One of five designs to showcase San Francisco’s Green Connections project, a 115 mile network of walking and biking paths to crisscross San Francisco, the concept for connecting Potrero Hill and Dogpatch includes a staircase and improved pathway along the 22nd street right of way, linking Potrero to Dogpatch’s commercial core; improvements to the 22nd Street Caltrain station; and the greening of 22nd Street.
In addition, the obsolete train tracks on Illinois Street will be removed and the sidewalks improved; the construction cranes currently parked along 24th Street will be moved; and an off-street trail will eventually connect to trails at the Warm Water Cove Park.
The next steps and timeline for the elements of the Potrero to Dogpatch Connection:
- Hillclimb Linking Potrero to Dogpatch: TBD. May be funded via the redevelopment of adjacent properties.
- Dogpatch Commercial Core Improvements: The City anticipates roughly $2M in development impact fees that can be allocated toward the project in FY 2016.
- Illinois Street (Short Term): Plans to work with the Port and PG&E to replace the asphalt sidewalk in front of the Power Plant with modern concrete sidewalk and landscaping.
- Warm Water Cove Park: Project planning is scheduled to begin in mid-2014 and construction is scheduled to start in mid-2016 be completed in mid-2017.
Can we just tear down I-280 past 101? I know about the plans to tear it down past 16th St, but imho that isn’t going far enough. I assume it was originally built to connect to the Embarcadero Freeway.
I’m all for tearing down the freeways ONCE we have a robust mass transit system in place that will encourage people to ditch their cars. Otherwise, you’re just setting yourself up for surface gridlock (Octavia Blvd come to mind?) and more pollution.
Improvements to the 22nd Street Caltrain station: does it include an elevator between street level and platform level?
Is the T, which runs a few blocks parallel to I-280, not enough?
How about two stairways into and out of the Caltrain stop. That stairway is always packed, need more ways to exit the train.
I also don’t think a Octavia is comparable. The Central Freeway provides the only freeway access to large portions of the city, whereas 101 offers an alternative to I-280.
Things like the old tracks add character. Unless it was prohibitive to pave around them I don’t see why they could not be left in place.
Adam – These tracks make biking dangerous.
Considering how often 101 (between 280 and 80) backs up, the portion of 280 is a nice alternative. I hope they don’t go through with taking any of it down.
Re: tracks along Illinois St. being a hazard for bikes – you can have the best of both worlds by just filling in the grooves adjacent to the rails. It is a cheap solution too.
As for improving the 22nd street station, wow, is that ever easy. One could dump a bucket of paint over the wall and call it an improvement. It is probably the most depressing station along the entire Caltrain line.
Then perhaps the bikes should avoid the tracks.
Duhhhhhh.
What about banning emergency vehicles from flying along Harrison Street instead — Harrison is a major bike artery and also a favorite of flying SFPD, SFFD and Ambulances. Disaster waiting to happen.
Or fixing the massively ugly, failed 101 Market street debacle so that traffic, pedestrians and cyclists can move through it efficiently.
Or so on and so on… not that these incredibly fussy un-travelled side street projects to nowhere don’t tickle the fancy. (Sarcasm intended)
Tracks can be a real hazard for cyclists – they can be difficult to see at night and a problem if the cyclist is made to swerve near them.
It isn’t simply a case of “avoiding them”, despite what our resident expert says.
“101 is an alternative to 280”
HA ha ha hah hah heh heh hee hee hee…
thanks, great way to start my morning.
I’m all for tearing down the freeways ONCE we have a robust mass transit system in place that will encourage people to ditch their cars. Otherwise, you’re just setting yourself up for surface gridlock (Octavia Blvd come to mind?) and more pollution.
Better transit doesn’t encourage people to ditch cars.
More expensive (in time or money) driving encourages people to ditch cars/trips.
This is pretty basic stuff, folks. I’m not for the government spending billions of dollars in the hopes that somehow that will fix things, when we already know how to reduce congestion without any net cost to taxpayers (increase the cost of driving and/or parking).
^ but the point is that there is not currently adequate transit to which people can switch. You can make driving as much of a pain as you want, but if the stinking lurching Muni bus comes and it’s standing room only, you haven’t accomplished anything.
And all your cost example does change the cost from being a government expenditure to build something better (better transit), to externalizing it to be a wasted, unnecessary expense (time and gas spent by drivers in traffic). Isn’t it better to use funds for something productive than something wasteful?
Look, I’m a fan of transit. I recently moved to the city and am selling my car. But a trip on transit – say from Park Presidio to Fillmore, or 9th & Irving to Millbrae – takes 3 to 4 times longer on transit than by car. (In case it’s not clear, those are actual examples, not randome selections.) No matter how annoying you make driving, if it takes me 1 hour 35 minutes to get from 9th & Irving to Millbrae, you’ve accomplished nothing other than making the city a *worse* place to live.
Autopia has always been at war with Pedestriana
“This is pretty basic stuff, folks. I’m not for the government spending billions of dollars in the hopes that somehow that will fix things, when we already know how to reduce congestion without any net cost to taxpayers (increase the cost of driving and/or parking).”
Very shortsighted.. The negative impact on the economy of curbing car use without increasing transit would be much higher than the cost of transit. That would be policy with tremendous negative in intended consequencies
but the point is that there is not currently adequate transit to which people can switch. You can make driving as much of a pain as you want, but if the stinking lurching Muni bus comes and it’s standing room only, you haven’t accomplished anything.
Depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. If your goal is to decrease auto use, you can absolutely accomplish that without worrying about the bus at all. Raising the price of driving will accomplish that.
To be clear to both you and jill – I am NOT advocating that we not invest in transit and only increase the cost of driving, I’m just saying that the two are not connected. We can build better transit and we can decrease the amount of driving, but just don’t expect that building better transit will decrease the amount of driving.
Even those cities in the world that have great transit systems have not seen auto use decrease with those expansions. The ONLY three cities that have been able to decrease auto usage in certain areas of town successfully without simply banning cars have been Stockholm, Singapore, and London. All through congestion pricing.
So again, if your goal is to build better transit. Do that. If your goal is to decrease auto usage, increase the cost. If the goal is to decrease auto usage by building better transit, well, that just ain’t gonna work.
“If your goal is to decrease auto use, ”
Everything has some cost and some benefit. A good goal involves reducing costs and increasing benefits. Sure you can simply be anti-car, and legislate burdens on cars (or simply ban them as you mention), but that’s not a good goal.
” I’m just saying that the two are not connected. ”
For someone who seems to understand substitution effects in housing (i.e. why building more “luxury housing helps prices overall even for people who can’t afford the luxury units.) Your inability to draw a connection here is puzzling.
“Even those cities in the world that have great transit systems have not seen auto use decrease with those expansions. ”
Again, on housing you are on the right side of this. Seeing that home prices and construction are both increasing doesn’t mean that construction causes high home prices.
There’s plenty of work aimed at providing better cost/benefit options for transit: Ride-share, Improved auto safety/fuel economy, electric cars, delivery services, corporate shuttles, public outreach about drunk/distracted driving/biking/walking, public transport options,….
Our time and money should be focused on making positive contributions for positive change.
Simply being anti-car is just backwards looking when we should be looking forward.
Again with the anti-car canard. I’m not anti-car, I just want markets used to fix things like congestion, rather than the fairy dust idea of “build better transit and traffic problems will go away!” And btw, I feel the same way about transit capacity issues – BART/Caltrain should use market pricing to spread out loads and maximize when more service is needed (why in the world do we have every 15 minute service at the Pittsburg station 19 hours a day?!?!)
Listen, my concern is that for decades we’ve stated things like “build better transit to convince people to give up cars”, yet that doesn’t happen. When better transit actually is built, people claim that it isn’t working because car use doesn’t decrease, thus the need to build more parking or widen roads or whatever, which typically then leads to worsening the transit that you just spent money to improve.
So…basically you shouldn’t even try to measure the improvement in transit by how much it gets people to “give up their cars”. Measure it by how much it improves transit.
“Again with the anti-car canard. I’m not anti-car”
Well, your post above spent a lot of time talking about decreasing auto usage seemingly just for its own sake.
Markets work, because the rules we set for them incentivize people to make positive contributions.
Microsoft execs would make more money if their phones took market share from the iPhone. One way to do this would be to make a better phone. Another would be to pass a law requiring half the iPhone battery to be replaced with a block of lead, making the iPhone worse and reducing sales.
It should be obvious why as a society we discourage the latter approach of negative competition.
“Listen, my concern is that for decades we’ve stated things like “build better transit to convince people to give up cars”
But we haven’t been saying that. Much transit in recent decades has been public transit. And in politics, unlike the commercial world, the incentive is to chase votes. And public transit has suffered mission creep with it being treated as an anti-poverty program (providing transit to those who can’t afford a car), a jobs program (think of the provision that Muni workers be paid the second highest salaries in the country) and a program for transport of the elderly/disabled (Why Muni buses stops are so close together). All of these other goals have some justification, but they pull public transit away from being a better transit system that will give people a realistic option to reduce car usage.
In an era when the owners of innovative tech companies in the Bay Area fly around in their G-5s and Citations, and DRIVE or are driven around in their Teslas or Porsches, what is it about many of the commenters here who somehow think the future involves walking or bikes? How is Larry Ellison to get from Woodside to Outer Broadway? Could this be why Larry and others end up buying expensive properties in Southern California where there is no community of finger wagers concerned about their lifestyles?
I ask this in all seriousness as I think there is some sort of generational nostalgia for a world 110 years ago where you craft your own beer, grow beards and ride bikes, all as some sort of reaction to having to sit in front of a screen all day at Twitter? Almost all cars will be pollution free non petrol vehicles within 20 years yet here we read about how cars are a “thing of the past”.
Bay Areans spend MORE TIME driving MORE MILES than almost any other urban region. Many of the homes now purchased in the upper bracket here are trophy homes for weekends away from The Valley.
Pretending that removing freeways will stop private vehicle use is stupid. Pretending that the wealthy cannot afford to drive is beyond stupid. Pretending the Bay Area has a comparable transit system to London or NYC and therefore we should imitate those areas is insane.
Rich Wall St bankers use planes too, not sure what in the world that has to do with transit.
At a metro level (CSA), the Bay Area has the second highest transit usage in the US, after only New York.
You’re focusing on the top 5% instead of looking at, you know, the majority of the population of the area.
“79.7 percent of commuters drive alone, 10.1 percent carpool, 5.3 percent use public transportation and 4.6 percent use other methods.”
(For San Francisco Bay Area-KQED)
“The bureau says the San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont region is also No. 1 for commute distance, again, with just over 2 percent of workers traveling more than 50 miles one way to get to work. In second place, with 1.9 percent of workers traveling at least 50 miles, is the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara area.” (KQED)
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2013/03/where-it-takes-longest-get-work/4870/
Tearing down freeways without an alternative transit system in place is putting one’s head in the sand. This sprawling region has the worst urban planning issues in the country regarding where people are selecting to live vs. where they work. All those private busses scooping up workers are sitting in the same traffic as everyone else because there is NO transit alternative.
Um, your quote actually explicitly calls out that the 50+ mile commutes affect 2% (!!!) of workers lol. Bad? Of course. But still neglecting to talk about the VAST majority of people.
Here are some lists by MSA (which splits the Bay Area into two metro areas, similar to the numbers you posted above):
http://www.newgeography.com/content/003098-a-look-commuting-using-latest-census-data
I have no idea where you got those numbers for carpooling and transit for the Bay Area, because they’re certainly not the census or ACS numbers. They don’t even pass the sniff test – double the number of people carpool as use transit? lol. That doesn’t happen in any metro.
“Work Access in the Non-centered San Francisco Bay Area ” without a major expansion of transit would be impossible. “Nearly 80 percent of the Bay Area’s jobs are outside the cities of San Francisco and Oakland”. The problem is how the Bay Area grew, not that evil car drivers refuse to ride MUNI. Their jobs are many miles away from their homes.
http://www.newgeography.com/content/004219-work-access-non-centered-san-francisco-bay-area?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Newgeography+(Newgeography.com+-+Economic%2C+demographic%2C+and+political+commentary+about+places)
What in the world are you arguing about? I’m 100% for major transit expansions.
“Almost all cars will be pollution free non petrol vehicles within 20 years yet here we read about how cars are a “thing of the past”.
Completely agree with this. Tearing down 280 is about the dumbest idea I’ve heard on socket site for awhile. Are these numbuts trying to kill the economy?
Speaking of 20 years from now, not only will new vehicles not run on petroleum fuel and run silent and pollution free, but they will operate mostly driverless. Mercedes already is selling vehicles that prevent rear end collisions with automatic stopping safeguard sensors. The freedom commuters will have to talk, type and watch media while their car drives itself down 280 will be a game changer……that is if 280 still exists, unlike the Luddite nonsense posted by some of roads being a thing of the past. The next time the Google driverless Prius drives by, take a good look at what is coming which is increased personal transportation vehicle use.
^Exactly. And driverless cars will mean that much, MUCH less parking is needed. So why in the world are we so focused on building so much of it now?
Driverless cars will be able to use the existing freeways in significantly more efficient ways, meaning we probably will be able to tear down 280.
Anon. Please expound on why driverless cars owned by individuals will not need freeways or parking spots.
