A prototype for a bike rack designed by David Baker + Partners [Photo Credit: David Baker]

Build pretzel-shaped steel tubes, bolt them to the sidewalk, and the cyclists will come. Or at least that seems to be the logic behind the newfound interest in bike rack design in cities throughout the country.  I remember a time when parking your bike meant locking it to anything you might tie a dog to, but these days everyone seems to have an opinion on the right way to lock up your bike – and a lamp post or park bench just will not do.

San Francisco-based architect David Baker (whose elegant, pleasantly weathered bike rack prototype is featured in DIY Urbanism: Testing the grounds for social change -- opening next Tuesday!), provides an excellent primer on bike rack design and implementation. Who knew that round tubes were more susceptible to pipe cutters? Or that a standard U-rack can easily accommodate three bicycles? It would behoove city planning officials to consult this guide before potentially installing the wrong kinds of racks on their city streets.

But bike racks have become much more than just another place to park your bike. Following in the wake of widespread bike lane implementation in even the most car-centric of cities (like Indianapolis and Detroit), bike racks are an instantly recognizable symbol of a city government’s commitment to promoting bicycle transportation. In recognition of the bike rack’s symbolic potential, cities like New York and San Francisco have brought industrial designers and architects into the process, sponsoring bike rack design competitions. Even David Byrne has collaborated with the New York Department of Transportation to install his own whimsical designs – although he seems to be on such good terms with the DOT that his work managed to bypass the usual jury process.

American cities have a long way to go before we come close to approximating the volume and efficiency of bike storage in iconic cycling cities such as Amsterdam, but a standard curbside U-rack with a galvanized steel finish is a good place to start.

Bike storage in Amsterdam [Photo Credit: flickr user julia.simard]

Criteria for bike rack installation in San Francisco [Image courtesy of SFMTA]

[Image courtesy of Streetsblog]

San Francisco has a problem with its roads. Since 1988, the average pavement condition of roads in San Francisco has declined 20%. No longer considered an essential city service to be paid for out of the City’s General Fund, city officials are looking for new ways to pay for street repavement projects. They are also prioritizing street repairs based on how fundamental each road is to the overall system.

With the current average PCI (pavement condition index) of San Francisco roads registering at 63 out of 100, we are in a troubling situation. Our roads are no longer considered “Good” (roads with scores of 70 and above). Instead they are dangerously close to “At risk” (roads at 57 and below).

According to a report prepared by San Francisco’s capital planning program, “San Francisco’s street network as a whole is slightly below the threshold for preventive maintenance. Engineers typically identify a PCI of 64 as a tipping point at which the pavement deterioration rate begins to steeply increase and more expensive treatments are needed for repair.” The report also claims the cost of repair of any San Francisco street will be four times more over the course of 70 years of use, if the proper preventive maintenance does not occur. If new funding sources are not identified, our roads stand to decline at the rate of roughly a point per year.

To get a complete analysis of San Francisco’s roads, and how we can best address this problem click here.

Known for their work in the intersection of design and data, Stamen and SimpleGeo have joined forces in taking an interactive look at this issue. They take the PCI statistics, readily available on DataSF, and overlay them on a map of San Francisco. We look forward to seeing a lot less red in the future. 

Roads with PCI of 0-49 shown in red, 40-69 in yellow [Image courtesy of San Francisco Department of Public Works]

While living in the suburbs often appears less expensive than living in the city, this is often not the case when factoring in transportation costs.  The Center for Neighborhood Technology just released an expanded version of their housing and transportation index which provides a comprehensive view of neighborhood affordability.  Unlike other affordability indices, the Housing and Transportation Affordability Index takes into account transportation costs associated with neighborhood design and location.   Their website allows users to explore neighborhood-level data about housing and transportation prices which include information on auto ownership, transit use, and housing density that can help Americans make more informed decisions about where they want to live.

[Map generated on H + T website comparing affordability in the Bay Area]

The H + T Affordability Index is a product of a collaboration with the Center for Neighborhood Technology, Center for Transit Oriented Development and was developed as a project for the Brookings Institution’s Urban Markets Initiative.  In the works since 2006, the Affordability Index recently expanded its analysis to cover 330 metropolitan areas in the United States, which accounts for more than 80% of the population in the United States and covers more than 161,000 neighborhoods.  

