of Milestone Imports explained to Streetsblog, the benefits of permeable paving are numerous. "It decreases impervious land coverage, provides a more stable load-bearing surface, and allows the water to go into the ground," he said. "It eliminates the need for detention ponds, which require additional space. And it takes off a lot of stress from the sewer systems when it's done correctly."

In addition, permeable paving can be made lighter in color, which reduces the urban heat island effect. It can be made of recycled materials, such as concrete and rubber, and by filtering the water, it removes pollutants. There are advantages for bicyclists as well: "It takes that film of water off the ground that makes it slippery," Chaffee said.

Municipalities around the country are starting to notice the benefits of permeable pavement. In Maryland, Montgomery County's "Rainscapes Reward" program offers homeowners a subsidy of up to $1,200 for converting a driveway from impermeable asphalt.

An alley in Chicago, before and after

The upcoming Cesar Chavez redesign will incorporate green street techniques as well, stretching from the 101 interchange "hairball" to Guerrero.

And San Francisco homeowners will be expected to pitch in: a new landscaping law requires that at least half of newly-constructed front lawns be water-permeable, whether through pavement, bioswales, or raingardens.

Cities like San Francisco, Chicago, and Portland can boast about early adoption of permeable pavement. The technique has long been favored in Europe (where some streets retain cobblestones dating back hundreds of years), but is still viewed with skepticism in the United States.

"They haven't quite gotten to where they're convinced that they can do streets that are low-maintenance," said Milestone's Chaffee.

Milestone imports porphyry, highly-durable paving stones that, when bonded by Propoxy, form a permeable pavement. In addition to its water management benefits, porphyry boasts another ecological advantage: reusability.

"When they have to dig up an asphalt street, they typically can't reuse that asphalt," Chaffee said. "Whereas with a permeable pavement, they dig up the cobbles ... fix whatever it is underneath, put everything back in -- including the exact same stones -- and reuse everything." Despite being called "cobbles," modern porphyry pavement isn't bumpy or roughly textured: it's ADA-compliant for wheelchairs, which means it's also easy on bikes.

Pavers like porphyry are just one of many solutions. A report by Curtis Hinman at Washington State University identified four successful surface types for constructing water-permeable pavement:

• Permeable asphalt -- Used for light traffic roads and parking
• Permeable concrete -- A well-regarded, generally-successful material
• Permeable pavers -- Best used for low-speed traffic
• Flexible plastic grid systems -- A grid filled with gravel or soil, sometimes planted with grass

Whichever method is used, it requires a thorough hydrological analysis prior to installation, since drainage and water flow can vary widely from one street to the next. It's wise to augment pavement with other ecological best practices such as rain gardens, bioswales, and street trees, all of which absorb, retain, and help to clean storm water. Rain barrels and eco roofs also provide a significant boost to pavement-based water management techniques, which is why San Francisco's Public Utilities Commission offers subsidies and instructions to residents interested in harvesting rainwater on their property.

Portland has also positioned itself at the forefront of innovative water management techniques. "We can talk about all the multiple benefits that greenstreet facilities provide, but the bottom line is it saves taxpayers' dollars," said David Elkin, a landscape architect with the city's Bureau of Environmental Services. "Instead of just a patch or trench in somebody's street, we're going to leave behind a green, vegetated facility."

Chicago is taking steps to improve its urban watershed as well, with its much-admired "Green Alley" program. Featuring 5,000 alleyways comprising around 1,900 miles of pavement, the city's goal is to convert flood-prone asphalt into hydrologically sensitive conduits that include permeable surfaces, strategically-placed drainage pipes, and recycled pavement.

Vancouver's Country Lane

Of course, features such as these cost more than a simple asphalt surface. Porous concrete is estimated to cost between $2 and $6.50 per square foot, interlocking pavers from $5 to $10. But according to Chaffee, the cost of installation is dwarfed by the alternative: deteriorating storm drains and overburdened water treatment plants that require expensive maintenance. That's consistent with findings in Chicago, where city officials observe that the high costs of improving alleyways is offset by decreased maintenance and operational costs.

Money is one obstacle to installing ecologically sound pavement. Time is another.  The San Francisco PUC's water management charrettes were held three years ago, and feasibility studies continue to this day.

