Community, Advocacy and Labor

The San Francisco Great Streets Project (GSP) has been collecting pedestrian counts and street user surveys, and has used time-lapse photography, to measure users' perceptions about the quality of the public realm before and after the 17th Street plaza treatments were in place. The results of the surveys show what many readers of Streetsblog have been saying all along: residents feel the sense of community and the quality of the pedestrian realm have gone up markedly.

In a city strapped for bike parking and sidewalk space, there is an abundance of one commodity: small strips of curb that seem to be of use to no one. As the lifting of the bike injunction in San Francisco draws nearer, it might be time to consider how these carved-up spots of curbside space can serve a new function.

The Senate Transportation Committee met earlier this week to consider AB 744, a bill that would authorize the MTC to convert carpool lanes to toll “express lanes” and use the revenue to expand the regional carpool and bus express lane network. To its critics, the plan is the last gasp of suburban highway expansion. To its proponents, it’s the beginning of road pricing and a substantial enhancement for regional transit.

At yesterday's Interdepartmental Staff Committee on Traffic and Transportation (ISCOTT) meeting, where decisions about temporary street closures are decided by all the agencies that have anything to do with streets and events on streets, the trial pedestrian plaza at 17th Street and Market Street received easy approval for a four month extension. Heads of MTA, DPW, the Planning Department, as well as Mayor Gavin Newsom, the two merchant organizations in the area, and many immediate community organizations all voiced support for the extension, many of them urging that the successful plaza become permanent.

The San Francisco Police Department -- in a rare public display of concern for bicyclists -- has issued a press release on the hit-and-run on Valencia Street last Wednesday involving a bicyclist and his 4-year-old son, who was riding in the back on a tandem extension. It asks for the public's help tracking down the driver of a "gray SUV or gray Chrysler PT Cruiser" (with a partial plate of "KAY" and a heart symbol) who is responsible for the crash:

Celebrated Colombian urbanist and former mayor of Bogotá Enrique Peñalosa told a standing room audience of more than one hundred people at the San Francisco Public Library last night that San Francisco can be friendly to cars or to people, but not both. Further, he argued that there is no fundamental technical reason why streets have to function only as free-flowing arteries to move cars, but that the state of our cities in America is a political decision that we can overturn and that American's perceptions of what is possible in cities will follow suit.

San Francisco's livable streets advocates have a chance to participate in a public forum tomorrow with Enrique Peñalosa, who, as mayor of traffic-clogged Bogotá, Colombia, implemented a s⁞weeping set of improvements to transit and the pedestrian realm.

A San Francisco bicyclist is asking for help locating witnesses who may have seen a hit-and-run crash Wednesday on Valencia Street -- one of the city's most popular bicycling corridors -- that left him with a broken back. Andrew Bennett wrote about the crash in an email he sent to the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition:

Leah Shahum, the executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, will debate and discuss the newly approved Bike Plan with Rob Anderson on KQED radio's "Forum" program tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. Anderson, the bicyclist-hating obstructionist who filed the lawsuit that has locked the Bike Plan in court, wrote on his blog this afternoon that he'll be joined by Bert Hill, who sits on the Bicycle Advisory Committee, Jamie Whitaker of the Rincon Hill Neighborhood Association and Chronicle reporter Rachel Gordon. Anderson, who has compared bicyclists to "Islamic fanatics," had more choice words for bicyclists in the comments section of his post: