Livable Streets

Last Saturday, as I was pedaling through Golden Gate Park, alongside a glut of bumper-to-bumper cars, I kept thinking to myself, "Why did I come on Saturday?" It had been so long since I spent a Saturday in GG Park. The juxtaposition was disgusting to me: a gaggle of cars against the lush green of a national park. On the lower portion of JFK Drive, as it bends toward the Dutch Windmill and Ocean Beach, I watched the irate faces of a few impatient drivers, red with anger that a pedestrian dare cross the street in a park. "This is taking forever!" I heard one of them shout.

When we wrote about the trial pedestrian plaza on 17th Street and Market Street that DPW expects to start this May, the story generated numerous doubts about how the city would create a successful public space out of a busy street abutting a gas station. 

Mayor Gavin Newsom yesterday announced one of his most ambitious plans for re-shaping San Francisco, telling reporters at a press conference with Caltrans Director Will Kemption and Caltrain Director Michael Scanlan that the city would move forward with plans to tear down sections of I-280 through San Francisco.  

I'm sorry I'm late.  You know how it is, if it's not in the Facebook calendar, I'm pretty much worthless at remembering.  

With San Francisco about to embark on its first pilot street closure, I thought it would be appropriate to revisit this conversation with the Open Planning Project's Executive Director, Mark Gorton, and New York City's Commissioner of the Department of Transportation, Janette Sadik-Khan, who has taken on the challenge of transforming NYC streets in a series of groundbreaking pilot projects. 

The next generation of community-driven reporting of quality-of-life issues--like potholes, graffiti, garbage buildup, or broken street lights--is SeeClickFix, a mapping software that enables users to populate a map with cases that are then forwarded to the responsible city agency. Much like a 311 system, SeeClickFix's software is predicated on the assumption that an aware and engaged public that uses technology can get the city that represents it to efficiently resolve its problems.

If you've pedaled or walked Sutter Street lately, or happen to live on Sutter like me, you've probably noticed the curb ramps and streets being torn up. It's all part of DPW's $1.2 million Sansome and Taylor Street Pavement Renovation Project, which began in early February. According to the DPW's Christine Falvey:

It's a good day to talk about the costs of car ownership on individuals and families and the need to integrate transportation and land use planning regionally.

As we reported a couple weeks ago, Walk Score was developing a new transit twist to their website, which is now in beta here.  The transit shed map seen above utilizes Google Transit Feed Specification schedule data from the MTA, Caltrain, and BART to produce the travel information (hint: zoom in to pinpoint your location if your results don't seem accurate).