Hmmmm

The DA seems to be having a little bit of a problem expressing himself, as I would guess that what he’s really trying to ask is “Why is this woman bicycling in this intersection while the traffic light governing her direction of travel is red?” So, given the presumptuousness, confirmation bias, and possible psychological projection the original question carries, I considered instead the underlying one.

Here are a few possible answers I came up with just off the top of my head:

• She’s trying to stay safe by getting up to speed before the speeding car traffic behind her reaches the intersection, by which time the light may be green and the speed differential will be dangerous and frightening if she is still stopped. Even if the street has a standard bike lane, the potential to be rear-ended while stopped at a traffic light by a driver who doesn’t see you is real.

  Solution: Install leading bike signals or allow cyclists to cross with existing leading signals for pedestrians. Physically separated bike lanes combined with leading bike signals make for an even more effective answer to this problem.

• She suspects that a nearby musical panhandler may be contemplating violence, so she has decided to jump the red light to escape this more immediate danger. After all, she’s not surrounded by a metal cage with lockable doors to protect her as she waits.

  Solution: As Idaho has been doing forever now, allow cyclists to jump reds after coming to a complete stop if the coast is clear.

• She’s trying to avoid getting a blast of exhaust to the face when the light turns green and the queued up gas guzzlers all accelerate. She wouldn’t be the first to make this decision. (To paraphrase a fellow bikeportland.org commenter:^[1] If you think there’s nothing wrong with what’s coming out of your car’s tailpipe, then go ahead and reroute all that stuff right into the cabin of your car and roll up the windows.)

  Solution: Install bike boxes and leading bike signals.

• Perhaps only moments ago, there were cabs or private commuter buses piled up on the other side of the intersection, blocking the bike lane, as very often happens in that exact spot near the pedestrian crossing leading to the Caltrain station. In this case, she may have decided to jump the light in order to more safely negotiate the up-coming pinch point. Starting from a stop at the same time as the car traffic would have made it much more difficult for her to avoid getting run off the road or intimidated by impatient drivers.

  Solution: Install bike boxes and leading bike signals and implement physically separated bike lanes in areas likely to see a lot of conflict with stopped cars.

If this photo was not of the busy Caltrain intersection, I could have added to the list the possibility that there were no cars traveling in the same direction she was, and after waiting many moons for a green light, she finally realized that the traffic signal was one of the “smart” ones that would never actually detect her bike and turn green.

Solution: Following Portland’s example, install bike-specific detectors, clearly label them, and include an indicator light that tells cyclists they’ve been detected. There’s nothing like knowing the infrastructure was lovingly made with you in mind to encourage you to comply with its wishes.

A-HA!
While contemplating the photo a second time, I noticed one very revealing detail: The pedestrians on either side of the street are still waiting for their signal and have not started crossing. This means the traffic signal is frozen in that brief moment between the time the east-west traffic light turns red and the north-south pedestrian light turns green. So in this particular case, our cycling hero probably just didn’t have enough time to clear the intersection before the yellow light turned to red, an understandable and common problem cyclists face because the yellow lights are timed for cars, which can and do clear the intersection must faster. This is especially problematic at multiple-lane intersections like this one.

So there you go, George. Mystery solved!

And here’s my solution: Instead of spending time and money proliferating an inflammatory finger-pointing campaign, invest in trailing bike signals that allow cyclists more time to get through intersections. These would also enhance safety and sanity for everyone by increasing separation between bike and car traffic and reducing the speed differential when the two do meet up again down the road.

A real way forward
While the strategies I’ve just outlined are easy ways to bring more order and predictability to our intersections, by far the most effective way to defuse the conflicts and dangerous dynamics happening on our roads is to use well known traffic-calming measures to slow car traffic down, providing all road users with the necessary leeway to safely and mindfully negotiate the space together.

I mean, after all, what’s the rush?

In order to get to my nearest grocery store, I had to make my way across one multiple-lane highway on-ramp, one seedy highway underpass, one four-lane road, one six-lane boulevard, a couple of side streets, and a few high-traffic parking garage portals.

Whole Foods or Bust

Countless times, I’ve waited at the westbound walk signal at the corner of Harrison, a five-lane bidirectional street, and 3rd Street, a six-lane one-way boulevard, for permission to make my attempt to cross all six lanes without being mowed over by cars taking right turns at speed or getting pegged by left turners failing to take me into account while shooting for the pocket between on-coming cars.

As I knocked on the hoods or trunks of those cars that had gotten a little too fresh with me in my right of way, my mind often revisited the same line of questioning:

• Why in a forward-thinking “transit first” city like San Francisco can’t we designate just one fully-stocked section of town for those of us who don’t care to drive, park, or dodge private autos when going about our daily business?
• Why must I contend with this ridiculous life-and-death game of frogger just because I want to pick up a veggie platter for my dinner guests without first purchasing a car?
• And why must I pay taxes for the pleasure of having my nearest grocery store located half a mile away just to make room for all these multi-lane boulevards I will never use and am regularly abused by?
• Especially considering I have chosen to live right in the hub of all public transport for the entire region!

San Francisco’s under there somewhere

If given the option, it’s clear that plenty of people would choose to live in a place where getting groceries, going to school, commuting to work, collecting a visitor at the airport, picking up the dry cleaning, attending their kid’s soccer game, stopping by the pub, and going to a show were all easily doable without driving, parking, or being bossed around by cars. And wouldn’t this be a boon for San Francisco? Such a neighborhood wouldn’t take up much room, since nobody would need to store or drive a car, and it would attract residents and tourists, while requiring much less money per capita from the city for providing all of the required public utilities and services. Developers would likewise be free of the burden of providing parking for housing and businesses, driving building costs and sale prices down.

So what’s the hold up?

When you investigate the answers to this question, it’s extremely easy to get overwhelmed by a feeling of helplessness in the face of a lot of enduring systemic barriers to breaking down the auto-centric status quo:

• From the ludicrously car-biased traffic engineering standards
• To our mid-century-modern (but very un-Danish) minimum-parking requirements for new developments.
• Our ineffective transit funding strategies
• The city’s ongoing tendency to assign costs to MUNI’s budget that don’t belong there
• And MUNI’s continued mismanagement leading to even more hemorrhaging of funds.

But city officials these days are working hard on specific initiatives to address each of the above bullet points, giving us reason for optimism if we can just get past the biggest most elusive barrier of them all:

NIMBY-ism (No Impeding My Big Yukon)

The biggest problem alternative transportation advocates face in San Francisco is a city constituency subset that responds to rumors of change the same way my cat reacts whenever I mistakenly jostle the noisy door of her carrier while rummaging in the closet.

And straight under the bed she goes.
LOL Cat by Kevin Jarrett

There is, however, one neighborhood in San Francisco whose residents might not be so resistant to streetscape changes.

Chinatown: San Francisco’s Beacon of Hope

In Chinatown, car ownership is already at a mere 12%,^[1] and the evidence suggests that the majority of its out-of-area patrons are also arriving without cars, yet its pedestrians are some of the most marginalized and put-upon in the city.^[*]

The Grant Avenue Holy Grail

San Francisco urbanists have been noticing Chinatown’s potential for a while now. What warm-blooded pedestrian advocate could have failed to respond to the scene on Grant Avenue when it was opened up to pedestrians for two glorious Sunday afternoons of recreating, socializing, and shopping, as a part of San Francisco’s new Sunday Streets program? These events gave us a tantalizing window into what a car-free Chinatown might look like, all while giving local merchants concrete evidence that reducing car space can be good for business.^[*]

Grant Avenue Sunday Streets 2012
Photo by Dianne Yee

A car-free Grant Avenue is a compelling experience, to be sure, and many activists have been inspired to advocate for removing cars from this historic street as soon as possible.

But Stockton Street must be addressed before Grant Avenue

While I am ultimately all for pedestrianizing Grant Avenue, I think it is very important to address Stockton Street first for three reasons:

1. The problems on Stockton are worse

It’s more crowded
Chinatown is the densest neighborhood this side of Manhattan,^[*] and nowhere is that more plainly evident than on the sidewalks of Stockton Street between Sacramento and Broadway during business hours, especially if you happen to be carrying a shopping bag or walking a bike. Heaven help you if you are in a wheelchair, behind a walker, or in front of a piece of rolling luggage. And if you thought it might be easier to push your child in a stroller to free up some hands for carrying a bag or two, I’m afraid you’re just going to have to cab it to Clement Street and try your plan there.

Excuse me. Pardon me. Coming through.

Trying to walk along Stockton even as an athletic and unencumbered young person can be extremely taxing, but it’s not because there’s not enough space. It’s because not enough of the available space is allocated to the people who live, work, play, shop, and go to school locally, because traffic engineers decided some decades ago that the vast majority of the space would be better utilized by outsiders who would like to drive their cars over Chinatown on their way from downtown to North Beach and beyond.

It’s more dangerous
Stockton Street also has a much higher pedestrian-vehicle collision rate than Grant Avenue does,^[*] and it’s not hard to see why. Stockton Street has more lanes of traffic going at higher speeds, and there is considerably more pressure on pedestrians to step out into traffic lanes to get around crowds and other obstacles on the sidewalk.