But perhaps the greatest obstacle is public awareness and confidence. Many people simple don't know of permeable pavement or its benefits. Chaffee believes that word will spread once more high-visibility projects appear in cities around the country. "There's going to be a tipping point," he told Streetsblog, "people are going to start seeing the benefits. It might start in neighborhoods first. And neighborhoods will push it forward through the city."

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

Phalen Creek in St. Paul, MN

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

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

Emerging Best-Practices

The Las Vegas Wash

At one time, the standard treatment was to place streams into culverts underground; now, aquatic restoration is viewed as a top priority. The EPA's "Principles for the Ecological Restoration of Aquatic Resources" describes federal priorities for restoring wetlands. The EPA calls for an increase in wetland area of of 100,000 acres per year, and provides municipalities with 17 guidelines, including "Address ongoing causes of degradation," "Design for self-sufficiency," "Use natural fixes," and "Focus on feasibility."

On a local level, some cities have made a similar effort to document the correct treatment of wetlands. The Seattle Public Utilities Commission provides citizens with a handbook for caring for natural drainage systems, making it easy for property owners to manage the Natural Drainage Systems near their homes.

"The science is pretty well-established at this point," said Mark Frey, a biologist working for the Presidio. Streetsblog spoke to him this week about the park's high-profile efforts to restore areas such as El Polin Spring, Thompson Reach, and the lesser-known Dragonfly Creek. As biologists continue to monitor and study urban waterways, there's a growing confidence in our ability to manage those projects.

Turning Sewers into Show-Stoppers

Some daylighting projects encounter success beyond what their designers could have hoped for.

Cheonggyechun in South Korea is the latest to dazzle observers. A prominent city feature for hundreds of years, it had become an open sewer by the mid-20th century and was buried. But this decade, a $384 million project cleaned the river, removed vehicular traffic, and established habitats along its shores. The revitalized waterway has become a destination not only for humans (90,000 visitors per day), but for fish species (which increased from 4 to 25), bird species (from 6 to 36), and insect species (from 15 to 192).

El Polin flows from a historic weir in the Presidio

Elsewhere in the park, the grasslands above El Polin Loop are being cleaned and replanted. A tributary that currently "short-circuits" the land in a plastic pipe will eventually flow freely through the trees. Dragonfly Creek, flowing near the Pet Cemetery beneath Doyle Drive, will see extensive rehabilitation as part of Caltrans' reconstruction of the highway.

The Presidio's location within San Francisco provides a unique opportunity for collaboration. "As an agency, we don't work with the city," the Presidio's Mark Frey told Streetsblog, "But as individuals, we visit the parks," including Glen Canyon Park and the wetland work at Lake Merced. When it came time to re-plant the native Islay Cherry in the Presidio, biologists ventured over to Bayview Hill to harvest seeds.

Providence's Waterfire

A decade of planning, fundraising, and construction began in the 1980s. By the time it was completed in 1996, the area was unrecognizable: railroad tracks and automobile thoroughfares were gone, replaced by a massive riverwalk. Now, rather than parking lots, the area features gondola rides and a late-night bonfire art installation on the river that has drawn millions.

Riverwalks have proven to be popular amenities in cities across the country, although few have required a daylighting project as extensive as Providence's. The Reno Riverwalk features kayaking on the Truckee River, and hosts an annual festival. In San Antonio, a $384.5 million project will revitalize 13 miles of river. And 1,900 feet of the Sawmill River in Yonkers, buried for 100 years, could be daylighted soon as part of the city's $1.5 billion revitalization project.

Blending in to the Landscape

Elsewhere, urban creek projects have sought a lower profile. They don't have to be the landscaping centerpiece of a city to make an important contribution.

Los Angeles has the lowest per-capita park space of any US city -- only 4% of the land is park. (San Francisco is more than twice that, at 9%.) In the middle of the city, plans are underway to restore Compton Creek, turning it from a polluted flood-control channel into a natural habitat. Despite several setbacks, watershed research continues.

A proposal for Vancouver's Still Creek

Seattle has also caught the daylighting bug, with several significant projects. Over six hundred feet of Ravenna Creek were daylighted in 1996 at a cost of under $2 million, restoring land that had been filled in during highway construction.

A decade later, Seattle's Madrona Creek was revitalized for $805,000 with bridges, ponds, cascades, and weirs, as well as human amenities like observation decks and trails. It's since become a habitat for the endangered chinook salmon.

