Pedestrian Infrastructure

At a well-attended community workshop in the Women's Center auditorium on Wednesday night, the Planning Department presented the Mission Streetscape Plan (MSP), a set of tools for transforming streets in the Mission (large PDF).  Some of the proposed concepts are tried and true traffic calming, like bollards, neckdowns, and speed tables, while some are far more innovative and reflective of work that many Mission neighbors have initiated on their own, such as the planted medians of the Greening Guerrero project and the permeable driveways and sidewalk gardens in Jane Martin's PlantSF projects. 

In a closed meeting of agency staff this morning, the DPW agreed to delay the construction of a median fence on Potrero Avenue between 25th Street and Cesar Chavez until they conduct further community outreach in conjunction with Supervisor David Campos' office. 

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).

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.

As we wrote a couple days ago about Jefferson Street, merchants on the commercial street there and throughout the city often assume parking spaces in front of their stores are vital to business, that their customers drive to buy, and that driving customers spend more because they can carry more goods home in their vehicles. 

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.

Editor's note: This is the latest installment in our series of occasional stories on how to improve the streets for pedestrians 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.

There was widespread government and public support for a two-way, traffic-calmed Hayes Street between Gough and Franklin at the Board of Supervisors' Land Use and Economic Development Committee meeting today, but there is a fundamental disagreement with the MTA on how to get there.