2. Stockton Street is where the locals are

The safety problems and inequitable distribution of space on Stockton are especially poignant because Stockton happens to be where the majority of the locally-oriented shops are found, like grocery stores, printers, Chinese herb shops, clothing stores, acupuncture clinics, bric-a-brac stores, restaurants, butchers, and other stuff I totally don’t understand because I’m not even a little bit Chinese. This stands in obvious contrast to the calmer and roomier Grant Avenue, which is host to more of the tourist oriented shops, like high-end jewelers, novelty shops, and gift shops full of San Francisco schwag.

LukDonTouch

The median household income in Chinatown is $17,630,^[1] so I’m pretty sure it’s not the locals who are hitting up Lukfook‘s new Grant Avenue location for their Holiday shopping needs.

3. The problems will be harder to solve if Grant is already car free

The Chinatown Community Development Center (CCDC) and the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) recently joined forces to help identify solutions to Stockton’s problems, and while they came up with some good recommendations, in my opinion they didn’t push the boundaries quite hard enough to come up with the best plan for Chinatown’s residents.

What’s needed along Stockton Street are comprehensive, sweeping changes in the allocation of space, which is of course going to meet with considerable political resistance, but imagine for a moment how much harder it would be if Grant Avenue were already shut down to car traffic.

Therefore I strongly believe that if we truly have Chinatown’s best interests in mind, we have to tackle the harder problems on Stockton Street first.

A plan of action for Chinatown, by me

Step Zero: Listen while I tell you a little story

I’ve been spending quite a lot of time in Chinatown recently, and in that time, I’ve detected four primary uses motorized vehicles make of Stockton Street:

• Parking
• Public transport
• Loading and unloading
• Just passing through

Nothing too surprising there, until you look a little more closely at the parking.

I had heard rumors from a couple different sources that most cars parked curbside in Chinatown are sporting handicap placards and are there all day every day. So I decided to check this out for myself.

In the morning and evening of December 4th and in the morning, evening, and late night on December 12th, I pounded the pavement all over Chinatown, recording the license plates of cars featuring handicap placards. What I found was absolutely in line with the rumors.

Hmmm

• The overwhelming majority of cars parked at ordinary meters during my daytime and evening visits were displaying handicap placards.
• At least 65% of the license plates I recorded on the morning of December 4th on Grant Avenue were also there (and usually in the same spot) during at least one of my subsequent visits.
• On the morning of December 12th, I made a point to arrive on the scene about half an hour to an hour before shops were open on Grant Avenue, and I watched as, one after another, people parked their handicapped-placarded cars in front of still-closed shops, exited their single-occupancy vehicles with hot coffees in hand and walked several blocks to wherever they were going. Eight hours later 50% of these cars had not moved an inch.
• There are fewer places to park on Stockton street that are not subject to daily 4-6pm street-cleaning closures but I found the general pattern there to be the same. Overall in Chinatown, 58% of the license plates I recorded during my first snapshot were also present during at least one subsequent snapshot.
• Almost all of the license plates I recorded during the daytime on the 12th were not present after 11pm.
• I stumbled on a further piece of anecdotal evidence around 7pm one night when I saw some people loading baking equipment from a bakery into a handicap-placarded car parked right outside the shop.

All of these findings strongly suggest that most of the cars which are taking up the prime curb-side parking spots in front of the shops in Chinatown do not belong to customers (who would not have remained in place for multiple data snapshots) or to residents (who would have residential permits and who would not all vacate the area by 11pm) or to genuinely handicapped people, but rather they very likely belong to shop owners or employees.

Step One: Implement parking reforms on Stockton and beyond

Historically, the SFMTA has tried to fight handicap placard abuse in the city generally by raising fees for violators and by discussing requiring handicap placard holders to pay the meters like everyone else. I think a much better answer for Chinatown is to incentivize shop owners to give up these spaces to customers arriving on foot, on transit, and by bike, in return for (1) forgiveness, (2) the inevitably increased business they’ll get, (3) some reserved loading zones, and (4) a guaranteed subsidized spot in one of the many nearby garages. If enough shop owners sign on to the plea bargain, there would also be plenty of space for new blue curbs to be painted at every cross street for the minority of present-day visitors and residents who are actually disabled and arriving by car.

We already know from experience that removing parking wholesale from Stockton street is a win for businesses and customers, as it was clearly demonstrated earlier this year when all parking was removed for one week. So really there is nothing to fear from dramatic parking reform in the area, so long as it is thoughtfully executed.

Thoughtful execution would also mean not opening up the newly-freed space on Stockton and Grant to other cars, as that would obviously be a very large step in the wrong direction. The current situation is extremely useful in that it is illustrative of the fact that those spaces in front of the shops are not contributing economically to the area, so it would be critical not to lose any time in giving the space back to the residents, visitors, and merchants of Chinatown in the form of bulb-outs, parklets, bike parking, or spaces for vendor stalls. And don’t worry, the community will have no trouble putting that space to use.

Step Two: Restrict Stockton to local traffic only

As far as the locals are concerned, Stockton’s most important function is to provide access to pedestrians, transit, and those vehicles which are actively loading and unloading inventory and passengers.

A usual weekday morning on Stockton Street

Stockton between Sacramento and Broadway should be reduced to one travel lane in each direction for buses, bikes, delivery vehicles, handicap-placarded cars, and otherwise-permitted cars with several turnouts on both sides for active loading and unloading. The resulting complementary pedestrian bulb-outs between loading areas would be eagerly gobbled up by shop owners and customers who can barely get an inventory display or a shopping bag in edgewise today. Crossing the street at intersections or even (gasp) mid-block would also be made dramatically safer by reducing the crossing distance significantly.

Only 12% of Chinatown residents own cars,^[1] but 100% live with traffic-related air quality hazards

Removing the graded curbs at cross streets would make crossing easier and safer for pedestrians and would help make it clear that no non-local traffic should be turning onto this street from side streets.

From what I’ve been able to determine, this new configuration for Stockton Street would serve the local population quite well. And if done right, transit speed and capacity would also be greatly improved. Restricting loading activities during peak commute hours, for example, would go a long way toward moving buses through faster during the most critical times.

Step Three: Ignore complaints from non-locals. They will be OK.

Of course we can expect a lot of moaning from those people who currently use Stockton to drive cars from their downtown jobs to their favorite bars in North Beach, but by now it will surprise nobody to discover that I’m not at all concerned with their first-world problems. As we’ve seen, through traffic in a neighborhood like this one is a social justice issue. A very small fraction of Chinatown residents own cars but every last resident is subjected daily to the very real health hazards, safety problems, intimidations, and inconveniences created by throngs of outsiders who insist on making time with their cars straight through Chinatown’s kitchen in order to get a good seat at the strip club on the other side.

So for those non-locals who are left wondering how they will get their car from downtown to the Lusty Lady in time to see their favorite dancer take the stage, I have two words: “Go around.” Or even better, seven words, especially for the drinkers: “Take the bus. It’s way faster now.” Or eight for those able-bodied young people who could stand to lose a few pounds: “Just walk or bike. It’s fun, I promise.”

But seriously, by the laws of reduced demand, in a situation like this one, despite appearances, the long term negative impacts on neighboring streets of restricting motor vehicle access to Stockton is likely to be minimal. And at any rate, it is only fair that those citizens who are addicted to their cars make some baby steps toward keeping to themselves the externalities they generate.

Step Four: Close just one block of Grant Avenue

The major challenge of Chinatown is absolutely Stockton Street, but once it is returned to its rightful owners, Grant Avenue is the next obvious place to look for further optimizing the health, safety, beauty, and function of Chinatown. To start with, simply installing two cement bollards in the middle of the Chinatown gate and a couple of corresponding ones on the brink of Pine would go a long way.

A great place for a couple of cement bollards if ever I saw one.

If Grant was no longer a useful through street, this already relatively calm street would become a lot more like the idyllic Waverly Place.

Waverly Place

On Waverly Place, the densest and most stunningly beautiful two block stretch in the entire neighborhood, you start to get a feel for the potential of Grant Avenue if it were to be made similarly inconvenient to through traffic.

Waverly Place

This would be an easier sell than shutting the entire street to traffic, and the effects would be dramatic all along Grant Avenue and throughout the neighborhood.

For example, if even just one block were to be entirely pedestrianized, I like to think a night market like those found in Hong Kong and Taiwan might spring up in our very own Chinatown. Just imagine it for a second:

Temple Street Night Market in Hong Kong. Imagine this on Grant Avenue.
Photo by James Diggans

Step Five: Start accepting applications from North Beach for similar reforms

If Chinatown is allowed to begin reaching its potential as a relatively car free utopia in the middle of the city, residents in other neighborhoods may begin to recognize the purchasing power of the car space in their own pedestrian-heavy corridors. We can hope that successes in Chinatown will generate the jealousy and political will required to nice up other parts of the city. I would be gratified beyond words to see San Francisco lead the way in bringing a little bit of the charm of the world’s more livable cities to our own country.