Seattle's Thornton Creek

Seattle's Thornton Creek was perhaps the most difficult undertaking, requiring that environmentalists take the city to court. Seattle had initially claimed that the creek simply didn't exist; but in 2004, the city reversed course, with a plan to restore the creek. Credit for the Thorton Creek daylighting goes to persistent neighbors who fought for years on the water's behalf; one community leader recalls gatherings at which cardboard models of the proposed landscaping was built on a kitchen table, with children fabricating trees for the makeshift diorama.

At the time, the site was a paved-over lot, slated to become a shopping mall and parking garage. Thanks to activists -- and $6.85 million in funding -- it is now a transit-oriented mixed-use development, featuring a bioswale capable of treating stormwater through natural processes before releasing it downstream.

A Model for San Francisco

The Nedelbach in Zurich

Elsewhere in the city, the Wolfgrimbach incorporates runoff from local homes and the Frisenbergbach is used by residents for swimming. Since daylighting began in 1988, streams have been incorporated into children's playgrounds, along city streets, and though residential developments.

Although Zurich provides inspiration for San Francisco's future, it's far from the only source. From Napa to South Korea to Providence, imaginative new ideas have turned urban creeks from an unhygienic nuisance into a critical component of cities' watershed and of sustainable development. All that's required to imagine similar transformations here in SF is a willingness to acknowledge a landscape that predates our arrival -- a landscape that has owned the hills and valleys of our city for thousands of years.

One of the proposed designs for Center Street in Berkeley, by Ecocity Builders

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

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

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

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

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

The Napa River

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

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

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

"You might go 4 years and never see a drop of water," Martin explained, "but when it's needed, it'll provide the capacity and move the water downstream into the wetland areas."

He added, "The Army Corps of Engineers uses us as an example of a new way of thinking about flood control."

And whether or not Napa's example meets the definitions currently used for daylighting, the re-engineering of the Napa River changed the way people thought about urban waterways in the Bay Area. 

Berkeley's History of Daylighting

Historically, Berkeley's land has been comprised largely of sediment pushed up along the Hayward Fault. Gradually, as many as a dozen streams carved their way from the Berkeley Hills into marshes along the bay.

In the late 1800s, after years of dumping sewage into those streams, Berkeley had a sanitation problem: Not only did the streams stink, they bred disease. And beyond the difficulties of sanitation, the water posed an obstacle to development, since developers couldn't build on a marsh.

So Berkeley built underground passages for the water, carrying it from its tributaries in the hills to outlets near the waterfront. During this time, many of Berkeley's streams -- a million years in the making -- were hidden from public view. Placed out of sight in the early 1900s, they were largely out of mind.

Advocates like Steve Donnelly like to point to Strawberry Creek as one of Berkeley's earliest daylighting experiments. Completed in 1984 at a cost of about $50,000, a 200-foot section of the creek was removed from a culvert beneath an empty lot and transformed into the centerpiece of the park. (The park cost an additional $530,000 on top of the creek construction.)

A class trip to Codornices Creek

The impact of that transformation has been significant. According to a study by the Rocky Mountain Institute, nearly 30 years after the daylighting, property values in the area around Strawberry Creek Park have increased, crime has decreased, and an empty warehouse has been converted to offices and a bakery.

Strawberry's success was followed in 1993 with the daylighting of Codornices Creek. This time, the city daylighted 400 feet of the creek between 8th and 9th Streets on the border of Berkeley and Albany, at a cost of $33,000. Nearly four hundred volunteers helped to restore the original meander of the water -- an important factor in regulating speed and controlling floods -- and the area saw a gradual increase in the population of species like crayfish, damselflies, garter snakes, mallards, egrets, and gophers.

"A 'sink' is where more animals die than are produced," explained Susan Schwartz, President of Friends of the Five Creeks, which protects and restores East Bay watersheds. Daylighting projects aren't necessarily sinks, she explained, but the possibility exists that a project undertaken for ecological reasons might wind up taking an unexpected toll on the environment.

Center Street Daylighting Could Be Berkeley's Crown Jewel

One of the champions of the Codornices Creek daylighting in 1993 was Bay Area urban planner Richard Register. He's also one of the primary supporters of the most recent push to transform Berkeley's Center Street.

The plan, which was recently endorsed by the Berkeley City Council, would create one of the most visible daylighting projects in the country on what is now a rather plain two-way street. Starting at the Berkeley BART station and stretching up to the UC Berkeley campus, Center Street would be transformed from its present-day asphalt into a pedestrian destination. And it would continue the work that began in the 80s: the body of water beneath Center Street is none other than Strawberry Creek, a section just upstream from the city's first major daylighting project.

