Urban Design

An open competition to design a new urban quarter in Iceland will prioritize sustainable transportation in a region that's proactively transitioning out of car dependency — and it could serve as a model for how to fill similar holes in growing U.S. communities.

In most U.S. metros, renters and buyers alike pay a steep premium to live in walkable neighborhoods, a new report finds — except for a small handful of U.S. cities where they actually cost less than car-dominated ones.

"Why wait five or six years before doing anything with the space?" was the question Brad Leibin, an‎ architect at David Baker Architects, was asked to help solve about an affordable housing project planned for West Oakland's San Pablo Avenue at 34th Street. "So we started to make a difference on that streets-cape immediately ... that project got me really interested in interim uses."

Last week, Gracen Johnson over at Strong Towns introduced the phrase "places I don't want to sit" to describe the lousy, leftover public spaces where someone has plopped down a bench or two as an afterthought. The seating, in these cases, helps crystallize how unsalvageable our public realm becomes when everything else is planned around moving and storing cars. Who would actually want to sit there?

The Board of Supervisors yesterday voted unanimously to establish the National Association of City Transportation Officials' Urban Street and Urban Bikeway Design Guides as official policy for all city agencies, as proposed by Supervisor Scott Wiener.

Supervisor Scott Wiener has introduced a bill that would make the National Association of City Transportation Officials' guides for Urban Streets and Urban Bikeways official city policy. The SFMTA Board of Directors already adopted the NACTO guides in January, but Wiener's legislation would establish them as official guidelines for other agencies to use, including the Department of Public Works, the Planning Department, and the SF Fire Department.

Three new cafes and restaurants in the Castro have been created in spaces formerly used as personal parking garages. Driveways and dark garage doors on 18th Street have been replaced with storefronts and inviting patios filled with people.

The debate over whether San Francisco's streets should be wider and less safe just to accommodate fire trucks was aired publicly at a City Hall hearing yesterday. Livable streets advocates and Supervisor Scott Wiener, who called the hearing, challenged the SF Fire Department's insistence on wider roadways, particularly its recent eleventh-hour push to change street widths that were agreed upon years ago in redevelopments at Hunters Point Shipyard and Candlestick Point.

When it comes to gauging support for changes on our streets, it's easy to get the impression at community meetings that a handful of vocal critics represent significant opposition. But as preliminary survey results from a recent Inner Sunset meeting on improvements for the N-Judah show, public forums can often be a poor reflection of the actual level of community support for re-allocating street space to improve transit, walking, and biking.