San Francisco Neighborhoods

Editor's note: This is the first of a three-part series on the past, present and future of traffic engineering in San Francisco. 

Pedaling up Sutter Street toward Leavenworth from his dentist's office during the height of the Wednesday evening commute, Dan Nunes is riding in the transit-only lane for his bike trip home, despite the new sharrows recently painted in the center lane to his left. There, drivers often zoom by at alarming speeds, breaking the 25 mile an hour speed limit, narrowly avoiding crashes, and treating the three-lane arterial like a highway, especially as they make the descent down the hill on Sutter just past Leavenworth.

When the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) counted all the publicly available parking spaces in San Francisco, city planners argued one of the more significant benefits of such a comprehensive study would be to put to rest speculative arguments about whether or not there was "enough parking" in a given neighborhood. Without a baseline of parking supply, the argument ran, the concern of neighbors or advocates about too much or too little parking wouldn't be based on good data.

The Broadway tunnel, stretching from Hyde Street in Russian Hill to Powell Street in Chinatown, is one of the scariest places in San Francisco to ride a bike, and it's no walk in the park for pedestrians, either.

Could San Francisco's first and oldest thoroughfare become the city's first true pedestrianized street?

StreetUtopia is a new community organizing effort centered in North Beach. Launched by Hank Hyena and Phil Millenbah at an inaugural event in early January, they drew upwards of 150 people to an empty historic storefront at 1 Columbus Avenue, where they showed Streetfilms, had a small art exhibit, and conducted a survey of the folks who turned out. Hank Hyena explained his motivation in terms of European cities which are often greener, more bike-friendly, and with more pedestrian-centers than US cities. Along with several other parents of children at Yick Wo Public School, including co-instigator Phil Millenbah, a San Leandro city planner, they staged an inspiring evening of art, film, and conversation.

Hoi Chong Wong can tell you about the commute from 3rd Street in the Bayview to Chinatown or the commute in Guangzhou, China. Though retired now, he's been making the trip to Chinatown on Muni almost daily since he immigrated to San Francisco in 1997, first on the defunct 15-Third bus line, and now on the T-Third Street light rail line, with a transfer to the 30-Stockton or 45-Union-Stockton bus line near 4th and King. In Guangzhou, he also traveled mostly by bus, plus the occasional bicycle ride.

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.

Anyone who's given a friend from out of town directions on riding Muni knows it can be tricky to describe just where they need to get off to reach their destination. Fortunately, buses now automatically announce upcoming stops and display them on screens at the front of vehicles, and light rail vehicles announce upcoming stations when they're running in the Market Street tunnel.