S.F. Expands Priority Conservation Areas
On April 21, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved the designation of five Priority Conservation Areas (PCAs) in San Francisco. Priority Conservation Areas are Bay Area open spaces that “provide regionally significant agricultural, natural resource, scenic, recreational, and/or ecological values and ecosystem functions; are in urgent need of protection due to pressure from urban development or…
“Unaccepted” Townsend Street is Unacceptable
San Francisco has about 850 miles of streets, in 12,500 street segments, covering about a quarter of San Francisco’s land area. 2,224 of those street segments are “unaccepted streets” – streets that are not maintained by SF’s Department of Public Works. Over half of those streets are paved, but often one or more features – sidewalks,…
Reclaiming San Francisco’s Alleyways
Public rights-of-way – streets and alleyways – make up about a quarter of San Francisco’s land area. Projects that reclaim alleyways as neighborhood-serving public places with greening, traffic-calming, and pedestrianization are moving forward in 2015. Living Alleys, also known as woonerfs, are shared space alleyways that prioritize pedestrian use and open space, using special paving, traffic calming, lighting, seating, green landscaping, and…
Daniel Burnham’s Plan for San Francisco
The last comprehensive plan San Francisco had for a greenway network was over a hundred years ago, when architect Daniel Burnham proposed it as part of his comprehensive plan for the City. Burham’s plan was released, with great fanfare, just a few weeks before the 1906 Earthquake and Fire. It proposed carving a network of…
2014 in Review: Complete Streets and Greenways
2014 saw progress towards complete streets and a greenway network for San Francisco – and also showed that the city’s projects and practices are still falling far short of its standards, policies, and goals. Vision Zero Vision Zero – the goal of eliminating traffic deaths within a decade – made progress in 2014. Various city agencies adopted…
The Future of Downtown’s Public Spaces
As San Francisco’s Downtown gets denser, and increasingly mixed-use – housing, retail, hotels, entertainment, and cultural institutions along with offices – it needs better public amenities – better streets, greenery, and usable and appealing public open spaces. The Downtown Plan, adopted in 1985, emerged from the ‘Planning Wars’ of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Downtown Plan’s intent…
Transit Victories of 2014
In 2014, San Francisco and Alameda County voters strongly affirmed their support for transit, walking, and cycling. In San Francisco, Prop L, a policy measure which sought to undermine the City’s transit-first policy, traffic calming, and innovative parking management programs, was resoundingly defeated in the November election. Proposition A, a $500 million bond for transit priority projects and…
Livable City’s Action Plan for Housing Marks a Year of Successes
Last December, Livable City put forward our Action Plan for Housing, a set of complementary strategies for making San Francisco a more livable, sustainable, and affordable city. We aimed to address San Francisco’s unprecedented housing crisis by putting forward a set of strategies for preserving existing housing and protecting tenants, while increasing the supply of housing that is…
Endorsements for the November 4, 2014 Election
2014 brings with it a packed ballot, both on matters of state and local importance. There are several important measures on the ballot this year that touch upon housing, transit, health, and a living wage. On Tuesday, voters will cast ballots on three key transportation-related measures. These measures can either help fund necessary infrastructure and…
Livable City Challenges Sunday Meter Rollback
Livable City and the San Francisco Transit Riders Union have appealed SFMTA’s decision to roll back San Francisco’s successful Sunday parking meter program. In January 2013, San Francisco finally started enforcing parking meters from 12-6 pm on Sundays on the City’s commercial streets. An evaluation [PDF] completed in December found the program to be successful – it increased…
