San Francisco Neighborhoods

The city's latest proposal to improve safety and transit service on Potrero Avenue is slightly different than earlier versions of the plan. While the redesign would expand pedestrian space, some residents at a public meeting yesterday pointed out that it could do much more to make the street safer for biking and walking.

The vision for Market Street (and potentially Mission) is becoming clearer with the release of new renderings of streets and plazas at public workshops for the "Better Market Street" project this week.

Two blocks in the Western Addition were closed to cars and turned into a neighborhood gathering space Saturday for the city's first "Play Streets" event. The program is an effort to build on the success of Sunday Streets and provide smaller-scale car-free spaces where people can play and socialize on a more frequent basis.

Sixth Street, which has one of the highest rates of pedestrian injuries in the city, could receive a road diet after the SFMTA analyzes the impacts of removing two of its four traffic lanes to improve safety.

A chunk of roadway at Valencia and Mission Streets would be reclaimed to create a plaza designed to make the corner more pedestrian-friendly and absorb stormwater under a project led by the SF Public Utilities Commission.

The Planning Department held a community workshop yesterday to field ideas on how to turn the numerous alleyways in and around Hayes Valley into calmer, greener, more inviting respites from the major traffic-heavy streets.

Most of the space on the busy commercial stretch of central Irving Street in the Sunset serves as a clogged parking lot, with rampant double parking and drivers circling the easternmost block to work around 19th Avenue's left-turn bans. But while the car traffic and angled parking spots that eat up public space may not disappear any time soon, the Department of Public Works held a recent public meeting to field input on how to make the street more livable with new trees, re-paving, a median with greenery, and a few corner bulb-outs.

The SFMTA painted the Embarcadero bike lanes green yesterday, which will hopefully help signal to drivers that it's not a parking lane. The SFMTA Livable Streets team wrote on its Facebook page that the Port of SF helped get the paint on the ground in time for the Fourth of July and America's Cup later this month.

The final designs for a people-friendly block of Bartlett Street in the Mission were presented [PDF] last week by the Planning Department, Department of Public Works, the SFMTA, and the design firm Rebar. The plan retains the sidewalk extensions that are key to calming traffic and inviting social activity outside of events like the weekly Mission Community Market, when the block is closed to cars.