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Streetfilm: Making a Better Market Street
Just about everyone who visits San Francisco's grand Market Street is awed
by its hustle and bustle, the myriad modes of transportation, and some
of the beautiful architecture the city hosts. But just about everyone
also agrees that Market Street has a much bigger potential as a people
space that accommodates its users in more efficient and human terms.
Parts of the street are in disrepair; whole blocks contain more boarded
up facades than functioning businesses.
March 16, 2009
Sunday Streets Will Expand to Six Days This Year
Taking another page from the international movement spawned by Bogotá's wildly successful Ciclovia, and just two days after Seattle announced its Summer Streets initiative, the official word is out: San Francisco's Sunday Streets campaign is proposing expanding to six Sundays this year, or one a month for six months, beginning April 26th.
March 4, 2009
John Muir and Livable Cities
Over the holiday I read a new biography of John Muir, the iconic Victorian-era environmentalist and tireless advocate for wilderness conservation who helped establish the Sierra Club. Written by environmental historian Donald Worster, the book narrates Muir’s well-known struggle and political machinations over the damming of Hetch Hetchy. Less widely known was that as a pacifist Muir was a draft dodger during the Civil War (he did abhor slavery), and although he believed America was immoral for allowing the 19th century killing-off of animals, he had to subsume his values to court Teddy Roosevelt, an avid sports hunter, in order to advocate for protecting wilderness. The storylines about Muir included a critical deconstruction of the politics of the early American conservation movement and this led me to reflect on the similarities between that movement and San Francisco’s contemporary livable city movement.
February 11, 2009
Advocates Ask Supes to Support a Two-Way Hayes
Advocates are calling for all livable streets supporters who have the time to turn out to the Board of Supervisors' Land Use and Economic Development Committee meeting today at 1pm to voice their support for a two-way Hayes Street, as was called for in the Market and Octavia Plan.
February 9, 2009
MTA Board Agrees to Consider Studying Central Freeway Alternatives
Nearly five years after the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a resolution calling for a study of alternative future configurations for the remaining Central Freeway, the MTA Board of Directors agreed this week to consider doing it in the Eastern Neighborhoods Transportation Implementation Planning Study (EN TRIPS).
February 6, 2009