SPUR understands the role that effective and affordable transportation options play in affordability and quality of life.  Check out SPUR’s article on Transit-Oriented Development in the Bay Area as well as our transportation page for more information on how SPUR is working to encourage better transportation options in the Bay Area visit.

Plug-in cars in San Francisco [Photo Credit: flickr user felixkramer]

PG&E’s clean energy blog, Next 100, recently explored the idea of the rise of electric vehicles in the Bay Area.  At the recent Plug-In 2010 conference, PG&E President Chris Johns predicted that the Bay Area will see around 500,000 electric vehicles (EVs) “plugging in” over the next decade.  

From a sustainability perspective, electric vehicles are a big improvement over their traditional alternatives, to be sure. But all of these new vehicles “plugging in” will create a huge demand for energy from the grid. According to PG&E, one EV can draw as much power as three homes in San Francisco.  Compounding this supply problem is the challenge of supplying this energy from clean, renewable sources, and determining whether new technologies to move energy around more efficiently — such as through a “smart grid” — could satisfy new demand without the need to build new generation.

One partial solution is shifting demand off-peak. Currently, PG&E offers special pricing for EV owners who charge their vehicles during off-peak hours in order to mitigate the demand on the grid. However, this may not be enough if EVs become as popular as Johns predicts.  

In order to better understand the infrastructure needs of the future, PG&E and the Electric Power Research Institute recently began a pilot project to examine how different vehicles impact the electric grid throughout the day. Various groups around the Bay Area are helping cities figure out how to finance and build the necessary infrastructure to prepare for EVs to go commercial this fall, with the release of the Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf.

Want to travel sustainably while EVs get figured out? SPUR recommends taking advantage of the old-fashioned clean transportation choices we have in the city: walking, biking and riding public transit.

Reflected Loop [Image via San Francisco Arts Commission]

We are visual creatures.  As such, we derive our orientation of our relative location according to the landmarks and visual reminders around us.  This is especially evident in how we navigate urban areas, by remembering a block near a notable statue or fountain in an otherwise crowded arrangement of buildings.

It’s a common situation - getting disoriented in an underground or enclosed public transit station (even for those who are spatially inclined).  Without any visual cues, it’s easy to get turned around and then end up walking an extra block or two in hopes of reaching the final destination.  The Central Subway Public Art Program hopes to remedy this common dilemma by installing “landmark” and “wayfinding” art pieces inside the future terminals, playing with our natural visual tendencies for orientation.

These installations will be tailored according to three stations: Chinatown, Union Square/Market Street, and Moscone.  Through creative interpretations of the cultures of those three areas of San Francisco, these projects have the potential to be impressive art installations, questioning the standard of an unpleasant commute by bringing back the enjoyment of a grand public transit system.

In the Union Square station, Jim Campbell and Werner Klotz’s Reflected Loop (above) strings a series of light and ambient reflections through the station.  The band winds around the station and connects back with itself in a continuous loop that has no beginning or end. The polished stainless steel discs of various sizes will reflect light according to the spaces around them.

Passing Time [Image via San Francisco Arts Commission]

Inspired by the evolving development of Union Square from a rural environment to a residential area to retail business center, artist Keith Goddard’s Passing Time (above) uses a series of intricate plaques to serve as visual reminders for areas of the station.  He will use varied materials to make these mosaics.

The SFAC's Public Art Program brings the “public” back into public art through an innovative series of proposals for the station-specific installations. In preliminary stages, the plans were shown in three different museums for the three different stations, allowing for public feedback and for anyone to state preferences for particular pieces. “We are confident that the overwhelming participation of local and nationally known artists will result in artwork that displays the rich cultural diversity of our City and creates modern day art exhibits for the public to enjoy while awaiting their train in our new subway stations,” stated SFMTA Executive Director/CEO Nat Ford.  This intersection between arts and transportation exemplifies the new ways in which San Francisco is rethinking its public transportation and the importance of the visual mind in the process of traveling to and from places around the city.

