Pedestrians

Today on the Streetsblog Network, more windshield perspective from journalists, via WalkBike Jersey. Andy B, the blog's author (and a frequent commenter on this site), writes about an Atlantic City newspaper editor who has come up with a bizarre theory about who is responsible for the rising tide of pedestrian deaths in the Garden State.

The stretch of Broadway between Columbus Avenue and the Robert C. Levy tunnel is an unheralded segment of San Francisco's Chinatown: storefront after storefront of neighborhood shops and restaurants, with far fewer tourists than Grant Avenue or Stockton Street. But its streetscape, though lively with pedestrians during the day, maintains much the same look it had when the Embarcadero Freeway still touched down several blocks to the east, funneling cars through the neighborhood via Broadway's four lanes of traffic, as pedestrians squeeze onto 12-foot-wide sidewalks.

Disney's Magic Highway USA is one of the more extraordinary examples of the myopic devotion to automobility and its infrastructure I've ever seen. It's probably also required viewing at the Reason Foundation and among Senator James Inhofe's staff in Washington DC.

Without question, Portland's Greenstreets program is the benchmark for American cities seeking to manage storm water and runoff from the street level before it enters the sanitation system pipes. Now, San Francisco is on its way to constructing its first on-street stormwater facilities in two places in the Bayview and Visitation Valley, pilots that should be instructive for the city going forward with the Better Streets Plan.

When Tim Tompkins took over as President of the Times Square Alliance, one of New York City's largest Business Improvement Districts (BIDs), the primary concerns were the security and cleanliness of the most iconic, if chaotic, public space in the world. Despite incessant traffic and pedestrian gridlock ("pedlock" to borrow Tompkin's phrase), his Board of Directors and city officials on the whole weren't initially interested in Tompkins' vision for transforming Times Square into a world-class public space, with less traffic and higher design concepts.

The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) and the Department of Public Health (DPH) recently announced a pedestrian safety program funded by a grant from the California Office of Traffic Safety (OTS, tag: "Toward Zero Deaths, Every 1 Counts"), a joint initiative that aims to increase enforcement of dangerous and illegal driver behavior, coupled with education campaigns to seniors and other vulnerable pedestrians.