2013-04-10
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A happy 135th birthday to the California Street Cable Car Line! The oldest of the three cable car lines.
A whippersnapper compared to the Metropolitan Railway, but still, happy birthday.
2013-03-27
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From Golden Gate Bridge’s new cashless tollway promises convenience in exchange for privacy by Adrianne Jeffries for the Verge.
I wonder if Gellis carries a mobile phone? I can’t think of a better transpoder to legally (if not actually) track people with.
2013-03-25
“Transit First” At Forty
San Francisco’s Transit First policy turned forty last week. Unfortunately, to someone from a city like London (which actually puts public transport first), it looks like all mouth and no trousers.
Some articles I read over the weekend illustrate this nicely. Streetsblog SF has a look at the state of play:
today, the vast majority of San Francisco’s street space remains devoted to moving and storing private automobiles, making the public right-of-way hostile to walking and bicycling. Muni remains underfunded, with vehicle breakdowns and delays caused by car traffic a daily part of riding transit.
Livable City Executive Director Tom Radulovich, “but where there’s a real shortage of road space, in the most congested parts of the city, the car is still the priority.”
Admittedly, as a SPUR report in 1999 explains, it could have been worse:
Were it not for the transit-first policy, the city would have followed the path of so many other American cities, widening roads, narrowing sidewalks, demolishing downtown buildings and then filling the spaces with parking garages. We would have destroyed the very density and walkability that makes this city different from the rest of the country, that creates the high economic values of downtown, and that provides the quality of life we enjoy.
Unfortunately, the knowledge that resisting the car makes for a better city doesn’t seem to have stopped people from campaigning for their cars, as a report also at Streetblog, covering a meeting about removing parking spaces on Polk Street, notes.
Kowalski’s claims went unchallenged, and no one mentioned the evidence that merchants tend to wildly overestimate, like the survey on Columbus Avenue which found that just 14 percent of people arrived by car, and those people tended to spend less than people who arrived by other means.
One speaker was even cheered when he claimed that the project was part of the United Nation’s Agenda 21. Yes, when it comes to local planning decisions, San Francisco can be just as paranoid and provincial as rural Virginia.
The best project-by-project examination of the policy’s limited success comes from Morgan Fitzgibbons, writing in the Huffington Post. Here are just two of his four examples.
Where are we today five months after the official approval of the project? The Fell Street section has been re-striped but not buffered against traffic, and there is absolutely zero progress on Oak Street. Still today, hundreds of people literally risk their lives every time they ride the three-block stretch of Oak so that a few dozen people can have a place to put their idle private automobile while they aren’t using it. This is “Transit-First.”
The basic idea behind Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) is to redesign the street to separate buses from private automobile traffic so that the public transportation moves more quickly and is, therefore, a more viable option. Anybody who has ridden the notoriously slow-moving 38-Geary or the 47 or 49 lines on Van Ness knows how critical these projects are. Both were supposed to be implemented by 2012, but the current launch dates for the Van Ness and Geary improvements are 2016 and 2020, respectively.
Even the recently completed transit lanes on Church Street between 16th and Dolores are “prioritized for transit and taxis”, rather than being exclusively for their use. I realise that it’s probably not the first place to justify it, but surely the wide multiple lanes of Geary, slower now than in 1911 and busy despite losing its streetcar, is a perfect candidate? How can such a project take seven years?
All in all, it’s hard to disagree with Fitzgibbons conclusion.
When we declared ourselves a “Transit-First” city in 1973, we still had a sense of our responsibility to pave the way for the rest of the country and basked in the accompanying prestige that came along with it. Forty years later, we’ve lost our edge — we no longer lead the country in anything but distance between our stated values and our actions and a misguided commitment to paralyzing hyper-democracy.
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Widescreen Mission. iPhone photos, cropped to 2.35:1 and lightly tweaked in Lightroom, taken during a wander back from lunch earlier today.
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by Tommy Farnsworth. The saturation’s been horribly overcooked (he must be aiming for Explore) but it’s a nice composition.
2013-03-18
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Many thought the old-fashioned streetcars assigned to Geary looked more and more antiquated, almost like the cable cars on Powell.
Certainly that belief was shared by many merchants on Geary Boulevard, the wide section of the thoroughfare running westward from Masonic Avenue through the Richmond. They were lobbying City Hall for a ‘Great Wide Way’, replacing streetcars with buses … and more parking for automobiles.
Planners who were eying the part of Geary between the Richmond and Downtown echoed this pro-auto sentiment. The Western Addition had been a vibrant community of Victorian homes before World War II. The section along Geary was populated mainly by Japanese-Americans. When World War II started, they were infamously hauled away to internment camps. African-American newcomers, who had come west to work in war industries, largely took their place. By the mid-1950s, there was talk of ripping down the Victorians along that part of Geary to gouge out a broad expressway to get automobiles downtown more quickly.
”What Might Have Been - Geary, a 2008 update of a story from the Market Street Railway’s newsletter in 2002.
This pretty much encapsulates the bad transport decisions of the 1940s and ’50s in the US: replacing streetcar (tram) tracks with widened roads served by buses (always subservient to private cars), a willingness (some would say eagerness) to demolishing houses in minority neighbourhoods in favour of freeways, and merchants demanding more parking.
At least the latter two arguments tend to have fallen out of favour, but business still seem to complain about parking all the time.
In the end the B Geary survived until the late 1950s, but the desired expressway was built in the early 1960s. Current plans for a “bus rapid transit” scheme seem to be as far away as they were in 2008.
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Today I learnt that the San Francisco Market Street Railway owns Streetcar No. 189, from Porto, Portugal.
Sadly it’s not in service, but it is under restoration. Hopefully it’ll see service some time soon.
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2013-03-08
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The internal view of an emergency water cistern in San Francisco, by Robin Scheswohl. Photograph via Burrito Justice, which includes more information on the emergency cistern system, along with more engineering photography from around the Bay Area.
2013-02-17
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Four photos from Ryan Lewis, who posts to Instagram under the account name urbanglitch. From his submission to Year of the Glitch:
I have been using the panoramic feature on my iPhone as a tool to create stretched images for a few months.
I wanted my process to be something that I physically had to work at and not just pressing buttons.
Each time I do a panoramic, I have to decide the optimal distance for the shot and path that the subject (in this case, a muni bus) is turning the corner but not coming towards you. The iPhone panoramic feature draws sliver by sliver as you move the camera across the area. As I experimented with the pictures, I was able to find the sweet spot of how to make the buses look stretched.
