Car Culture

The vast majority of San Francisco's street space is devoted primarily to moving and storing cars, and most of that curbside parking for private automobiles is given away for free. Most of the city's street infrastructure is not paid for by fees related to driving, so it is disproportionately bankrolled by those who don't drive, through general taxes. By any objective measure, the state of affairs on San Francisco's streets is heavily tilted toward cars and designed to incur minimal personal cost to drivers.

Today’s Times devotes two pieces to the “suburbs are out, cities are in” phenomenon that has taken root in much of the country over the past few decades -- the great inversion, urbanologist Alan Ehrenhalt has dubbed this reversal of the suburbanization wave that swept through the U.S. in the last century. Though both pieces will pretty much be old hat to Streetsblog readers, they’re interesting nonetheless, both as signposts and for what they leave out.

The marketers at Chevy totally have this urban millennial thing nailed down. The car manufacturer sponsored this promotional video for a Divisadero Microhood Art Walk held last week, along with the website The Bold Italic.

Do Geary Boulevard and Masonic Avenue need more car traffic? The marketers of the newly-opened "CityTarget" store seem to think so.

When Sarah Harling was hospitalized by a minivan driver who made a left turn into her at a stop sign intersection, she says the SFPD officer who filed the police report included a fabricated statement from her claiming that she "approached the stop sign without stopping."

Along Masonic Avenue this weekend, an anonymous safe streets advocate found a creative way to call out the absurd behavior of neighbors who showed up way too late in the game to oppose a redesign of the street in a bid to save car parking.

Two weeks ago, transportation researcher Michael Sivak brought us the news that there are fewer cars per person in the U.S. now than there were a few years ago – and that the number isn’t expected to rise again.

Running Saturday morning errands, you may have found yourself in traffic, only to realize you’re stuck behind a line of vehicles inching into a car wash. Each month, nearly half of all American car owners head into one of the nation’s estimated 100,000 car washes to bathe their vehicles in some loving suds.

What's keeping Congress from passing an extension to the federal budget? Democratic protection of automobile subsidies.