^[1] Chinatown statistics gathered from this document released by the San Francisco Planning Department after the 2010 census.

Brighton, UK
Photo by Dominic Alves

One of Brighton’s Lanes
Photo by John Starnes

Even from beneath the ominous black cloud of teen angst, I couldn’t help but notice that omfg this place is so awesome, not that I was about to let on to anybody, least of all my mother. While we were walking through a part of the lanes that had sprouted a ceiling, making it suddenly more like an indoor-outdoor shopping mall, a school kid approached us with a video camera and told us he was doing a project for one of his classes. I felt begrudgingly compelled by social propriety to interact with the young lad as he asked me what I thought about the “world cup”. At fourteen, I had no idea what a “world cup” was, but I supposed from his enthusiasm that it was probably pretty good, so I said something vaguely positive and then finally confessed I had no idea what he was talking about. At this point, he somehow figured out that I was from the good ol’ U-S-of-A and yelled out “Jackpot!” right into the echo chamber, much to my dismay. Then he went on to enjoy immensely the process of teasing out the extent of my ignorance, archiving every detail of my humiliation for posterity.

That story really doesn’t have much to do with anything apart from being the first time in my memory that I experienced a car-free zone, and despite my best efforts to remain grumpy about it, Brighton’s Lanes made a lasting positive impression on me that day. Altogether, my mother spent two weeks of her life ferrying me and my frown around England, and by the time I arrived back home in Minneapolis, everything in my home town appeared to be unnecessarily large and spread needlessly far apart. I immediately felt smug and cultured, smarter and more experienced than my fellow countrypeople, which suited my chosen teenage persona just fine.

Several years later, long after I’d allowed smiling back into my life, I discovered this little corner of Boston and fell immediately in love, this time openly affirming my adoration to my travel companion and wondering aloud what it might be like to live above a shop in one of these tiny lanes.

Small pedestrian zone in Boston
Photo by Margaret Napier

A few years after that, I moved to London, where I worked within walking distance of Neal’s Yard and lived within weekending distance of all manner of densely populated, car-free or car-light, commercially and culturally rich neighborhoods in continental Europe.

Amsterdam
Photo by Moyan Brenn

Prague
Photo by Moyan Brenn

Lyon and Berlin
Photos by Ioan Sameli and Ana Rey

The more of these places I saw, the better I was able to articulate my idea of urban utopia.

I used to be pretty sure my ideas were unique in all the world when I’d tell others that the best cities of the future will be those in which private cars are nowhere to be found and all of the amenities you might find in Manhattan, Paris, or London are just outside your doorstep or a short walk, bike ride, rickshaw ride, or streetcar trip away. It’s an image reminiscent of the fortified cities of ancient times, in which the walls are replaced by parking garages for those who still want to own cars for trips outside the city. I’d learn later that a few cities which more or less fit this description already exist, but I was not wrong that this sort of urbanist’s neverneverland is nowhere to be found in North America.

Mmmm… Venice
Photo by Tambako the Jaguar

Since moving to San Francisco eight years ago, I’ve gotten used to meeting other urbanists who have dreamt up the very same narrative for our blissfully car-light future, so I was recently unsurprised but still intrigued to discover Tracy Gayton and the Piscataquis Village Project.

Piss Caticus
Piscataquis (“Pisk Att-icus” or “Piss Cat-icus”) Village is an as yet non-existant car-free rural town full of narrow lanes lined with arcades and attached row houses, punctuated by small plazas and internal courtyards. Many of the row houses contain commerce on the ground floor and, though this is not specifically called out in any of the official documents I’ve yet reviewed, I think I can say with confidence that these commercial enterprises feature large windows to light up the streets at night, and patios with seating spilling out into the narrow lanes, bringing about a community feel and the sort of safety, charm, and photo opportunities we usually feel we have to fly overseas to experience.

Piscataquis Village still only exists in Tracy’s mind and in the minds of a few dozen “contingent investors”, but at least Piscatiaquis Village has a name, a website, a reputation, and the beginnings of a potential future citizenry, which is a lot more than I can say for the ideas I’ve gone on about at length over pitchers of beer with my urbanist friends.

Tracy has decided to locate the whole thing very far away from any urban center, in what is now an extremely sparsely populated rural area in Middle Maine, where zoning laws, bureaucratic hurdles, and NIMBYistic resistance are all likely to be absent or minimal, allowing the march of progress to move forward relatively unimpeded.

As delicious and tempting as this project sounds to someone like me, the project will almost definitely ultimately fail to recruit me for a couple of reasons:

1. I’d Need a Car
The first and most obvious downfall of the plans as they are currently being presented is that there is, as of yet, nothing in them about establishing any kind of regional public transit to anywhere at all. This means that in order to get to and from the village, which is by its own admission in the middle of nowhere, I would either need to buy a car, arrange to use someone else’s, or hitch a ride with someone else whenever I want to leave the 500 acre lot.

Even if I was down with the idea of purchasing a car in order to drive back and forth from my car-free utopia, I really can’t ignore the fact that after a decade of never driving a car, I am frightfully and inescapably bad at it and should by no means be allowed anywhere near the driver’s seat of any highway-legal motorized vehicle whatsoever, and I certainly should never be permitted to drive any such thing on roads or anywhere else, no matter what my California driver’s license declares me capable of doing. I’ll tell you what, California doesn’t have the first clue who can or should be driving a car. I have a permanently disabled ankle and a freshly rotated pelvis to show for California’s ridiculously relaxed approach to handing out driving licenses to anybody and anything. If California refuses to police me, then I must police myself and steer clear, so to speak.

It seems to me to be a bold move on the part of the Piscataquis Village Project to dismiss out of hand as potential future citizens of their car-free utopia all of the people in the world who are already living a car-free life and have no interest in ever driving a car or otherwise being dependent on one. No, no, if I can’t hop on a train or a bus and be at the nearest international airport in under an hour, all bets are off for this card-carrying member of the car-free choir.

2. There’s a Total Creepy Fake Town Potentiality
If Pisk Atticus comes into being, there is reason to believe it may not mature past being a ghost town or a remote commuter village that brings lots and lots of car traffic into the neighboring job centers.

Jakriborg, a similar intentional car-free community recently established in Sweden, suffers from a “Creepy Fake Town” reputation, and anybody who does a Google Image search about Jakriborg can immediately tell you why.

Wait. Where are the people?

Even more no people!

Even though Jakriborg is on a well traveled train line between two very nearby population centers and over 500 families currently live there, and more people are moving there every day, from a Google Image search point of view, it looks conspicuously empty for all the density of its built environment. I’d guess that’s because, while it looks like it’s trying so hard to be so much more, it is still mostly functioning as a suburb. Because of its location and connectedness, I have hope that Jakriborg will one day grow into its britches and become a destination for jobs, commerce, and culture, but until it does, it’s going to continue to look more like a housing development than a town.

There is quite a lot less in Mr. Gayton’s plans to comfort me that Piscataquis Village will mature beyond being a peculiarly organized suburb, retirement community or, worse, a collection of summer homes. Some of the investors who are called out as examples in one of the project’s own slide presentations openly confess they are either planning to use their lot as a vacation home or are possibly going to leave it completely uninhabited, maybe even unbuilt. Some say they want to retire there, which is better than merely vacationing there, but is anybody planning to move in and open a shop? Employ people? Take a job in town? Who will shop at the shops if people are only using the village as a vacation home or to store their empty lot indefinitely?

I can’t help but suspect that there’s not enough in the plans yet to attract the economic and cultural forces it needs to overcome these pitfalls, and the density of the built environment will only contribute to the feeling that those who do live there are to be revered as the survivors of a neutron bomb event or perhaps not survivors but ghosts.

OK, so now what?
So where will our future utopian car-free village come from? Mr. Gayton is after all completely correct in pointing out the infuriatingly uphill battle in our existing cities against NIMBYism and outdated, myopic, and inhuman laws and engineering codes keeping the car-saturated status quo alive and killing in every single corner of every last American city.

Mr. Gayton points to the failure of the Gaslight Village Project, an attempt to build a car free utopia from scratch in a neglected part of Philadelphia, as further evidence we should give up on changing our existing cities and focus instead on going back to the land and building there.

However, if you look around these days, there are reasons for renewed optimism that the tide is turning for our cities generally and in San Francisco particularly:

• In recent years, cars have started going out of style. Today’s tweens care more about their iPod Touches than they do about spending a bunch of time and money just to relieve their parents of their chauffeur duties.
• And these are the people who will be inheriting our urban cores.
• Which, by the way, are steadily vacuuming up the population around them like hungry hippos, making our cities increasingly dense.

  
  It’s people. They’re making our cities out of people!
  Photo by Andrew Shell

• To cope with the projected density, San Francisco has long been working on overhauling its bureaucratic processes and funding mechanisms to expedite bike, pedestrian, and transit improvements, and despite recent setbacks, we are still more or less on track.
• And we can expect less resistance from local businesses as studies from more and more cities, including New York, Portland, and San Francisco, demonstrate what urbanists have known for years: that trading car space for bike, transit, and pedestrian space is good for business.