Woah, woah, woah. I didn’t say that driverless cars would be owned by individuals. The next logical step of moving to driverless cars is that many folks won’t own them if they can simply punch a button on their phone and have one come immediately to take them wherever they’d like (road trip to NYC? Arriving in 90 seconds…)
I own a car because I enjoy driving. If I’m no longer actually driving the car, meh. No reason to own one, I’ll just call one up whenever needed. I assume that this is the eventual goal of companies like Uber, no longer having to deal with those pesky human drivers, and now able to substitute in for all transportation needs of everyone, not just short in-city trips.
i dont see why i would not own it just because its driverless. i would still own. otherwise you have to pay the taxi cost everytime. Cars are not going to decrease in the next 30 yrs. they are going to increase. we may be able to slow the increase, but it will be an increase. Additional road infrastructure will need to be built. The talk of closing down a major freeway into SF is just absurd and economical self sabotage
otherwise you have to pay the taxi cost everytime
Um, the cost will fall dramatically. The holy grail of transit has always been “personal rapid transit” – where a person can decide to go to any place at any time by pushing a button, without needing to do anything else themselves. You walk outside and are immediately whisked to your location.
For many, many years, this was assumed to need tracks to be built to each house, etc, which just isn’t feasible. However, as soon as cars are self-driving, it’s immediately viable everywhere. There will be a transition time because some people will still assume that they need to own their own car, but eventually that will subside. There is simply no reason to own your own car when a ride anywhere, with any amount of stuff, and any number of people is simply a push of the button and a few seconds away.
Companies like Uber will manage fleets of hundreds of thousands of cars that can all be stored at central locations spread throughout the area. Sophisticated algorithms will determine when and where cars will likely be needed, so you may notice that there are numerous empty cars parked or circling around your neighborhood in the morning, but not so much in the middle of the night.
The idea that self-driving cars will simply mean that everyone will still own a car but it will simply drive itself is ridiculous and very “only-looking-ten-years-ahead” thinking. Think 20-30 years. A self-driving car that doesn’t change the way that we think about cars is a useless technology.
many of you people are talking about the future like it’s 1950. I agree that cars are not going away anytime soon and many times they are very convenient but we’ve invested in car-oriented infrastructure for so long there’s no wonder that other modes have suffered. Building cities around the car also translated into the suburban distopia that many are fleeing right now to live in the cities.
Cars certainly have their place but they really shouldn’t be the primary mode for something as basic as getting to work.
This debate is not just about efficiency – it’s about quality of life. Cars allow people to live further away from work – that translates into more time spent commuting, more time away from family, less time for community building, more stress (traffc, parking,etc) . Building cities for cars reduces street life, takes up valuable real estate, and makes it difficult for more efficient modes to work well (e.g. buses in traffic).
This debate is also about postponing the solutions to todays problems for future generations. Self driving, zero emission cars may be great but 20-30 years is a long time. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush! Climate change is a real issue and we need to be doing all we can now to reduce our emissions.
whats your suggestion S? bikes for everyone. now you’re talking about the 1920’s in present tense
The talk of closing down a major freeway into SF is just absurd and economical self sabotage
You mean like the Embarcadero Freeway. Or the Central Freeway.
You have already lost the battle wolf, all you can do is pick up the survivors at this point.
But that car you continue to own and use tells me you have the “lost the battle” as well NoeValleyJim. If the future of San Francisco means no auto traffic, why not get rid of your vehicle? After all, in transit rich California who needs a car to get to Napa, Tahoe, Mendecino, Big Sur, Santa Barbara, Palm Springs or Mount Tam?
(All places I love to visit)
Getting rid of a duplicate freeway and getting rid of cars altogether are not even close to the same thing.
If you think 101 traffic is bad now, wait till you see it after getting rid of that “duplicate freeway”.
^Yes, yes, we’ve heard that story before. The end of the Embarcadero Freeway was going to be disastrous for traffic and the Chinatown economy. The shortening of the Central Freeway was going to be disastrous for traffic. Developing parking lots in SOMA was going to lead to parking armageddon. Anyone see a pattern here?
the auto-apologist screaming about the disasters to come with road diets (and road-kills) have the track record and credibility of cold warriors talking about dominos, iraq war supporters talking about WMD, and right wing economists predicting inflation for the past 5 years. all wrong and all in the service of wrongness.
the wolf wrote:
No, you just made up “bikes for everyone” to make it easier to respond because you don’t have a valid, cogent argument against what he did write; this is known as a straw man.
He said “cars are not going away anytime soon” and later that “Cars certainly have their place”. Nowhere in his comment did he say that everyone should ride a bike.
S had the trend right. From the L.A. Times last week, Californians grow less reliant on cars, survey finds:
There’s always going to be people who grew up in, say, Simi Valley and want to bring their suburban lifestyle choices with them to the city. That doesn’t mean the city should encourage them to consider those choices normal when their are a wealth of alternatives.