"I think it's absolutely fantastic that Richard Register has fought for this," Susan Schwartz told Streetsblog, though she added that because the Center Street proposal is such a tiny, pedestrian-focused section of the creek, "it's not going to make any significant difference to the watershed." As such, Friends of the Five Creeks has not taken a position on the project.

Kristen Quay, Restoration Coordinator at the Urban Creeks Council, agreed that the Center Street proposal is more of a human amenity than a comprehensive daylighting. "The constraints are pretty extreme," she told Streetsblog. "The vehicular access and the location of the site make it not as, well, creek-like."

Creek daylighting can be controversial, unpredictable, and potentially dangerous. For example, in areas near the bay that were formerly industrial, additional groundwater could potentially stir up toxic pollutants.

But when done carefully, daylighting can bring multiple ecological benefits to a neighborhood. Historically, straight, deep culverts are particularly prone to flooding during storms; they're prone to earthquake damage and in combined sewage systems like San Francisco's, they place additional strain on water treatment plants.

In contrast, daylighting can increase habitat for wildlife, ease monitoring and treatment of water quality, and contribute to human recreation, education, and opportunities for sustainable development.

"Stream restoration is neighborhood restoration," explains Ann Riley of the Waterways Restoration Institute in "Urban Stream Restoration."

Significant portions of Strawberry Creek remain enclosed within culverts.

Probably not.

In the hundred or so years that the creek has been hidden below ground, there's been a lot of development up on the surface. Many private homes sit atop the underground culvert. Obtaining that land would be a nearly impossible.

Sometimes, a daylighting project will be fortunate enough to come along at just the right time and in just the right place. In 1992, Thousand Oaks Elementary School began to seriously consider daylighting Blackberry Creek. At the time, Blackberry ran directly underneath the school property and was prone to frequent floods. Once the plan to daylight was approved, it cost $144,000 to remove a dilapidated playground and restore 200 feet of creek to the surface. Now fifteen years later, it's a treasured feature of the school.

The Blackberry Creek project required years of work, fund-raising, and political campaigning. A similar project along Schoolhouse Creek was a massive undertaking. Future projects will be even more challenging.

The Future of Daylighting in the Bay Area and Beyond

Property acquisition aside, there are numerous other obstacles to daylighting. Determining the historic meander of the stream may be impossible; fully-restored creeks require significant space along their banks for sloping and vegetation; water can attract less-desirable animals such as wild rats and mosquitoes; and there are inevitable conflicts over public access to the water.

But for all of those challenges, a little bit of daylighting can go a long way. "The thing about riparian corridors," the Urban Creek Council's Kristen Quay said, "is they provide an inordinate amount of benefits to wildlife. Providing any habitat at all is worth a lot, it's certainly worth the average cost of these projects. Our more mobile species like birds and insects -- especially bees -- can reach these projects very easily and take advantage of their benefits."

Although each project is radically different, dozens of cities all around the world have managed to successfully rethink their treatment of creeks, streams, and lakes.

In future installments in this series, we'll be taking a closer look at those cities' plans. They include replacing the widest bridge in the U.S. with a river of floating bonfires, the creation of a kayaking facility in the middle of downtown Reno, and the possibility of unearthing buried streams in San Francisco.

People's Park in Berkeley

Let's hope that doesn't take another million years.

After more than than 15 months of delays spurred by weld fabrication and inspection issues, the first steel sections for the highly publicized signature span glided across the Bay Thursday afternoon.

"This is the moment we will actually see this bridge come to life," Caltrans spokesperson Bart Ney said to a small group of journalists at a press event.

When the barge carrying eight 1100-ton sections arrived at Oakland's Pier 7, it was ahead of schedule for a change.

Upon seeing the cargo for the first time, Metropolitan Transportation Commission executive director Steve Heminger said, "it's about time."

The freighter, called the Zhen Hua 17, arrived six days early, and could have coasted through the Golden Gate one day sooner if not for this week's El-Nino-like storm surge, which pummeled the Bay Area with high winds and heavy rains.

Rough seas Wednesday forced the freighter into a holding pattern about 40 miles off shore from the Golden Gate, and was one of three ships delayed that day.

