Pavement to Parks

The San Francisco Great Streets Project (GSP) has been collecting pedestrian counts and street user surveys, and has used time-lapse photography, to measure users' perceptions about the quality of the public realm before and after the 17th Street plaza treatments were in place. The results of the surveys show what many readers of Streetsblog have been saying all along: residents feel the sense of community and the quality of the pedestrian realm have gone up markedly.

When Mayor Gavin Newsom dedicated the first of three Pavement to Parks plazas at 17th and Market streets, he promised to push forward with the next two trial plazas in short order, including one at the intersection of Guerrero Street and San Jose Avenue, one of the more precarious corners in the city, where traffic speeds down Guerrero after exiting I-280, the footprint of the now-abandoned Mission Freeway. For community residents like Gillian Gillett, who has been fighting to make the neighborhood more pedestrian friendly and less sick with dangerous traffic for years, the news was thrilling.

At yesterday's Interdepartmental Staff Committee on Traffic and Transportation (ISCOTT) meeting, where decisions about temporary street closures are decided by all the agencies that have anything to do with streets and events on streets, the trial pedestrian plaza at 17th Street and Market Street received easy approval for a four month extension. Heads of MTA, DPW, the Planning Department, as well as Mayor Gavin Newsom, the two merchant organizations in the area, and many immediate community organizations all voiced support for the extension, many of them urging that the successful plaza become permanent.

San Francisco's livable streets advocates have a chance to participate in a public forum tomorrow with Enrique Peñalosa, who, as mayor of traffic-clogged Bogotá, Colombia, implemented a s⁞weeping set of improvements to transit and the pedestrian realm.

When Mayor Gavin Newsom dedicated the trial pedestrian plaza at 17th Street and Castro last week, he took a significant stride toward improving his record on livable streets issues. He demonstrated engagement with local community groups and advocates by taking symbolic and institutional steps that incrementally nibble away at the paradigm of streets that gives primacy to the movement of cars.