Walk SF Bartends at Elixir

This is just a quick shameless plug heads up about a fun fundraising event for Walk San Francisco.  From 9 PM until closing on Wednesday, June 22nd, a few awesome Walk SF members will be tending bar at Elixir on 16th and Guerrero.

Mark it on your calendars and invite your friends, because this will be a great chance to share a drink with the Walk SF board, transportation advocates, and other people who just love to walk in San Francisco.

Enjoy yourself and tip well; the tip money will go toward the work that Walk SF does to make San Francisco a safer and more pleasant place to walk.

Truly Green 'Greening'

It's a nuance not without its risk of controversy, as SF Citizen expressed in a recent post.  The movement to add more landscaping to San Francisco streets has been gaining steam and literally gaining ground in the last few years.  It think this is a good thing for a lot of reasons.  But almost  all of the square footage that's been de-paved and planted has been taken from our pedestrian space, and that's a distinctly bad thing.

Instead, we could plant trees in the road, or we could green a street as part of a more comprehensive repurposing of the space.

Such a Waste

And truly an avoidable one, at that.

National advocacy group Transportation for America has released its latest Dangerous by Design report, and with it an interactive map of pedestrian fatalities in the last 10 years.  Just type in an address to see the shocking list of places where someone has been killed while walking in the last decade.

Each black marker on this map represents a person, someone whose life was deemed to be just the cost keeping traffic moving in this city.  Whenever a pedestrian safety improvement isn't built because the cost of construction is too high, I'll remember this map.  What's the price of a bulb-out or countdown timer compared to the life of the person it saves?

High Speed Road Block

Peninsula NIMBYs.

Go ahead and react.  We've been hearing this pejorative label since shortly after the residents of the peninsula voted overwhelmingly in support of the California high speed rail bond.  Wealthy residents of Palo Alto, Atherton, and Menlo Park don't want the fast train in Their Back Yards, and so want to scuttle the voter-mandated line to San Francisco.  Inexperienced, politically-connected HSR Board members are literally railroading peninsula citizens with a bloated, ill-planned waste of taxpayer dollars.  Pick a side, you're either fer it or agin' it.

This argument has gotten unnecessarily heated.  Remember, folks, we're all neighbors and our success as cities depends in many ways on our success as a region, which in turn depends on us working together.  If that seems too hard to do, let's take a step back and look at how other people managed to work out a very similar conflict right here in the Bay Area.

Mid-Market Deconstruction

The Southwest-most entrance to the Civic Center BART/Muni station is being deconstructed.  I noticed this was closed about a week ago when trying to exit the station, but I didn't know they were doing this kind of work until my walk to work today.

It's possible they're replacing the opaque - if high-quality granite clad - railing with a stainless steel grill, like the one that opens onto UN Plaza North of 7th Street.  Anybody know for sure what's up?

Don't Be a Jerk

San Francisco has the same rules as NYC: you can't ride your bike on the sidewalk if you're over the age of 12. So, you know...

Power Walking

During Sunday Streets today, interim mayor Ed Lee picked up one of Walk SF's awesome I [walk] SF t-shirts. This strikes me as a refreshing change from the previous administration, and gives me some hope that walkers in our city will start to see some real improvements.