Even in better weather, San Francisco bar pilots navigate large vessels through the Bay's gauntlet of narrow shipping channels, sand bars and whipping winds.

The vessel's Chinese crew, shown here on deck during a break in Thursday's heavy rains.

Pete McIsaac, president of the San Francisco Bar Pilot's Association, said, tempest aside, part of the reason bar pilots couldn't board the ship has to do with the shape of its hull.

Most container ships have flat-sided hulls, allowing the bar pilot's ship to safely bob alongside the massive sealiners until weather permits boarding. The Zhen Hua 17 is much different: narrow at the waterline, its hull drastically flares to 32-meters wide at some points, much like the hull of an aircraft carrier.

That type of hull can "completely destroy the boat if there's a sea running," McIsaac said, like Wednesday's 12-foot sea swells that have been tossing around the smaller bar pilot boats.

Thursday's choppy seas threatened to keep the freighter stranded. But when the storms broke around noon, the 225-meter long Zhen Hua 17 had a date with the bar pilot who assisted it into the moor at Pier 7, the project staging area just south of the existing Bay Bridge.

"We've been at the whims of the weather with this ship coming in," said American Bridge project engineer Mike Flowers, whose firm is the prime contractor on the project.

The first of four shipments for the suspension span deck floats on the Zhen Hua 17 at Pier 7 in Oakland.

It was a much different story at the start of the voyage. The skies were clear over Shanghai's Changxing Island at the end of December, and the only thing raining from the sky was confetti.

There, at the expansive facility of Zhenhua Heavy Industry Company - known better by its former name of Zhenhua Port Machinery Company, or ZPMC for short - more than 2,000 workers have labored for years virtually around the clock to churn out the steel for this project. According to a Caltrans press release, executives from ZPMC and Caltrans brandished scissors for some ceremonious ribbon-cutting and workers lit firecrackers for good luck as the 25-year old vessel waded through the Yangtze River and into the mouth of the vast Pacific Ocean.

Caltrans and American Bridge engineers in Oakland, while perhaps not as superstitious, were not as celebratory either on the rainy grey afternoon. A cluster of journalists slogged out to the Port to catch a glimpse of the hulking Zhen Hua 17, which was skirted at the pier by a smaller tugboat called the Millennium Falcon.

"It's not something that played out well for some big public event," Ney said, "And that's fine because we're focused on getting the bridge built."

Flowers said internal discussions among project mangers led to the decision to wait to break out the champagne until the next shipping milestone, when the tower sections arrive in late spring or early summer. (Note how project managers talk in seasons with this project, not months.)

"The tone for the Bay Bridge team is extreme exuberance, we've been working really hard on getting these segments here," Ney said.

Birds take flight on the grey Thursday afternoon against the background of the freighter.

Using the aptly named Left Coast Lifter, a mammoth red-white-and-blue floating crane parked in the Bay, crews have erected thousands of temporary steel formwork just east of Yerba Buena Island in the gap where the completed parallel concrete roadways abruptly end.

Over the next 10 days, as crews complete the task of unloading the more than 5,000 tons of steel from the Zhen Hua 17 onto barges that can carry two of the 80-foot-long sections at a time, Ney said crews must first check to see how the pieces have shifted during the trans-Pacific trip.

Massive yellow structures on the freighter called "sea fasteners" ensure the safe passage of each of the delicately fabricated deck sections, Ney said, by absorbing impacts and allowing the sections to travel stacked one on top of another.

Because the signature span is a so-called self-anchored suspension span, the bridge is built in reverse, with the temporary trestle supporting the deck until the tower and cables are in place. In all, there are 28 sections comprising the deck and another 20 sections for the four tower legs that will eventually rise 525 feet from the marine foundations waiting off Yerba Buena Island.

Shallow waters off the island's coast hinder even the specialized Left Coast Lifter from immediately positioning the goods at the future spans' westernmost end.

Flowers said that crews will first hoist the 1,100-ton sections next to the more centrally located tower foundations and onto a cradle - essentially a tray sitting atop the trestle rails. Then, using a system of hydraulic jacks, crews will push each piece hundreds of feet along the falsework.

A smaller tugboat, the Millennium Falcon nudges the hulking Zhen Hua 17, which transported more than 5,500 tons of steel for the suspension span of the new Bay Bridge.

These sections will be over land, not sea, and will hover above the formal naval torpedo building - once used to house munitions - on the rocky island below.

