Infrastructure

Five months' groceries for a family of four. A year's worth of textbooks for a college student. One thousand sixty dollars: That's how much inadequate infrastructure spending cost the average American family last year, according to a new report from the American Society of Civil Engineers, "Failure to Act: The Economic Impact of Current Investment Trends in Surface Transportation Infrastructure." And it's only projected to get worse.

During the heavy rainfall season, San Francisco faces some daunting challenges: Draining the water, keeping the roads from getting slippery, and containing and treating the runoff. Some storms are so severe that the city can't keep pace. That's when we see flooding in the Muni tunnels and sewage discharges into the bay.

(Editor's note: This is Part 3 in a 3-part series on the Bay Area watershed. In Part 1, we examined a radical new daylighting proposal in Berkeley; and in Part 2, we looked at the changes that SF streets may face under a bold plan by the Public Utilities Commission.)

(Editor's note: This is Part 1 in a 3-part series on the Bay Area watershed)

For the engineers toiling to complete the replacement of the Bay Bridge, their ship has finally come in.

We’ve been waiting for years now to see some physical changes to accommodate the huge increase in daily bicycling. We did get an odd set of painted bike lanes and green bike route signs, and a significant number of bike racks for parking, before it all came to a halt due to the injunction three years ago. After perusing the much-anticipated Draft Bicycle Plan and its dense bureaucratese, full of overlapping redundant promises, I’m afraid we’ll be waiting a good while longer to see the kinds of changes that we ought to be getting.

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.