So instead of abandoning our cities, maybe we should take another look at why projects like Gaslight Village failed. For example, instead of eyeing the empty or neglected neighborhoods, perhaps we should examine the possibilities in the parts of our cities which already have a lot of the key characteristics of the promised land: density, public transport, mixed uses, a large pre-existing car-free constituency, and obvious long-standing cultural and economic connections. With so many of these things already in place, the remaining bureaucratic, political, practical, and social hurdles to filtering out most of the cars and replacing them with more practical alternatives may very well end up being beans in comparison to the complexities of setting up a brand new car-free urban center anywhere else.

In my mind, the only question, really, is which city will crack this nut first, and while I see stiff competition out there, I’m still rooting for San Francisco, and I think we have a good shot at the prize. In particular, I think Chinatown, already the densest neighborhood this side of Manhattan, holds a lot of potential to be our toe-hold on a future car-free utopia that you’ll be able to get to and from on foot, on BART, or on the MUNI F, J, K, L, M, N, T, 1, 2, 3, 8X, 10, 12, 30, 38, 41, 45, or 76.

I’ll explore this idea further in another post.

And so I interrupt this 3-month radio silence to present you with these eight winsome videos right here:

• Toy Boats – A Sydney Tilt-shift Time-lapse (4:00)
  
  In this fun little film, Nathan Kaso uses a tilt-shift lens to make the whole city look like it came from the set of Mr Rogers’ neighborhood for an episode about what grown-ups do all day. The innocence oozing from every pixel, though, hasn’t made me forget what Bill Bryson taught me about the land down-under, where every single non-human creature is trying to kill you (along with some of the human ones too, naturally). The people swimming in the water all look like adorable box jellyfish bait to me.

  Click here to view the embedded video.

• Venice in a Day (3:23)
  
  And if you’re dying for more Mr Rogers’ Aquatic Neighborhood action, look no further than just a tiny bit further down the page:

  Click here to view the embedded video.

• Weathering Spring – Portland Time-Lapse (4:42)
  
  I apologize for all the nature in this one, but between the dreamscapes, there is some fantastic urban footage with a decent helping of bridge and skyline porn. And it’s marginally better than that Finding Portland video at not completely omitting the active transportation element that has put Portland on the map as far as the world outside the Pacific Northwest is concerned. However, it does have some sleepy highway fixations in the middle and it does kindof ignore the beer and donuts angle. (coffee schmoffee.)

  Click here to view the embedded video.

• 3 Years At the Same Place (3:22)
  
  Watch an old piece of horrible modernist architecture get demolished and replaced with a brand new piece of horrible modernist architecture over the course of 3 years:

  Click here to view the embedded video.

• Timelapse hoek Singel-Haarlemmerstraat, Amsterdam (3:09)
  
  An intersection of beauty from your favorite city and mine:

  Click here to view the embedded video.

• Kuala Lumpur Day-Night (2:36)
  
  Finally, a video in which some actual skill went into the selection and execution of the soundtrack. Blow this one up to full screen and check out the ninja action from 0:40 to 0:45, the scooter bike-boxing from 1:34 to 1:40, and the meta-photography around 1:45. All around, this video features stunning production quality and, probably, budget:

  Click here to view the embedded video.

• London Lights (2:21)
  
  Yep these parts of London definitely do look better in the dark:

  Click here to view the embedded video.

• This is Where We Live (2:47)
  
  Time lapse, stop motion.. close enough. 4th Estate’s dreamy rendition of London contains zero cars! It’s almost enough to tempt me to move back there. I wonder how many of the animators complain about the availability of parking in London, and how many happily take the bus or ride a bike, realizing that much like a dream child, you can’t have your dream village and drive over it too.

  Click here to view the embedded video.

In response to this trauma, for the next several months, my nieces, then seven and nine years old, repeated a role-playing game in which they built a structure out of blankets and interlocking poles, and then one of them would hide inside shrieking while the other destroyed the “house” bit by bit, pretending to be the tornado. Then they would put the whole smoldering heap into the “dumpster” and start again, alternating roles each time. The object of the game was clearly for the victim to survive the storm, which she always did, no doubt reasserting her feeling of control over her environment. It was classic self-directed role-playing therapy at work, and eventually my nieces reverted to their usual pastimes of practicing cartwheels and terrorizing neighborhood frogs.

I don’t know what sort of natural disaster raised Robert Moses, but some horrifying force of nature must have provided Mr Moses with the motivation to blow his therapeutic role-playing game all out of proportion, confusing his control fantasy with reality, and ultimately visiting his terrors on the helpless inhabitants of New York City repeatedly and, as it must have seemed at the time, endlessly.

Moses positively thrived on seeking out the most populated areas of the city and then bulldozing the heck out of them to make way for building things on a massive scale, like expressways, crack stacks, or unreachable or forbidden “parks” (the emptier the better). The louder people screamed, the more of a high this unelected official seemed to get from his power to ignore them. The denser the residential blocks, the more he appeared to relish taking aim at them. Confusingly, he spared a building here and there by moving it or rotating it instead of demolishing it, often at great expense, which he later admitted he did just for the thrill of the challenge. New York City was his sandbox, and he would rearrange it or outright trample it if, when, and where he wanted to.

A Robert Moses Urban Utopia: Towers separated by expressways and unreachable greenery
Photo by thienzieyung

After watching the Daleks in Manhattan episode of Doctor Who, I decided that the natural disaster that raised Robert Moses was not natural at all but rather a genetically engineered catastrophe from the planet of Skaro. It dawned on me that he must have been part of the human-Dalek army, which would explain why every part of the landscape he touched quickly began to resemble the nuclear wasteland of his home planet, almost as if on purpose. Hmmm.

“Extermeeenate!”
Photo by kev_hickey_uk

When you’re a Dalek, and the only tools you have are a toilet plunger, a narrow viewfinder, and a gunstick, every problem starts to look like a toilet clog in need of annihilation. And indeed, to Robert Moses and the planners who took after him, cities looked like toilets whose main problems are clogs – clusters of traffic or people which need to be dislodged and flushed.

In this spoiler of a scene from the Daleks in Manhattan episode, we find out that in an attempt to remove their names from the endangered species list, the Daleks have decided to introduce to Manhattan a race of human-Dalek hybrids which would live outside the legendary metal shell that Daleks have historically inhabited.

Click here to view the embedded video.

How completely natural, then, for them to be attracted to cars as a sort of home away from home, a pied-à-terre for their hostile alien race. And by extension, it only makes sense that they would pursue as a matter of urgency the extermination of the soft human commuting infrastructure in order to replace it with a concrete, barren, car-dependent, anti-social landscape to accommodate their descendants.

The episode is set in the 1930s, and as it happens, 1930-something was the precise time when Robert Moses’s pavement-proliferation ideas were beginning to gain some traction in NYC. See? The BBC is totally on to something! When you really think about it, it’s clear that Robert Moses’s agenda betrays a Dalek influence. Like Daleks, he harbored a deep dislike and mistrust of humans. Whenever he found a large concentration of human habitats, he responded by leveling entire neighborhoods and replacing them with dead zones of one sort or another, laying waste to human ecosystems, or simply shearing a lifeline for an entire population center by installing a multilane Dalek thoroughfare across it, removing the ability of the local humans to circulate their bodies, their commerce, or their news at a local level, leaving the seeds of self destruction behind to finish the neighborhood off for him as he moved on to the next ant pile in need of a good stomping.

Robert Moses and the famous “Urban Renewal” programs he helped shape all across the United States in the middle of last century were all about clearance. And by that, I don’t mean big savings or the sort of clearance you’ll regret forgetting you need on Drive Your Bike To Work Day. No, the sort of clearance he was into was the creation of the sort of dark, empty, unsupervised wastelands you find between urban population pockets. You know, the kind of place you go to dump a body or transact a drug deal. Or, if you’re like me, exactly the sort of area you don’t dare walk through alone at night.

While urban designers of the activation persuasion, like Jane Jacobs or Jan Gehl, love to create space for people, Robert Moses was all about creating space between people. Gehl Architects see Moses-type voids in the middles of urban areas as disagreeable and hazardous vacuums that can tend to draw out and amplify the misanthropic temptations of a few. And as I discussed in my last post, their weapons for combatting these voids are multitudinous and include things like chairs, potted plants, and traffic-calming bulb-outs.

“The role of the designer is that of a very good, thoughtful host anticipating the needs of his guests.” — Charles Eames
Photo by me and Michael Brucker and Erich Ferdinand

In the Gridlock episode of Doctor Who, the BBC explores how a Dalek-influenced urban planning trajectory might have played out if left unchecked for billions of years. In this picture of the New York of the distant future, city dwellers literally pass their entire lives isolated from each other in their cars in a state of perpetual three-dimensional gridlock.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The streetscape outside of the cars has been completely stripped bare, the sky and the ground are both invisible, the cars virtually drive themselves, nobody seems to have any recollection of where they’re supposed to be going, and the whole human species has grown extremely patient, resigned to celebrating their next anniversary, graduating from the online university, and bringing a new little life into the world, all before they reach next rest stop. In the New York City of 5,000,000,053 AD, the Daleks have indeed exterminated everything but the highway system they need for their own kind to flourish, and they’ve generated an entire metal-encased population after their own image.