Flowers expects that task will get underway in mid-February, after his team and Caltrans jointly scrutinize the sections, checking to ensure the bumpy sea voyage did no harm.

A heavyweight in the shipping crane industry with almost 80 percent of that global market, ZPMC is relatively new to bridge building and struggled - as Caltrans engineers said most fabricators would - to meet the exacting weld quality demands imposed by Caltrans. This resulted in widespread repairs and a backlog of work for some 200 inspectors on site in Shanghai.

But take a look around the Port of Oakland and you'll find more evidence of ZPMC's handiwork, like the behemoth shipping cranes that grace the shoreline, one scenic backdrop for the Bay Bridge construction. And the Left Coast Lifter was also built by the Chinese fabricator. Although the paint job was ZPMC's idea, according to one Caltrans public information officer.

Despite the flurry of recent activity for the project, more than two decades will have elapsed from that October 1989 day when the magnitude-6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake rattled the Bay Area, to the estimated bridge opening in late 2013.

What's one day more?

Time is of the essence for replacing the Bay Area's busiest bridge, which carries 280,000 vehicles daily and is second only to New York City's George Washington Bridge. With the seismic clock ticking away and last autumn's eyebar failure putting the existing structure back underneath the media microscope, officials say the sooner the better.

And with public awareness amplified by talks of a likely toll increase and charging carpools to cross the bridge, some of those 280,000 drivers are sure to be watching Caltrans' every move.

The red-white-and-blue Left Coast Lifter, the largest floating crane on the West Coast, idles behind the Zhen Hua 17, a freighter carrying steel for the Bay Bridge's signature span.

Prompted by spiraling interest rates, decreasing toll revenue and the undertaking of the $750 million seismic retrofit of the Antioch and Dumbarton bridges, drivers should expect to pay at least $1 more to cross six of the region's bridges. Congestion pricing on the Bay Bridge will set the toll between the current $4 to a peak-rate of $6, with carpools now expected to contribute a proposed $2.50 via mandatory electronic toll tags.

With bridge tolls set to increase by July 1, at least commuters will finally be able to see whatever it is that they're paying for because by then construction of the suspension span will be well underway.

Leaps and bounds made in the field of seismic engineering prompted the 74-year-old bridge to be replaced - rather than retrofitted. The original structure was expected to be in use for more than 100 years. Caltrans has designed the new bridge to operate for 150 years and withstand the kind of major earthquake the U.S. Geological Survey says is probable in the Bay Area.

"This isn't the type of bridge you build once in a lifetime. This is the type of bridge you build once," Ney said.

We’ve been waiting for years now to see some physical changes to accommodate the huge increase in daily bicycling. We did get an odd set of painted bike lanes and green bike route signs, and a significant number of bike racks for parking, before it all came to a halt due to the injunction three years ago. After perusing the much-anticipated Draft Bicycle Plan and its dense bureaucratese, full of overlapping redundant promises, I’m afraid we’ll be waiting a good while longer to see the kinds of changes that we ought to be getting.

It’s really hard to believe that after all this organizing and earnest campaigning we’ll basically end up with a few thousand “sharrows” and another batch of partial, end-in-the-middle-of-nowhere bike lanes, lanes which in any case are horribly inadequate patches on our misallocated and car-centric public streets. How is it that after almost two decades of rapidly expanding bicycling, the city’s transit priorities still treat bicycles as an annoyance that they only grudgingly are willing to accommodate? When will there be a systematic commitment to altering the streets of this city to create dedicated bikeways, separated from cars and pedestrians, comprehensively linked to provide for easy, graceful, convivial bicycling to all parts of the city?

Over at the blog Copenhaganize their basic point is summarized in two short sentences:

Each and every day 500,000 people ride their bicycle to work or school in Copenhagen. This blog highlights who they are, why they do and how it was made possible.

Forty years ago Copenhagen was just as car-clogged as anywhere else but now 36% of the population choose the bicycle. Copehagenizing is possible anywhere.

