Pedestrian Infrastructure

Just two weeks after Oakland’s Latham Square opened on August 16, office workers could be seen arriving in ones and twos at lunchtime. A clutch of high schoolers from the nearby Oakland School For the Arts zoomed in on skateboards and sat together on a big bench in the shade, looking cool and disaffected. The park, which made the last block of Telegraph Avenue below 16th Street car-free, provides such a natural definition of the border between downtown and uptown Oakland that it feels like it has always been here.

Once again, a merchant group is contesting a proposal that would improve walking and public space on a San Francisco street. At a community meeting on plans to add greening and sidewalk corner extensions on central Irving Street last week, merchants balked at the idea of removing 10 to 12 parking spaces to extend eight sidewalk corners and create spaces where people can rest.

After listening to city planners say there's no practical way to redesign Potrero Avenue with protected bike lanes and two transit lanes, Josh Handel didn't buy it.

The city's latest proposal to improve safety and transit service on Potrero Avenue is slightly different than earlier versions of the plan. While the redesign would expand pedestrian space, some residents at a public meeting yesterday pointed out that it could do much more to make the street safer for biking and walking.

A chunk of roadway at Valencia and Mission Streets would be reclaimed to create a plaza designed to make the corner more pedestrian-friendly and absorb stormwater under a project led by the SF Public Utilities Commission.

As if San Francisco's sidewalks weren't narrow enough, they're often cluttered with objects like newspaper racks, utility poles, street signs, and utility boxes.

Last Saturday, Daly City officials and residents convened to celebrate a newly built transit plaza, the centerpiece of the long-awaited $3.4 million Top of the Hill project, which includes a series of pedestrian and streetscape improvements along three blocks of Mission Street between John Daly Boulevard and Parkview Avenue. The project was constructed with $2.3 million from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and $700,000 from the San Mateo County Transit District (SamTrans).

The final designs for a people-friendly block of Bartlett Street in the Mission were presented [PDF] last week by the Planning Department, Department of Public Works, the SFMTA, and the design firm Rebar. The plan retains the sidewalk extensions that are key to calming traffic and inviting social activity outside of events like the weekly Mission Community Market, when the block is closed to cars.

Just after our look at the faltering pace of plaza expansions under San Francisco's Pavement to Parks program last week, we get another glimpse of New York City's ongoing efforts to reclaim street space for people and improve safety using low-cost, temporary measures like posts and gravel epoxy.