As Pedestrian Deaths Soar, the Tenderloin Fights Back With 1 Mile of Car-Free Streets
San Francisco’s open streets program, Sunday Streets, returns to the Tenderloin and Civic Center on September 8 from 11am-4pm, transforming a neighborhood suffering from the city’s highest percentage of pedestrian fatalities into a safe, open space for all.
San Francisco’s Car-Free Roots
Human beings have been carving roads and paths for eons, but it’s easy to forget that cars are quite new. Before automobiles, roads were shared spaces – open to pedestrians, vendors and modes of transport like horses and buggies.
Planning Commission Approves Better Environmental Review Standards
On Thursday March 3, San Francisco’s Planning Commission unanimously approved an essential, and long overdue, change to the way it reviews projects under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The Commission replaced automobile level of service (LOS), a measure of automobile delay at intersections, with vehicle miles travelled (VMT) as their chief transportation measure for analyzing projects. This…
What Makes a Livable Neighborhood?
A livable San Francisco is a network of Livable Neighborhoods. Each neighborhood should have a distinct character, but each should be complete, supporting living, working, commerce, and culture. A Livable Neighborhood is: Compact Sustainable Livable neighborhoods conserve land, and are of sufficiently density to support frequent transit service and neighborhood-serving businesses. Livable neighborhoods provide a…
Car-Free Streets and the Poetry of the City
Poets Plaza, a proposed piazza in North Beach, has been delayed again. Supporters have started an online petition to get the project moving. There will be a public meeting about the piazza on Thursday, March 3 from 6 to 7:30 pm at the Tel-Hi Center, 660 Lombard Street near Mason. The plaza, also called Piazza Saint Francis, would…
Annie Alley – Creating Open Space in a Neglected Alley
We are working hard to reclaim our public spaces and ensure privately-owned places are still welcoming to everyone. 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,…
Creating Sustainable Door-to-Door Transportation
Although sprawling, the overwhelming majority of Bay Area residents have convenient access to sustainable modes of transit. A major hurdle for many potential users is the short distance between home and transit, and again between work and transit. These first and last mile challenges keep many people who either live or work in transit poor…
Livable City’s Greenway Initiative
The goal of the Greenway Network Initiative is to create a citywide network of landscaped boulevards, green streets, and linear parks which link the city’s neighborhoods to one another and to the major parks, wildlife corridors, waterfront, and public transit hubs. The Network will serve as sustainable transportation infrastructure (walking, bicycling, and public transit), and provide…
“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,…
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…