My mother is from Copenhagen so I’ve visited the Danish city many times. I think it must have influenced my early thinking, because it was back in 1987 when I drew up a little flyer calling for a “City of Panhandles.” San Francisco cyclists all know the Panhandle’s cyclepath as one of the real pleasures around here (granted, it would be better if pedestrians would have their own path to its side!) and the way it links to the Wiggle route between the Mission and the Haight is just icing on the cake. A city with some vision, rather than a plodding traffic planning bureaucracy that is led by a Mayor who is only interested in what is going to facilitate his election to the next office (and always blatantly biased towards car owners and the wealthy), would have already been working on converting key routes across the city to bicycle boulevards… not just car-centric streets with “bike boulevard” signs, but whole thoroughfares that are closed to cars and only open to bicycles and emergency vehicles. Going a couple of steps further, why not open such thoroughfares to horticultural design and public art? Imagine sculpture gardens, curving murals, daylighted creeks, linear food forests, vegetable gardens, benches and fountains… the list goes on. The city would benefit in so many ways through such a comprehensive conversion of space currently sacrificed to the insatiable uses of private automobiles.

It’s self-evident how much better such street spaces would be for neighbors, pedestrians, children, and cyclists. It would open space for a systematic approach to re-localized food security. For those who clamor for “green jobs” (I’m not one of them), such natural ribbons crisscrossing the city would require first a lot of major construction work, and then a great number of gardeners, farmers, bicycle mechanics, bike parking attendants, landscapers, artists, and more. Juxtapose such quality, engaging, meaningful work to the stupid jobs that pass as “important” in the financial district, or the wasted labor producing so many luxury highrises, office buildings and other pointless projects of “economic development”… Let the tourists join us in riding and walking through the garden paths of San Francisco! Let’s think about the work we do and the design of our city as a canvas on which to create something really astonishingly better than what we’re settling for now. The SF Bike Coalition should be a lot more aggressive and push for much more far-reaching and far-sighted transformations than this tepid and uninspiring Bike Plan, in order to live up to its political and social responsibilities!

We walk on layers of history. In our neighborhoods, in our cities, there were once natural phenomena, like creeks, sand dunes, hills, and forests. Over time they were covered in farms, factories, houses, and most of all, streets. At first those streets were dirt, often thick and muddy. Around the middle of the 19th century they started to be used for railroads, both intercity, and local streetcar and cable car lines. Sometimes the shape of our 21st century streetscape is a ghost of those old train lines.

In the Mission, where I live, all of this pertains. But more than the questions of ecological succession, including natural and human, as well as agricultural, industrial, and residential uses of land, there are the shifting human communities themselves. At any given moment in time there are diverse populations living side-by-side, right next door, right on top of each other, but sometimes that close proximity does not include much awareness or daily interaction.

Last week I wrote about Jane Martin and her project PlantSF, and how it inspired a couple of dozen families along the nearby blocks of Harrison, Alabama, 22nd, 23rd, 24th and 25th to begin the historically overdue process of depaving this cemented neighborhood. I walked around speaking with folks this past Saturday, as "Mission Roots" took hold in many sidewalk gardens, and I had more than one reaction. Of course I was delighted to see all the effort being made to green the city, to reverse the domination of 20th century urban design. I met many lovely folks, most of whom were homeowners working in front of their own properties. Apparently the organizers had successfully garnered a $50,000 grant to provide materials, and the cement cutting services were donated by a local company. The homeowners had to apply to the city for permission, using the one-page permit Jane Martin helped design, and that involved a modest fee and a drawing that conforms to city regulations in terms of accessibility, utilities, etc. Interestingly, one of the main organizers of this effort, Audrey Newell, confirmed my hunch that 75% of the participants had approached the organizers, rather than the organizers having to go out and convince people.

Audrey Newell demonstrates planting, Jan. 10, 2009.

But I couldn't help but notice in this preponderant Latino neighborhood that the entire population engaged in this project were non-Latino, mostly white with a few Asians. Far be it from me to blame the people who were actually doing something proactive about urban ecology and doing it in such a neighborly and community-oriented fashion. No, they're not the problem. The problem is deeper, having to do with issues of private property, displacement, and gentrification. Because it's clear that these relatively affluent, mostly recently moved-in folks were wittingly or unwittingly part of a process that is altering the neighborhood, making it whiter and richer, and making it harder to live here if you are a renter, poor, Latino without a union or well-paying job, etc. Beautifying the streets is a welcome development, and the people doing it are obviously committed to living here and making the neighborhood more pleasant for everyone, but something more is needed.

Mission Roots on Harrison between 22nd and 21st.