So now that we know what an exterminated city looks like, let’s wipe away the tears and remind ourselves what an activated city looks like.

But first, a kitten:

Happy kitty, sleepy kitty, little ball of fur.
Photo by Jacob Davies

And then let’s just go straight to Amsterdam, which, like a kitten, is always a reliable source of reassurance in this topsy-turvy world. May I suggest, though, muting the youtube’s sound and replacing it with a soundtrack of your own choosing. Or this soundtrack of my own choosing. Watch and listen as the adorable industrious humans go about their business in good company while not mugging each other in this lively urban space:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Some cities have gotten straight to the heart of the issue by seeking revenge against the Daleks themselves. Here we see a Dalek activating an urban area in spite of himself:

Argh!
Photo by jamieanne

And herein lies the future: Activated city centers that nurture the human spirit rather than marginalizing and annihilating it, utilizing the billions of years of community service debt the Daleks worked so hard to rack up in the 1930s-60s. Though the future has a way of never getting here, rest assured, it is bright.

Over the course of my recent exposure to Gehl Architects’ reading materials and presentations, I have noticed that they can be repetitive (and we all know how I feel about that). In particular, a word they repeat over and over and over again is Activate.

“Acteeevate!”
Says the Gehl Architect while a couple of onlookers get lost in his eyes.
Photo by me and Michael Brucker and Erich Ferdinand

Recently, I was busily cleaning my apartment, talking to myself and doing my Gehl Architect impression, when I picked up a toilet plunger and it suddenly dawned on me that I sounded a lot like a Dalek with my incessant acteeevate! chanting. Just substitute extermeeenate! for acteeevate! everywhere (s/activ/extermin/g), and I’ve got myself a Dalek impression!

“Extermeeenate!”
Photo by kev_hickey_uk

But then I realized that this striking similarity is actually completely superficial, and Gehl Architects are in fact the total opposite of Daleks. Their familiar-sounding refrain is not mimicry but the other side of a call-and-response, a perpetual face-off between two diametrically opposed world views, but one we can only ever hear one side of, since it is volleyed through the void between dimensions. And then I got lost in a reverie and realized that what the BBC has been getting at this whole time is that Robert Moses was a spawn of the Daleks. Of course! If you want to read all about that, then by all means, stay tuned for my next post.

Anyway, as I was saying, Gehl Architects are always running around activating things. Activation, as a Gehl Architect uses the term, refers to creating a space that naturally generates activity, which is more or less measured by the number of person hours spent there. When we think of “activity” in an urban center, we often think in terms of human and vehicular throughput, as we tend to think of streets in general as commuting devices, rather than as public spaces, but activity in the Gehl Architect’s mind is not the same as throughput at all. In fact, it is only barely related and high levels of throughput can even be indicative of a failure to activate.

Public square in Malmö, Sweden
Photo by La Citta Vita

If you think about it in terms of person-hours rather than person feet (even if you forget to divide by 2), it’s easy to see that if 5000 people jog in one side of a town square and directly out the other, that does not create as much activity as 500 people hanging around reading books, sitting at cafés, or window shopping for 30 minutes to an hour a piece.

Many people moving quickly through the space can result in considerably less life in the city than a handful of people who spend time there…. It is generally true that the activity level in city space often increases dramatically in good weather. The difference is not that there are necessarily more people in town, but that the individual user spends more time there. We walk slower, stop more often and are tempted by offers to stay a while on benches or in cafés…. Venice has a remarkably high level of activity although the population has been reduced dramatically. The explanation is that all traffic is on foot, everyone walks slowly and there are many spontaneous stays. — Jan Gehl in Cities For People: How many and how long: quantity and quality

To me the reasons for wanting to activate a space are obvious, since an active space is by definition one humans enjoy, and being a human myself, I like the sorts of things humans like. If you need some other reasons, though, I have a few more for you:

• An active street is a source of economic vitality for the surrounding community
  Of course it’s bad form to require people to spend money in order to hang around in your public space, but the good news is you don’t have to. Where there’s a bunch of people, there’s bound to be a certain percentage participating in the local economy.
• A lively street feels safer, and it actually is safer too.
  If you were going to mug someone, would you do it right outside a populated street cafe full of tourists taking photos? Most muggers hold off for a more romantic, secluded, clandestine opportunity.

  If we reinforce city life so that more people walk and spend time in common spaces, in almost every situation both real and perceived safety will increase. The presence of others indicates that a place is acceptably good and safe. There are “eyes in the street” and often “eyes on the street” as well because it has become meaningful and interesting for people in nearby buildings to follow what is going on in the street. When people make their daily rounds in city space, both the space and the people who use them becomes more meaningful and thus more important to keep an eye on and watch out for. A lively city becomes a valued city and thus also a safer city. — Jan Gehl in Cities for People: Safety and Security

• Active streets create healthier, more compact, and more sustainable cities.
  It’s hard to participate in city life from inside a car. Cars aren’t very good at window shopping or gardening or sitting at cafes, so a properly activated street is always a pedestrian-dominated one. When you leave the car behind, you tend to get more exercise and interact more with other humans. You also take up less space, use up fewer non-renewable resources, and pollute less.

Window shopping
Photo provided by Jason Bain and The Lindsay Post, Sun Media. All rights reserved.

In order to activate a space, Gehl Architects apply a sort of urban-design Feng Shui along with a few familiar Event Planning principles to achieve the desired effect. I’ll cut to the chase, though, with some concrete examples of Dos and Donts.

In some places, all it takes to activate a space is to plunk a chair down in it.

Chairs attract butts
Photo by Jared Goralnick

But while a lot of the tools and tactics for activating a space are rudimentary and accessible, urban activation is not as straightforward as it might appear. Figuring out where a chair will effectively infill a void requires a little savoir faire. In order to attract sitters, a chair must be located in a dynamic place where lots of potential sitters will walk past it. It should be near things sitters want to look at, in an atmosphere where sitters will feel safe, comfortable, and in control of their destiny.

Photo by Clyde Robinson

Despite the convenient nearby bike parking, this chair isn’t going to see much action. It’s a little too hidden to be reliably discovered by potential sitters, which means it’s also too secluded to feel safe to hang around in for very long, especially after dark. And there’s nowhere to put a friend. Before we even get to the part where the occupant is going to be staring down a garbage can, this chair is a no-go.

These chairs are located in a place that probably sees a bit of traffic, and the garbage facilities in this case are well out of the way, but the chairs look uncomfortable, perhaps even designed to prevent visitors from overstaying their welcome. These token political gestures are exposed, unconfigurable, and pointed toward a dull landscape where nothing of interest ever happens.

Photo by sachab

The lively living-room fixtures pictured below are unconfigurable as well, but a person’s experience in them is not. They have transcended seating to become playground equipment. They provide novelty, they’re a conversation piece, and they facilitate all kinds of different interactions among the diverse and ever-evolving constituency the surrounding area supplies.

Feet on the furniture
Photo by Frankie Roberto

And then there’s the kind of activation that happens by dumb luck, or terrible misfortune, depending how you look at it.

Like sugar ants to Humphry Slocombe
Photo by Addy Cameron-Huff

Skateboarders, a classic thorn in the side of architects, police, and urban planners, are ever eager to take advantage of any invitation to linger a while and interact with their surroundings, often in unanticipated ways that sometimes have unwelcome consequences.

Grinding away
Photo by niXerKG

The usual countermeasure is to add deterrents or protective devices to the built environment as an afterthought, but these patches are arguably uglier than the damage they are meant to prevent or mask, and they also reduce or eliminate just the kind of liveliness we should be trying to encourage and preserve.

Ugly
Photo by Cindy Funk

A better approach would be to anticipate the skateboarders and provide appealing places for them to play, which can act as a release valve, redirecting rather than eliminating the energy skateboarders provide. Skateboarders have more than shown themselves to be pretty unpicky about the location of these designated areas. Historically, any centrally located seedy underpass with a bit of extra lighting will do:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And as highway underpasses are some of the trickiest urban voids to activate, this seems to me to be a win for everyone concerned. If you really want to show your skateboarders you love them, though, give them an above ground daylighted skate park to populate, too.

Speaking of skateboard-friendly places, in the amazing not-so-distant utopian village of Portland, whole neighborhoods sometimes get together to decorate one of their intersections as an adorable exercise in “village building“. Whole big groups of strangers and their children meeting up to do urban-assault-style art together is just so Portland. It’s also another pretty good example of temporarily activating a public space, and some intersection repair projects leave behind not just paint but seating, landscaping, and other interactive elements to help keep the space activated even beyond the initial construction party.

