Livable Streets

Updated 6:09 p.m. with comment from MPNA.

Last fall, Lou Huang was at a community meeting for the initiative to redesign Second Street in San Francisco. Planners handed out paper cutouts, allowing participants to mix and match to create their ideal street. Huang, an urban designer himself, thought the exercise would make for a great website. Now, after months of work beginning at a January hackathon with colleagues at Code for America, it is a great website.

We've gotta spotlight this op-ed that appeared in today's edition of the SF Chronicle calling upon the SFMTA and city leaders to make Polk Street more like "a Paris street, where people saunter and stay for hours, not just one errand."

With flyers stuck on storefront windows along Polk Street spreading misinformation about the SF Municipal Transportation Agency's developing plans to make the street a safer, more inviting place to walk and bike, local supporters of the project are rallying neighbors and merchants to attend a public meeting on Monday. There, city officials including SFMTA Director Ed Reiskin and D3 Supervisor David Chiu are expected to attend.

A new entity that calls itself the "Save Polk Street Coalition" has come out against the developing plan to improve safety for people walking and biking on Polk Street because it would entail removing some parking spaces.

Cars littered on San Francisco's sidewalks are a painfully common sight. The problem is perhaps most prevalent in outer neighborhoods like the Sunset and Bayview, where, for decades, homeowners with residential garages have paved over their front yards. The pedestrian environment on these streets is left degraded, with swaths of dead space where families and people with disabilities are often forced to walk around an obstacle course of cars and driveway ramps.

Residents are enjoying a more livable outer Bryant Street since the city implemented a road diet last month, reducing four traffic lanes to two (plus left-turn bays at some intersections) between 23rd and Cesar Chavez Streets. Neighbors joined Friends of the Urban Forest on Sunday on the block between 26th Street and Cesar Chavez to add trees and plants to two new medians -- visual signals that drivers should slow down as they enter the neighborhood from the 101 freeway.

A nice little transformation has taken place on Elgin Park, a one-block residential street next to the Central Freeway touchdown at Market Street and Octavia Boulevard.

Construction will begin this month on physically separated bike lanes and pedestrian safety improvements on three critical blocks of Fell and Oak Streets after the project was approved unanimously yesterday by the SF Municipal Transportation Agency Board of Directors.