The California High Speed Rail Authority met yesterday in San Francisco. The agenda was packed with many interesting things including a new station area development policy. But the real controversy was about the section between San Jose and San Francisco. I joined hundreds of people during public comment to weigh in on this one small segment.

Over the past few years, a group of high speed rail opponents has been gathering strength in some of the Peninsula communities such as Atherton and Menlo Park, arguing that the train will impact their views, be too noisy, and otherwise ruin their quality of life.

There is certainly a lot of design work to do as the High Speed Rail Authority and Caltrain explore the peninsula segment and figure out how to make “joint operations” work.

But what some of the residents of the Peninsula seem to be asking for is an impossibly expensive project or no project at all. There cannot be a 60-mile subway up and down the Peninsula.

The Bay Area Council penned a strong letter pointing out the flaws with the “build it right or don’t build it at all” approach. If “building it right” means addressing every local impact of the project to the satisfaction of every local resident, there will not be enough money in the world to build this project.

TransForm pointed out at the hearing that the issues with the Peninsula communities stem from the fact that the High Speed Rail Authority made the fundamentally correct decision in 2004 to choose an alignment that re-uses existing track where possible and goes through existing cities. (This was in contrast to a cheaper alternative that went through agricultural lands and skirted many existing cities, relying instead on “greenfield” stations.) Having made the big decision the right way, the Authority now faces the political and design problem of actually bringing the train through all of these already-developed communities. Even though the Peninsula creates design challenges it is absolutely critical that the project goes all the way to San Francisco, where the highest ridership stations in the entire state will be located.

I tried to put this project into some larger context in my remarks. California is already the most populous state in the nation (by far). It will grow from 38 million people today to 50 million people by 2030. The real reason we need high speed rail is to provide an armature or framework for organizing this massive growth. Where the interstate highway system was the infrastructure that enabled the suburbanization of America, high speed rail can enable a re-centering of growth. It is the necessary supporting infrastructure for walkable communities in California.

The real question we are facing is whether we are still capable as a society of actually getting something like this built. In the age of CEQA, in the age when we seem to believe that more public process is always better, in the age when we seem to believe that nothing should happen unless there is consensus, can we actually create a transformative infrastructure? As America tries to learn how to compete with “single vision” nations that do not share our democratic values, the question of how we learn how to actually get things done under our political system looms larger and larger as a central problem to overcome.

With every infrastructure project that SPUR supports we face the dilemma of how to be supportive against the tide of opponents while still working constructively to improve projects and make them as good as they can be. We could not be happier with the “big moves” that the High Speed Rail Authority has made thus far. They have picked the right alignment, one that will reinforce center-oriented growth. Now the task is to get the small moves right to find that elusive balance between more expensive designs that address community concerns and the need to keep the project affordable enough to actually build it.

This is the most important project in California. It is a naïve and impossible wish to “get it right” if right means the ideal design in every community. We need to get it “right-enough” to attract lots of riders away from the automobile and enable a new pattern of growth in the state.

SFpark Overview from SFpark on Vimeo.

Taking the guess work out of parking. That’s what SFMTA’s innovative new parking program, SFpark, aims to accomplish. When implemented, the program will dramatically change how drivers locate and pay for parking.

A new SFpark "smart meter" [Photo Credit: flickr user SFMTA_sfpark] 

Here’s a quick breakdown of how SFpark works:  

• Sensors located in parking spaces and City-owned garages will track real-time parking availability
  

• This information will be uploaded to the SFpark data feed which will be publicly available so people can easily find an open space

• Drivers will access this information through smart phone applications, SFpark.org, and street signs

After drivers find an available parking space, they will find new parking meters that accept coins, credit and debit cards, or SFMTA parking cards.

SFpark is putting those sensors and parking meters to work for another good use: variable pricing. The more parking spaces available, the lower parking costs will be. The fewer parking spaces available, the higher parking costs will be. Basically, SFpark will use technology to direct drivers to park where there is a lot of availability and encourage shorter parking durations where available parking is more limited.

