Livable Streets

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. 

Anthropologists and transit advocates have long bemoaned the rise of The Sacred Rac, its subsequent worship by the majority of the people of the Asu tribe, and the attendant demise of bipedus norteamericanus, or the common pedestrian.  But new evidence appears every day that the once-endangered pedestrian may be seeing a resurgence in urban habitats throughout the nation.  

Though David Brooks might argue in his New York Times column that Americans want to live in small towns and suburban dreamscapes, the fact is more and more of us live in metropolitan areas, and discussions about what we want should have to do more with the context of those metropolitan areas.  Brooks should be looking at the quality of the public spaces where people live, and the walkability and ease of transit in those neighborhoods.

Urban space advocates the world over use best practice examples from other cities to raise the bar on policy and praxis in their own cities.  For years in New York, Transportation Alternatives and the NYC Streets Renaissance Campaign invoked the phrase "Lessons from London," pointing to congestion pricing and the pedestrianization of Trafalgar Square, among other excellent projects, that demonstrated that city's commitment to reconquering its streets for people over cars. They also pointed to Paris, Copenhagen and Bogotá for examples of brilliant bike share programs, four decades of urban design giving primacy to pedestrians and cyclists, and innovative use of street space and buses to move more riders on Transmilenio BRT than most cities move on their entire transit systems.

The City Design Group at the Planning Department has released its proposal for transforming Jefferson Street at Fisherman's Wharf into a single-surface pedestrian priority street, the first of its size in San Francisco.

I just finished an interesting journey that took me to the World Social Forum at the mouth of the Amazon River system in Belem, Brazil, and then to Los Angeles and finally home, just in time to attend a presentation last night at CounterPULSE of Rick Prelinger's Lost Landscapes III. The show consists of rare and obscure footage of life in San Francisco going back over 100 years. A few of the clips are striking reminders of how much the basic "technology" of roads and how we use them has evolved during the past century.

The Metropolitan Transportation Commission's (MTC) main auditorium in Oakland was standing-room-only  Wednesday for an Allocations Committee meeting where the MTC board debated proposals by staff on how to spend the expected stimulus money when President Obama signs the bill into law.  MTC Executive Director Steve Heminger explained the need to get the discussion started even before Washington made anything final because the deadlines for spending the stimulus money are so tight and the MTC doesn't want to return unspent funds.

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.

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.