So how do neighbors reach across the divide? I'm hoping that this newly formed "Mission Roots" association will become a place that invites more and more people to engage in similar projects, eventually surpassing the limits of sidewalk gardens and taking on bigger issues of our shared commons. "One Lane for Food" anyone? Commenters on last week's post were quick to defend the sidewalks for pedestrian use and suggested that these efforts ought to be pushing into the street more, taking space from cars and parking rather than pedestrians. I couldn't agree more! In fact, why aren't we already busy ripping a lane out of every street in the city, preparing the ground for food forests and urban self-sufficiency?

Depaving beneath chestnut trees next to Kaliflower on 23rd St.

Anti-gentrification efforts have been stuck in opposing simple efforts like those produced by Mission Roots and PlantSF on the grounds that they lead to further displacement. But what really leads to further displacement is the institution of private property. Certainly the new homeowners (not all are new, but plenty are) are beneficiaries of a system that facilitates displacement of the less wealthy by the more wealthy, and we've seen that having devastating effect in San Francisco and especially in the Mission. But everyone needs a place to live and I'm disinclined to blame individuals who have moved in for a system in which we're all in it basically for ourselves. But now that we're here, and the neighborhood is in flux, isn't it incumbent on all of us to reach out, to find a way to overcome a paradigm of scarcity and replace it with the kind of barn-raising, garden-planting sociability we saw this weekend, perhaps better termed "shareCity"?

Beyond the exhorting, let's remember that no neighborhood is stable in this crazy world. Every one is subject to sudden poverty and displacement and "owning your house" (via a mortgage to our utterly corrupt and bankrupt banking system) is no solution… Layers of history help us remember how transient and ephemeral any population's claim to a specific neighborhood really is… This stretch of Harrison Street, for example, was once predominantly Irish and Italian, until the late 1950s and early 1960s when many white San Franciscans joined the national exodus to the suburbs, to be replaced by a large influx of Central Americans and some Mexicans.

Crowds on Mission at 21st in1956, courtesy San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library.

Down at 21st and Harrison, where the elementary school Las Americas sits across from one of the new Mission Roots sidewalk gardens (the school itself is expected to soon plant gardens on their sidewalks too), there was until 1989 the John O'Connell Technical High School. It has since moved to a new building on Folsom between 20th and 19th, backing up on Harrison.

John O'Connell Technical High School, 1953 (left, courtesy San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library) and today's Las Americas elementary school, both at SW corner of 21st and Harrison.

The original O'Connell building was damaged in the 1989 earthquake and closed. Back in 1946 it became the Samuel L. Gompers Trade School, named after the early trade union leader. And even earlier, the same structure was home to the Ford Motor Company where Model T cars were made in the 'teens.

Old Ford factory at 21st and Harrison, which became Samuel Gompers Trade School in 1946 (courtesy San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library).

Winding out between the Western Plywood company (which is still there between 22nd and 23rd on Harrison) and the diminutive Atlas Stair building was the old San Jose-San Francisco railroad. It went right up Harrison, and in more recent times freight trains were common on Harrison, once probably stopping to pick up newly manufactured Model-T's at the Ford factory. Even today there are hints of the days when Harrison was full of rail tracks instead of bike lanes. At the corner of 20th, diagonally across from Café Gratitude, a gray warehouse still has its old loading dock on the sidewalk where boxcars once sat for days at a time, as recently as the 1980s.

Southern Pacific train on Harrison near 21st in 1905 (top, courtesy San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library) and an old loading dock still at 20th and Harrison (below).

Strange modern layers sit on top of one another here too. Across the street are the schoolyards of the new John O'Connell High School. A field that had been left unfinished for two years after the school was opened was finally completed, but for some strange budgetary reason, the school district covered it in Astroturf! It's ironic that the school district is so backwards when twenty yards to the north on the same property is an old community garden started in the early 1980s by Jeff Miller (once president of San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners). It had fallen into disrepair a few years ago, but just in the past year some people have brought it back to life.

(left) Community Garden on Harrison at back of O'Connell High School; (right) Astroturf field at O'Connell.

The zeitgeist of our time is reinhabitation, reinvigoraton, and reconnection to the possibilities of an urban nature that sustains and nurtures us. But to really go as far as we might, we'll have to go way beneath the pavement to bring forth fresh water, food security, and a new neighborliness based on resilient communities and local self-reliance. Such a sensibility is an antidote to the displacement paradigm that ignores important histories and fails to value a living legacy that enriches and deepens all our lives. We're all in this together, and that's becoming more obvious by the day.