Aside from making it easier for drivers to find and pay for parking, SFpark promises a variety of other benefits. Circling for parking represents about 30% of driving in San Francisco. By reducing the need to drive around for parking, there will be fewer cars on the road. This will make our streets quieter and safer for pedestrians and bicyclists, reduce air pollution, and speed up buses.

Despite these expected benefits, one area that may be cause for concern is decreased revenue from parking tickets. The city currently brings in about $17 million a year from tickets for expired meters. However, the new parking payment options will make it easier for drivers to avoid tickets, which will likely decrease ticket revenues. It remains to be seen if the new revenues from higher parking rates during peak times will be enough to offset the expected loss of expired meter revenue. Although not an explicit goal of SFpark, any decrease in revenues will be cited by SFpark’s opponents given the city’s current fiscal problems. This points to a larger problem with implementing any innovative program in today’s economic environment: any policy will be judged through a short-term fiscal lens, even if the policy accomplishes long-term city goals.

Installation of 190 new parking meters in Hayes Valley will begin on July 27, 2010 -- the first step in implementing the SFpark program. All told, about 5,000 new meters will replace old meters in SPpark pilot areas, including Downtown, the Marina, the Fillmore, SoMa, the Mission, Civic Center, and Fisherman’s Wharf. 

Map of SFpark area:

[Map courtesy of sfpark.org]

SFpark will be testing its new parking management system at 6,000 of San Francisco’s 25,000 metered spaces and 12,250 spaces in 15 of 20 City-owned parking garages. The pilot phase of SFpark will start this summer and run for two years.

As California lays the high-speed rail groundwork, SPUR continues its series on international precedents. While France built high-speed rail two decades after Japan and within a different state apparatus, the system had remarkably similar results: growth and concentration.  France teaches us that a state investment in high-speed rail (HSR) can have major impacts on places that are isolated and suffering from lagging economic performance. The examples of Lille, an old industrial and mining center in northern France, and Nantes, south of Paris, are often cited as success stories.

Euralille [Photo Credit: flickr user savourama]

Lille is an important crossroads in the European HSR network with service to London, Paris and Brussels.  Once a quickly depopulating and gritty industrial city, Lille has diversified into knowledge-intensive, service-producing activities.  Euralille, the new retail, business and conference center designed by Dutch powerhouse architect, Rem Koolhaas and OMA, is illustrative of the makeover.  Euralille straddles Lille’s two main railway stations.  A standalone city, it houses productive facilities as well as affordable housing. In 1994, Architectural Review dubbed Euralille the “Instant City.”  

Equally unrecognizable change has befallen Nantes.  An industrial port city in the 19th century, in the past 30 years Nantes has developed into a major service sector hug.  In 2004, Time magazine named Nantes “the most livable city in all of Europe.”  The TGV, France’s high speed rail network, came to Nantes concurrently in 1981.  

The success of the TGV cannot be separated from France’s institutional and planning framework.  The determination and capacity of a strong French state was instrumental. The nation owns and provides operational subsidies to SNCF, the HSR operator. 

[Photo Credit: flickr user Julka2009]

However, this is not to say that localities have no role in high speed rail.  In recent years, local government has played a more important role in France. Vis-à-vis joint development agreements and direct development subsidies, French localities have exerted pressure to densify around TGV stations.  Cities also set the purchase price of land and assemble properties to facilitate development. Lille approached station area development with public private partnerships in mind.  Part of the key to Nantes’ and Lille’s success is the not insignificant recent investment in transit feeder networks that connect high speed rail with outlying areas.  Not including Paris, there are 20 light rail systems in France, most built after HSR.  Of these 20 systems, 18 are in cities with HSR service.  At least in France, the concentration of travel demand thanks to high speed rail and the urban location of most stations have generated a consequent demand for feeder transit, with the usual array of environmental and land use benefits.

All told, the public sector bet that HSR investment would be sufficient to catalyze urban growth and induce private investments.  They were right.   

Takeaways:

• HSR in France is largely a product of the government’s building, operating, maintaining the network.

• Local planning and development incentives can play a huge role in sparking station area development.

• HSR can transform decaying cities into the most livable in Europe.

• HSR ridership increases with robust feeder transit. 

In the coming weeks, we’ll look at “HSR” in the United States and United Kingdom drawing conclusions about what it all means in the California context.