One of Portland’s famous intersection repairs in progress
Photo by Sara Dent

On an urban planning scale, if you take a part of town that already enjoys a bit of population density, and then install comfortable seating around a bit of scenery, away from cars, and amidst opportunities to watch or participate in something fun, your project stands a good chance of attracting locals and tourists on a regular basis.

This is what urban activation looks like:

Aker Brygge, Oslo
Photo by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra

Camden Town, Middle Yard
Even on a wet day, people are out enjoying the space
Photo by Enrique Fernández

The Nyhavn waterfront district in Copenhagen invites people to take a load off
while watching the tourist boats come and go.

See? Don’t these places make you want to take a vacation and go visit them?

In an upcoming post, I’ll talk about how the Gehl Architects plan to have their way with Market Street in San Francisco so you don’t have to fly to Europe or England for this kind of experience.

Unless otherwise noted, all photos used in this post are licensed as part of the Creative Commons

Click here to view the embedded video.

Today, plenty of San Franciscans still do dress up to visit Market Street, much like their predecessors did a century ago.

Photo by torbakhopper

However, lots of today’s San Franciscans will also spend hours selecting just the right outfit for a root canal or a bikini wax appointment. The majority of people, though, arrive on today’s Market Street undeniably underdressed, a few even wearing flip flops, lending the area a distinctly come-as-you-are vibe.

No bare heads here.
Photo by John Martinez Pavliga

And who can be surprised? With the exception of a couple of cool new bike shops, an attractive genius bar, the city’s densest cluster of BART and MUNI stops, a steady stream of beautiful historic streetcars, and one spectacularly long line for our internationally famous amusement park ride, on an average day, there just isn’t much to attract the runway crowd to Market Street east of Octavia.

Thankfully, the SFDPW, SFMTA, SFCTA, SFOEWD, and the SF Planning Department have teamed up to create the Better Market Street Project. The BMS project’s plan is to take advantage of the next scheduled repaving of Market Street to try to restore the corridor’s former glory as a destination not just for San Franciscans but for the entire Bay Area and beyond. They want Future Market Street to give visitors something to write home about and locals someplace to wear a hat to. They want to increase the daily population along the street while simultaneously easing circulation of all of the ways people transport themselves there.

These are ambitious goals, so I decided to attend one of their recent public workshops to see how they figure they’re going to make all of this happen.

The presentation opened with hopelessness and despair as they announced that, while originally scheduled for 2015, implementation is now forecasted to start in 2016, finishing sometime in 2017, by which time I’ll be in my 40s and my life will be over anyway.

Nevertheless, I stayed on to see some of the sorts of things that might be going on along Market Street before I die, and it’s a good thing, too, because the black clouds were scattered and my mid-life crisis forestalled the moment I spotted all the prominent displays featuring headless people in onesies walking their dogs, waiting for buses, carrying shopping bags, sitting in wheelchairs, casting shadows, and saying bla bla bla to each other.

Headless chickens in their PJs, a reinterpretation of some public material available on the BMF website.

Why? Because not only does clothing the populace in pajamas give these Future Market Street vistas a distinctly cozy, living-room feel (or, alternatively, a Pajama Jammy Jam feel, something that is sure to appeal to the fashionistas of SF), but if you’ve seen these types of drawings before, you know this also means that someone in San Francisco knows about Gehl Architects and has invited one or two of them to the project. This warms my heart because, although they don’t know how to make a website go fast, when it comes to urban design, as I’ve mentioned before, these guys really know their chicken.

Future Market Street’s target audience
Photo by SLO County Bicycle Coalition

The Better Market Street project has three objectives, as stated in their fact sheet:

• To create a sense of place through sustainable designs that celebrate local culture and diversity, and elevate Market Street as the signature destination in the Bay Area
• To optimize sustainable mobility so that all users have a pleasant, reliable, efficient, and comfortable experience
• To foster economic development for a productive, healthy, resilient and vibrant* corridor.

Easy peasy.

The first public outreach campaign in May 2011 was about clarifying the public’s priorities for the future of the street, which helped to frame the discussion for this, the second round of public workshops, each of which was divided into five different angles on the problem, five separate points of discussion for attendees:

• Public Space – This is for when people take up space, publicly
• Streetlife – This is for when living things accumulate along the street and occasionally play frogger with the traffic on the street in an attempt to get to their frog homes at Forever 21 or Blue Navy.
• Bicycle Facility – This is for when people on bikes try not to hit other street life while partaking in a delicate dance with buses, cabs, and vehicular tourists, all texting and flapping their doors while driving.
• Public Transit – This is for when people take the bus to the street in order to become a street life while they wait for another bus.
• Private Auto Circulation – This is for when tourists mistakenly think there’s parking on Market Street and then get trapped there, forced to be as menacing as possible to street life until they can find their way out.

I’ll address these five aspects of the discussion in a few upcoming posts, so shake well and buy often.

* Bill Lindeke of Streets.MN recently had some things to say about saying things about using the word vibrant, but I stopped reading when I saw the word boondoggle. Perhaps all of us would be wise to consider something a Boston University Linguistics professor once said to me: “If you repeat a word to yourself long enough, you die.”

Unless otherwise noted, all photos used in this post are licensed as part of the Creative Commons

Westbound on Geary approaching Presidio Avenue 1956
Photo provided by Jack Tillmany

In addition to the J, K, L, M, and N rail lines that we have today, we also had the A, B, C, D, E, a different F, and an H (and briefly a G and an I).

Eastbound Geary at Van Ness, rolling past Tommy’s Joynt and St. Mary’s Cathedral, 1956
Photo provided by Jack Tillmany

Not only that, we also had a number of additional (numbered) lines run by the Market Street Railway Company. (Many of the MUNI bus routes we have today, like the 14 Mission, 6 Parnassus, 31 Balboa, and 21 Hayes, are named after the Market Street Railway lines they replaced.) And on top of all of that, we also had a lot more cable car lines run by the California Street Cable Railroad. And for a while, you could even take a train across the lower deck of Bay Bridge and into the East Bay. In fact, the lower deck was included in the original design of the bridge specifically in order to accommodate rail travel.

Yes, San Francisco was a venerable example of the Golden Age of Rail that directly preceded the large-scale country-wide urban takeover by private cars in the 50′s and 60′s.

In this last period before the automobile gained dominance, trains, trolleys, and interurban lines tied the walking nation along a nucleus of stations and structures. At every stop along Main Street, bars, stores, and so-called taxpayer strips opened…. Vulnerable though these cores would prove, the mobility and urbanity framed by the streetcar and train were extraordinary. Travelers could cross the downtowns of America as fast as they ever would. Foot, bike, horse, carriage, rail–the modes of movement were myriad and harmonious to city making, and designers still did their best to buttress them. — Jane Holtz Kay, Asphalt Nation

Can you imagine a San Francisco in which the various modes of transport were cooperative and complementary rather than competitive? Unpossible! Except that it actually happened.

If you live in San Francisco and you’re reading this blog, the chances are good you’ve experienced the 38 Geary, at least from the outside.

photo by Christian Muñoz

And it looks pretty OK from the outside, right? At least when Christian Muñoz is responsible for the photography. But during peak times near downtown, unless you catch that westbound 38 at one of its first 2 or 3 stops, you can count on watching several of them go by before one with any space for you arrives.

photo by Charles Haynes

And once you’re finally on one, you will spend quite a long time wishing you weren’t, and also, if you’re me, wondering how it is the city officials in this Transit First City haven’t done anything about the obvious unmet demand for mass transit along Geary. Do they think downtown San Francisco and its arterials don’t have enough private vehicular traffic? Are they trying to incentivize us to buy cars and cause more congestion? Worse air? More pedestrian deaths? More parking ticket revenue? So they have even more money to not invest in rail for Geary?

By the time you get to the avenues, you might be able to find a seat, and the whole journey is likely to take you 45 minutes to an hour, depending on various things like traffic and whether or not you managed to catch one of the limited stop buses.

Can you believe that there used to be four streetcar lines along Geary? In 1920, it used to take 35 minutes to get from the Ferry Building to the ocean on the B Geary–not exactly HSR speeds but not insignificantly faster than today’s 40-50 minute bus voyage which covers a slightly shorter distance. The A, C, and D lines all travelled along parts of Geary too. I know! Where did they all go? What were the city officials thinking when they got rid of them?

Well that all goes back to a time in U.S. history when rail was being ripped out and replaced by buses in all of America’s major cities. The circumstances surrounding the rapid simultaneous motorization and de-railing of urban America are pretty unsettling, a little controversial (though not quite as controversial as you might expect, given the seriousness of the allegations), and therefore way out of scope for this post. For now let’s just say that for “whatever reason”, the general trend in all of America’s major cities in the 1950s was one of dismantling rail lines and replacing them with buses, and San Francisco followed suit to a point.

San Francisco’s rail came out of this era better preserved than that of most cities for a couple of reasons:

1. The fact that San Francisco’s rail lines were half owned, and by the end of 1944, almost completely owned by the city itself made them more resistant to the political undermining and monopolistic overtures happening at the time.
2. And perhaps even more importantly, many of the tunnels which were used by San Francisco’s rail lines were not adaptable to car or bus travel, so they were spared the bus treatment. This is why the J, K, L, M, and N lines are still with us today.

