San Francisco Neighborhoods

Mission District residents who equate streetscape improvements with rising rents dominated a community meeting discussion yesterday about public space upgrades along Mission Street.

The SFMTA recently made some upgrades to bike lanes and pedestrian crossings around Valencia Street and Market Street.

A civil jury has determined that a truck driver was negligent when he killed Amelie Le Moullac as she rode her bike at Folsom and Sixth Streets in August 2013, KQED's Bryan Goebel (Streetsblog SF's first editor) reported today:

The Hearst Corporation filed an appeal last month in an attempt to dismantle the Annie Alley street plaza so drivers exiting its parking garage could take a more direct path to Mission Street.

Page Street is a pretty great bicycle route to get downtown from the western neighborhoods -- until you reach the two blocks that are typically backed up with cars waiting to turn on to Octavia Boulevard and the Central Freeway. Bike commuters are forced to squeeze by stopped cars, either to the left (in the mostly empty oncoming traffic lane) or the right (the door zone tunnel).

Julie Christensen, a leading North Beach advocate for wider sidewalks and a Central Subway extension, has been appointed as the new District 3 Supervisor by Mayor Ed Lee.

Muni plans to launch a new bus line this month to beef up service along eastern 16th Street, connecting the BART station at Mission Street to the soon-to-open University of California SF hospital at Mission Bay. The 55-16th Street route would complement existing 22-Fillmore service on 16th, extending beyond the 22's endpoint all the way to the east end of 16th and then north on Third Street towards its terminus at UCSF.

The nascent prospect of extending the Central Subway beyond Chinatown gained steam this week with the release of a preliminary city study [PDF] that lays out some conceptual proposals to bring the subway further into the city's northern neighborhoods.

Ever since the Embarcadero was uncovered from beneath a freeway more than two decades ago, San Franciscans' appetite for a more people-friendly waterfront only seems to have grown.