Pedestrian Infrastructure

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:

As we reported last week, several city agencies have begun to look at ways to improve Market Street when it is repaved, including an inter-agency process spearheaded by DPW and the Planning Department.  Yet, we've still heard nothing from Mayor Gavin Newsom that suggests he'll make the transformation of San Francisco's most significant street an urgent priority. 

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.