The B Geary line, though, was not so lucky. It got ripped out as part of a larger scorched earth campaign of overzealous modernizers in the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency. One of their first projects, Western Addition-A1, aimed to obliterate the “blighted” areas along Geary by bulldozing everything adjacent to it all along the corridor, including a large number of Victorians and treasured cultural institutions, in order to widen it, install a series of superblocks, and create a high-speed boulevard for private cars, patterned after the usual modernist anti-urban practices popular all across the country at the time. And so the B Geary was replaced with buses at the end of 1956, much to the dismay of its regular riders.

B Geary’s last run, Playland at the beach, 29 December 1956
Photo provided by Jack Tillmany

At the time the B Geary line was dismantled, it was very popularly traveled day and night as a direct link between downtown San Francisco and Playland. At the time of conversion, however, the Bay Area Rapid Transit network was already in the planning stages, and the popular Geary corridor was supposed to be included in that network, which would also partially replace the recently demolished Key System in the East Bay.

In October 1961, the plan for BART within San Francisco looked like this:

Graphic from Eric Fischer

And travel times on the Geary line were supposed to be around 9 minutes during rush hour from the Bay to the Ocean, leaving both the B Geary and the 38 Geary in the dust.

Original ideas of BART travel times
Graphic from Eric Fischer

However, in 1957, Santa Clara County Supervisors opted out of the BART plan in order to focus instead on building expressways. This decision set off a chain of unfortunate events, which ultimately led to Marin opting out of the plan in 1962, apparently taking with it enough of the Geary corridor’s relevance to cause it to fall off the table too.

An effort was made in 1966 to include an underground subway tunnel along Geary as part of a future expansion of MUNI, but the bond measure didn’t achieve the two-thirds majority it needed to pass.

Today, 55 years later, the 38 Geary sees 55,000 daily riders, making it one of the busiest bus lines in the western United States. 100,000 additional riders travel to and from the Richmond District daily on the three nearby parallel routes. Especially considering the disincentives I mentioned earlier, the existing and potential demand for fast, frequent, and reliable mass transit along this corridor is conspicuous. Even now, the number of people traveling on Geary by bus each day equals the number traveling by car. Even so, rapid transit to the Richmond District remains somewhere in the nebulous future.

Current efforts to restore sanity to Geary are taking the form of a planned Bus Rapid Transit line that is still in the review and design stages and won’t see the light of day until at least 2019.

Most BRT lines have real actual separated lanes instead of the fake bus lanes we have in San Francisco.
Photo by Carlos Felipe Pardo

BRT is a form of mass transit in which buses dress up like trains and are let loose on a “track” that’s actually just a dedicated road, and they ride between stations that look just like real train stations, and they pretend all day long that they’re trains even though everybody knows they’re not. The idea is that BRT combines the best features of buses and trains into the ultimate mass transport device: One that’s smooth, efficient, and dignified like trains, yet flexible, inexpensive, and easy to design and implement like buses.

A BRT station in Barranquilla, Colombia. Looks just like a real train station!
Photo by Carlos Felipe Pardo

The burning question, of course, is this: If BRT is so easy to design and implement, why is it taking until 2019 to get BRT going on Geary even though analysis began in 2009? Some of the delays are of course down to the usual concerns about the loss of parking, the removal of moving car space, the short term and perceived long term disruption to businesses along the corridor, and of course the time honored Level of Service absurdities that still have to be dealt with, but part of the problem is also that BRT does not yet inspire the grassroots transit advocacy that rail does, so the concerns of motorists have not been as effectively countered as they might have been had this been about reinstating a proper railway along Geary.

The BRT project as it was originally conceived also did not inspire the would-be natural allies of transit supporters: bicycle and pedestrian advocates. The concerns of both groups are slowly being addressed as the planning process continues, however the whole effort to achieve a livable Geary corridor could have been a lot more effective and efficient if livability advocates of all stripes had teamed up ahead of time and talked to each other before taking on the customary parking and traffic spill-over remonstrations of the usual motormouths who don’t yet understand the dynamics of induced demand and also haven’t yet figured out that even the existing slow and overcrowded buses are bringing in way more shoppers than that pitiful single-car-occupancy parking spot out front could ever dream of supplying.

In the meantime, even though I’m as disappointed as anyone else that the discussions about planned improvements to Geary are not yet really about rail or bicycles, I have put the next SFMTA Citizens’ Advisory Council meeting on my calendar (Thursday, August 2, 5:30–6:30 PM, 1 South Van Ness Avenue, Room 3074, in case you’re wondering), and I’ll be keeping track of this list for future opportunities to weigh in and provide support for a more livable Geary corridor.

A few years ago, I was biking up a hill under a heavy backpack that was brimming with groceries, when I saw a car temporarily abandoned in my bike lane. Presumably this car’s unfortunate parking-spot seeker was just inside the nearby convenience shop picking up a carton of almond milk or whatever and would “only be a second”. I looked over my shoulder and saw that traffic was sufficiently behind me that I would have time to pass in the lane of travel to the left, even in my current grocery-laden uphill-facing condition, and so I commenced passing. However, as I reached the other side of the parked car and started heading back into my designated zone, an SUV full of teenage girls whizzed past me as its occupants shouted angrily at me and showed me all of their middle fingers. I had apparently not anticipated, as I calculated my chances for getting around the parked car in time, that one of those cars off in the multi-laned distance was going twice the speed limit and was making a beeline for the space I would be occupying. My bad!

The next day, I recounted this story to a friend of mine and then began whining about all the drivers out there who feel it’s OK to store their cars in the bike lane, to which my lovely non-cyclist friend replied, “Well, to be honest, until now I’d thought of the bike lane as the Do Whatever You Want Lane.” In her defense, the police in San Francisco seem to have a similar attitude, so I can see where she might have become confused.

So, to clarify for anyone who might not understand why cyclists get grumpy when the bike lane is blocked, here are a few typical bike lane situations that really get our Pedal Panties in a knot.

A blocked bike lane adjacent to high speed traffic

Photo adapted from one taken by Payton Chung

If a cyclist is forced to leave the bike lane and merge suddenly into high speed traffic, several things conspire to make this a very dangerous situation for the cyclist:

1. Beyond a distance of twenty or thirty feet, humans (yes, even cyclists) are terrible at judging the distance of an object. (For a little perspective, a city block ranges in size from about 300 to 900 feet.) As Tom Vanderbilt explains in chapter three of his wonderful New York Times Best Seller, Traffic,
   

   “When objects like cars are within twenty or thirty feet, we’re good at estimating how far away they are, thanks to our binocular vision…. Beyond that distance, both eyes are seeing the same view in parallel, and so things get a bit hazy. The farther out we go, the worse it gets: For a car that is twenty feet away, we might be accurate to within a few feet, but when it is three hundred yards away, we might be off by a hundred yards.

2. Especially when viewing an approaching object more-or-less straight on, humans are equally terrible at judging how fast it is closing in on us. In the same chapter, Mr. Vanderbilt discusses this problem in the context of one car trying to pass another on a two-lane bi-directional road:
   

   “A car in the distance approaching at 20 miles per hour makes passing easy, but what if it is doing 80 miles per hour? The problem is this: We cannot really tell the difference. Until, that is, the car gets much closer–by which time it might be too late to act on the information.”

3. As the famous Invisible Gorilla experiment shows, people very often don’t see things they are not looking for. When we are driving cars, in order to be able to navigate our environment at higher speeds than we are evolved to handle, we select out any input that is not “useful” to us. As we move at higher and higher speeds, we filter out more and more of the information around us.
   
   Therefore, as sudden unexpected entities on the road, especially a high-speed road, cyclists merging from an obstructed bike lane cannot count on the motorists behind them to help prevent disaster. The most common reason given by drivers for colliding with cyclists is that they looked but didn’t see them, regardless how many lights or reflectors the cyclists were wearing.
   

4. 
   Photo from OregonDOTThe selective vision problem is obviously aggravated by driving while drunk, exhausted, or distracted by things like GPS devices, smart phones, regular phones, tacos, Facebook, spiders (just talking about spiders will cause an arachnophobe to tunnel their vision), or even distractions outside of the car, like ghosts, UFOs, attractive pedestrians, the walking dead, anti-everything protests, or pedestrians wearing nothing but paint. And no, using a hands-free phone is not safer.
   

5. And finally, what should be blindingly obvious to everybody: In the event of a collision, the higher the speed upon impact, the higher the victim’s chances of dying or being seriously injured are. What is perhaps not as evident, though, is that the human body cannot tolerate impacts much over 20mph and the risk of death increases with speed non-linearly. If you are hit at 20mph, your chances of survival are around 97%. If the speed is increased by just 10mph, your chance of survival drops dramatically to 1 in 5. For this reason, councils all over England are dropping their speed limits to 20mph in residential areas and school zones. Tom Vanderbilt puts it another way in chapter 9 of my favorite book ever this week:
   

   “In a crash at 50 miles per hour, you’re fifteen times more likely to die than in a crash at 25 miles per hour — not twice as likely, as you might innocently expect from the doubling of the speed. The relationships are not proportional but exponential.”

