Eyes on the Street

Building off Jane Jacob's maxim that more eyes on a street make the street feel safer, the San Francisco Arts Commission has commissioned numerous artists to display their projects in abandoned storefronts as part of the Art in Storefronts program, and as the photo above illustrates, some of those eyes are literally watching you.

Here's your weekly round-up of photos from our Flickr pool. Thank you as always and please do send more our way. A selection of others after the jump.

Great to see so many children out for Walk to School Day this week. An absolutely beautiful photo of this little girl above. And good lord was it intense to get buzzed by the Blue Angels! I never want to be on the target end of our military.  Thanks as always for the wonderful photos you keep uploading to our Flickr pool. Have a great weekend!

Wow, what a beautiful bunch of uploads the Streetsblog community has been tagging for our Flickr pool!  Please keep it up. And plug1 (a.k.a. whatimseeing.com), you rock; we'd put more of your photos up, but we don't have that much server room.  Thanks all for the contributions and please keep sending them our way!

The City of San Francisco is still barred from installing any new bike infrastructure because of a three-year-old injunction, but that's not stopping the San Francisco Unified School District from installing bike racks at the city's schools. The school district isn't covered by the injunction, and it's using several sources of funding to add desperately needed bike racks to schools like Balboa High, where these new racks were spotted just yesterday by health education teacher Christopher Pepper.

It may be the most dramatic Pavement to Parks implementation yet: at the intersection of San Jose Avenue and Guerrero Street, enormous logs have arrived that will form the backbones of planter beds. The Planning Department's Andres Power provides an update:

Thanks to all of you wonderful photographers who tag your photos and videos in our Flickr pool. Be sure to send us more and we might see you on the blog!

A recently-striped bike lane is causing confusion along Lakeside Drive in Oakland. Brian Smith posted the above photo to Livable City's car-free living mail list, and Walk Oakland Bike Oakland blogged about the issue earlier this month. It still hasn't been corrected, but Jason Patton, Bicycle and Pedestrian Program Manager for the City of Oakland, said in an email that the city is aware of the issue and is working to correct it:

Intrepid explorers of San Francisco regularly stumble upon the many ghost streets that still hide all over town, rewarding the patient pedestrian for their diligence. Mostly they are on hillsides where steep grades impeded road building at earlier moments in history, but they're still presented as if they were through-streets on the maps.