Quality of Life

Don't look now, but NYC DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan's magic may have rubbed off on DPW Director Ed Reiskin, to San Francisco's benefit.  Reiskin has been leading a multi-agency effort to close a small portion of 17th Street where it meets Market Street to vehicle traffic and convert the space into a trial pedestrian plaza, which he hopes to see operational by May. 

The next generation of community-driven reporting of quality-of-life issues--like potholes, graffiti, garbage buildup, or broken street lights--is SeeClickFix, a mapping software that enables users to populate a map with cases that are then forwarded to the responsible city agency. Much like a 311 system, SeeClickFix's software is predicated on the assumption that an aware and engaged public that uses technology can get the city that represents it to efficiently resolve its problems.

Hunter College student and photographer Andrew Lynch recently posted Google Map mashups of the unbuilt freeways that made up many of the master plans in cities around the country in the 1950s and 1960s.  San Francisco, New York City, and Boston avoided the worst of automobility, while the map of Los Angeles freeways was pretty well paved.

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. 

The bike scene in Los Angeles is alive and well - and growing every day.

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.

Curb cuts, also known as driveways, theoretically provide vehicle access from the street into a private garage.  New development in San Francisco has been required to include off-street parking since the 50s, in an effort to ensure a convenient supply of on-street parking.  But as documented by Mary Brown’s comprehensive investigation in the Mission District, 49-percent of all residential garages are used for storage, not parking.

Transportation consultants and planners associated with the San Francisco Transportation Authority's (TA) ATG working group sent excited bursts of email to each other earlier this month about a new development coming from the state Office of Planning and Research (OPR), the body responsible for writing and amending the CEQA guidelines related to transportation and traffic.  The OPR had adopted much of the spirit of the working group's recommendations and proposed an amendment (PDF) to CEQA guidelines that de-emphasized LOS and indicated that it would be much better to use measures for vehicle miles traveled (VMT) reductions such as ATG.