Bicycle commuters may not have all of this calculus in their heads to back up the middle finger they wave at you while you idle your car in their bike lane, but they instinctively perceive the danger they are in from the collection of near misses they all have from their experience on the road, and they resent being put so blatantly and casually in harm’s way.

A blocked bike lane on an incline
In light of all of the points above, it should be clear now why blocking an uphill bike lane is similarly badly received by cyclists. Riding up hill on a bike is harder and therefore slower than riding on a flat surface or on a descent. When you block our lane on an incline, we are forced to merge with traffic while going painfully slow in comparison. The speed differentials are all out of whack and make for conditions similar to those on a higher speed road. (I am going to trust that I don’t need to include a separate section for bike lanes on high speed uphill roads.)

Random city equipment blocking the bike lane
Nothing says I love you like a piece of DOT equipment in the bike lane.

(Photo adapted from one taken by Adam Herstein)

Civilian crap blocking the bike lane
According to a major study conducted by UCLA professor Donald Shoup, United States residents (regardless if they drive a car or not) subsidize curbside parking as much as they subsidize Medicare or national defense. Free and cheap street parking also brings with it a number of other unsavory externalities I will one day cover in a different post, but keeping these things in mind, it should now be clear why it is so vexing for tax paying cyclists to discover that their own neighbors feel entitled not only to the curbside space reserved for their cars but also to the cyclist’s lane of travel whenever they need a bit of extra free storage for their garbage bins or whatever. Blatantly prioritizing your own convenience over someone else’s safety is usually to risk getting a rise out of them.

Sorry for biking in your trash lane
(Photo and caption by Eric Gelinas)

Ironic lane blocking
Bike commuters often feel like nobody in the world understands their needs or recognizes their rightful place on the road. And nothing drives the point home better than an ironically blocked bike lane.

Safety Driven
(Photo by Kate McCarthy)

Click here to see the most ironically blocked bike lane in the whole world. Ohhh Emmm Geee. And of course, a traffic cop parked in the bike lane is a timeless classic, especially when that cop is simultaneously issuing tickets to cyclists as they leave the bike lane to go around him, which is of course, not illegal.

Traitorous lane blocking

Photo by Daniel OinesBefore you start suspecting that cyclists are made 100% of saccharin and sunshine, let me call to your attention the harsh reality that some cyclists, much like their car-driving counterparts (or perhaps like themselves when they are in cars rather than on bikes), don’t realize other cyclists exist. A few cyclists, especially beginner bikers and vacation bikers, have an annoying tendency to abandon their bikes in the lane or stand around in the lane exploring a bike map with their friends. A still more irksome form of cannibalistic lane blocking is salmoning, a practice brought on by the preponderance of wide blocks combined with multi-lane one-way arterials in American cities, motivating lazy cyclists to cheat by going the wrong way down a bike lane.

Partial blocking of a bike lane

Photo by shmoothCyclists can feel the compassion like a kick in the teeth when they see a car partially blocking the lane. You can almost hear the driver feeling good about themselves: I’m not blocking very much of the lane. Bikes aren’t that big! I’m sure they can get by! They totally won’t mind.

If you know a thing or two about bikes and car doors, you know the part of a bike lane that is safe from car doors is the left-most 6 inches or so of most bike lanes, if indeed any portion of it is safely ridable, which makes it easy to see why a lane encroached upon from the right will cause most safety-conscious cyclists to veer into the lane of travel to get around all those good intentions. Similarly, a bike lane partially blocked from the right side by a cab or a delivery vehicle, looks uncannily like a death trap to an experienced, risk-averse cyclist.

Minivans, SUVs, and luxury vehicles blocking the bike lane
Undoubtedly not all cyclists are as cynical or as smug as I am, but when I see a minivan, an SUV, or a luxury vehicle blocking my bike lane, I assume one of two things is going on:

1. The driver of the vehicle hails from the suburbs, drives their car every day, and has possibly never ridden a bike in their life. They probably live much of their lives in pursuit of safety for themselves and their kin while being content to throw the rest of us under the bus. As the target market for this hands free home paper towel dispenser, it’s likely they think germs and terrorists are the biggest dangers they face in their daily lives, so they’re far too busy making a stand for clean hands to think about the safety of other road users.
2. OR the driver is not ignorant at all of what they are putting the rest of us through, they simply suffer from a completely unchecked sense of entitlement to take up whatever space suits their fancy in the moment.

Photo by Timothy Vollmer
Photo by EURIST e.V.

And in case anyone is wondering, despite the obvious lack of enforcement, yes blocking a bike lane is illegal in San Francisco and in the state of California. However, taxi cabs have been given a break by the SFMTA. As it happens, the one time I’ve been hit by a car at high speed, it was while I was passing a group of taxis and Ubers all bunched up in the bike lane to pick up the responsible non-driving drunks outside of Pete’s Tavern. If only the drunk driver behind me had decided to take a cab that night.

Unless otherwise noted, all photos used in this post are licensed as part of the Creative Commons

Chicken crossing a road for unknown reason in Amsterdam-Noord, NL

Of those who are willing to consider the problem of chickens and roads, most are perplexed by it, while several go so far as to resent the fact that so many chickens keep lustfully ogling the other side. They claim this is simply fowl play and that it should not be tolerated. Some planners and motorists egg each other on to the point that a few end up deciding that the glaring statistical predictability of regular road crossings by chickens demonstrates a deeply embedded and fantastically irritating innate flaw that spans the entire species.

Chickens, on the other hand, feel cooped up, complaining that they are perpetually separated by impossibly wide and often multi-lane roads from the food, grit, scratch, bedding, and other basic necessities they need to lead healthy and satisfying lives.

WTF? How on earth am I meant to get over there from here?
(Photo adapted from one taken by thienzieyung)

Engineers and planners might be wise to consider a different question:

Which came first? The chicken or the road? (or, indeed, the chicken or the traffic engineer?)

Like a child drawing a chalk line through an ant hill and expecting the ants to keep themselves to one side or the other, planners regularly slap multi lane highways straight through the middle of long-established villages and then watch in amazement, brooding and clucking as not only chickens, but all manner of other personalities flock to the new highways in droves, seemingly unable ever to finally decide which side of the road they want to be on.

Photo adapted from one taken by mckaysavage

It’s no secret traffic engineers’ lives would be a lot easier if chickens would just keep to whichever block they were on when the roads were installed, straying from it only while donning the clever disguise of an automobile.

However, the reality is that there will always be some chickens who are too young, too old, too drunk, too sick, too disabled, too good looking, or just too near to their destinations to wrap themselves in a motorcar for the simple purpose of getting over there from here.

As a result, traffic engineers are sometimes henpecked into installing specific areas where they will allow chickens to cross.

WTF? How on earth am I meant to get to the chicken crossing from here?
(Photo adapted from one taken by thienzieyung and another taken by 4nitsirk)

These designated chicken crossing areas inspire great comfort and confidence for those road users who are not chickens, but they have a couple of drawbacks for those who are:

1. Instead of being located where chickens generally want to cross the road, they are more often than not deployed in whatever places will minimize inconvenience for motorists.
2. They don’t even necessarily increase a chicken’s safety while crossing the road, and in fact, they can sometimes actually decrease a chicken’s chances of reaching the other side without being rerouted along a lengthy detour through the chicken E.R.

Surely there must be some benefit chickens can derive from going out of their way to use the crossing zones. For example, if they do get knocked down by a motorist while in the zone, surely they can expect the police to find in their favor and reprimand the motorist at the very least for weakening the effectiveness of the zone.

Well, no, actually. A wise person might think that, but I’m afraid that wise person would be, more often than not, quite wrong.

Robert Moses totally didn’t know his chicken.
(Photo adapted from Wikimedia Commons)

There are a few urban designers, however, who not only have an understanding of chickens and roads but also dedicate themselves tirelessly to spreading the word and, whenever and wherever possible, changing the experience of chickens vis-à-vis roads for the better. One shining example is Jan Gehl, an architect and urban design consultant from Denmark. He gives lectures and works with urban planners and engineers all over the world to increase awareness and understanding of the unique needs of chickens, especially when it comes to roads. Thanks to him and his colleagues at Gehl Architects, many cities, such as Copenhagen, Denmark, and Melbourne, Australia, have made great strides in accommodating chickens.

Lars Gemzøe of Gehl Architects knows his chicken.
(Photo adapted from one taken by max_katz)

Plucky young chickens can now opt to relocate, in hopes of a better life, to one of the few cities which have decided to start taking chickens seriously, but so far all of the best cities for chickens are located outside of the United States. Chickens in the U.S. dream of a day when they won’t have to sail across the ocean just to have a stroll on the other side of the road.

Do you know your chicken?

Unless otherwise noted, all photos used in this post are licensed as part of the Creative Commons