SPUR’s policy paper on high-speed rail is due out this fall.

 

Geary Boulevard runs almost the entire width of San Francisco, from Market to the ocean. The name of the street hides a lot of history – John White Geary was the first mayor of San Francisco post-statehood, and he would go on to govern Kansas during its “Bloody Kansas” period in the buildup to the Civil War.  But that’s a matter for another post though – this post is about forgotten transportation.

Today, the traffic on Geary reflects San Francisco’s dual nature. On the one hand, this is a town that depends heavily on transit, and the 38-Geary is one of the busiest bus lines in the country (the busiest in the western half of the country by some estimates). On the other, the street’s design, especially through the Western Addition, clearly prioritizes heavy private auto traffic, as evidenced by the two underpasses (below Fillmore and Masonica). Below is an east-facing picture from the Webster Street pedestrian bridge in Japantown:

[Photo Credit: flickr user flowertai]

Before the 1950s, though, Geary was home to a number of Muni streetcar lines, also with heavy ridership. Like a number of other lines throughout San Francisco, these fell victim to Muni’s move to buses through the middle of the last century. So today there’s no sign that Geary was home to some of the city’s earliest Muni streetcar lines: the A-Geary ran from downtown to Golden Gate Park (at 10th Avenue), and the B-Geary ran to the ocean, terminating at Playland at the Beach, the former amusement park on Ocean Beach. The density found in even the western reaches of the Richmond today is thanks in part to these streetcars and the mobility they offered. Coming just six years after the devastation of the 1906 earthquake, they helped to hurry along the westward reconstruction of the city in the 1910s and 20s.

[Photo Credit: flickr user telstar]

Unfortunately for railfans, the city decided to switch over to cheaper bus transportation during the 1950s. Some streetcars like the H-Potrero serving Potrero Hill were canceled due to low ridership, but ultimately the city replaced almost all its rail, even on heavily trafficked Geary. The only lines that survived this switch were those with special rights-of-way, leaving us with the five Muni Metro lines we have today. Meanwhile, Geary was “upgraded” to accommodate the automobile, with additional lanes, underpasses on Fillmore and Masonic, and freeway-style exit ramps. As with elevated rail teardowns in New York, San Franciscans were promised a restored and improved form of rail transportation. During the 1960s, the plan was to construct a Geary branch of the BART regional system:

[Photo Credit: flickr user Eric Fischer]

These plans fell through when Marin County elected not to join BART. But plans to bring rail to Geary persisted, with proposals for a Muni Metro subway down Geary and streetcars down California and Balboa Streets appearing in planning documents as late as 1974.

[Photo Credit: flickr user Eric Fischer]

Unfortunately, failure to find funding and pass ballot measures doomed these proposals, and Geary (despite being a relatively dense corridor) was left with local and express bus service that -- though robust -- is limited in its capacity.

On the bright side, the pendulum seems to be swinging back towards transit in the Bay Area, among the plans getting a lot of attention is a proposal to build bus rapid transit along the Geary corridor. While this would not have the speed or capacity of a subway, it would still represent an improvement for getting to the northwestern reaches of the city. The plans currently call for a 2015-16 completion, but they’re meeting some local resistance. In an additional ironic twist, the overpasses that made the street more like a freeway are also conspiring to make the BRT plans more complicated. According to Kamala Kelkar for the The Examiner:

Three options exist for dealing with [intersections with overpasses], which include Fillmore Street and Masonic Avenue: have the pedestrians cross three lanes of speedy traffic at a crosswalk underneath the bridges, have them exit on either end of tunnels and walk to their transfers and shopping, or have the buses stay aboveground, which could sacrifice up to 300 parking spots between Van Ness and 33rd avenues, according to documents from the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, the local agency in charge of the BRT.

Hopefully the city can see its way past these roadblocks and bring more transit to Geary – and maybe even a rail line in the medium-term. (Even the idea for a BART line underneath Geary resurfaced in a 2006 Regional Rail Plan alternatives analysis.) But in the meantime, the focus should be on bringing speedier transit, namely bus rapid transit. SPUR’s take on the Geary BRT project is available here.