Car Culture

San Francisco is quickly adding residents, but very few cars.

Last weekend, San Francisco's world-famous crooked block of Lombard Street saw most of its car traffic disappear as part of a month-long trial, opening the street up for people. The SFMTA's goal is to eliminate the gridlock caused by tourist drivers who queue up for blocks to cruise down the street.

A peculiar thing tends to happen when we talk about streets and transportation: We don't talk about cars. Seriously -- listen to conversations, read news headlines, and you'll start to notice that even when cars are the main subject, people will, consciously or unconsciously, fail to explicitly mention them.

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.