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Paradise LOSt (Part III): California’s Revolutionary Plan to Overhaul Transportation Analysis
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.
January 28, 2009
Paradise LOSt (Part II): Turning Automobility on Its Head
One of the unintended consequences of San Francisco’s bicycle injunction, which Rob Anderson and fellow NIMBYs will likely rue for some time to come, is the arduous thought and labor that advocates and professional planners have invested in doing away with LOS all together.
January 27, 2009
Paradise LOSt (Part I): How Long Will the City Keep Us Stuck in Our Cars?
The idea that the speed and free-flow of cars is the proxy that is being used across the state of California to measure whether a project is [environmentally] impactful is in the long run undermining the very quality of life [we] are working to protect.
January 26, 2009
Unlocking San Francisco’s Privately Owned Public Open Spaces
“Here was a territory that existed for which there was no map,” said Rebar’s Blaine Merker. “We kept seeing little plaques that said these were public spaces, but you had to go past security guards and up elevators to get to them. We felt that art could be a form of urban research, but we needed to create art that was equally as absurd as the spaces.”
January 20, 2009
299 Valencia Appeal Fails As Swing Vote Dufty Sides with Developer
The Board of Supervisors, in one the first tests of the new progressive bloc, failed to muster a supermajority vote to support an appeal that would have overturned the Planning Commission's approval of a conditional use (CU) permit, which allowed seven more parking spaces than the ratio set in the Market/Octavia Plan for a proposed condominium and commercial development at 299 Valencia Street.
January 14, 2009
Depaving Uncovers Layers of History
We walk on layers of history. In our neighborhoods, in our cities, there were once natural phenomena, like creeks, sand dunes, hills, and forests. Over time they were covered in farms, factories, houses, and most of all, streets. At first those streets were dirt, often thick and muddy. Around the middle of the 19th century they started to be used for railroads, both intercity, and local streetcar and cable car lines. Sometimes the shape of our 21st century streetscape is a ghost of those old train lines.
January 13, 2009
Jane Martin is a Force of Nature
Jane Martin is a longtime resident of San Francisco's Mission District, a licensed architect, and an avid gardener. She is the founder of PlantSF, an informational website dedicated to reconfiguring the design and use of urban spaces, primarily sidewalks and to a lesser extent, residential streets. PlantSF started in 2004 after Martin had spent considerable effort establishing a sidewalk garden in front of her then-home on Shotwell between 17th and 18th Streets.
January 8, 2009
San Francisco Mayor to NYC: “Eat Your Heart Out.”
At a groundbreaking ceremony for the long-awaited Transbay Transit Center in San Francisco yesterday, Mayor Gavin Newsom asserted the project will be "so much more extraordinary than Grand Central Station."
December 11, 2008
Jan Gehl Reflects on San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf
"When I was a visiting professor at Berkeley in the 1980s, I used to come to Fisherman's Wharf and walk around," Danish urban designer Jan Gehl said Wednesday night, to more than 100 San Franciscans at the Pier 39 Theater near Fisherman's Wharf. "Now it's like deja vu; it's exactly like I remember it 25 years ago."
October 9, 2008
Transit-Oriented America, Part 3: Three More Cities
Part 3 in a series on rail and transit-only travel across the United States focuses on the final three cities of our journey. Part 2 looked at the first three and Part 1 presented an overview of our travel.
August 22, 2007