Matthew Almon Roth

[This story originally appeared on Streetsblog San Francisco]

Will you be sharing your Mini? Photo: City CarShare

As more teens wait to get their licenses and young adults drive fewer miles annually, advertisers have begun to point to advances in digital technology to explain the trend. Many younger adults use digital media to connect to their friends virtually, the argument goes, and technological innovations will likely reduce the incentive to own and operate a car.

Now, with the passage of a new law in California that allows current car owners to share their personal vehicles in a car sharing service and make money without voiding their personal insurance policy, the age of owning a car as a rite of American adulthood may be ceding to a new vision of vehicles as a social service.

Because your car spends on average more than 90 percent of the time parked and idle, proponents of personal vehicle sharing argue, why not make money instead of sitting by as your investment depreciates in a garage?

“We feel like this is a historic moment. This legislation basically revolutionizes the idea of the automobile into being a shared service,” said Sunil Paul, CEO of Spride Inc, a personal car-sharing start-up company. “We think it can have a huge impact over the next many years about the way we think about the automobile.”

On the heels of the announcement that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed AB 1871 into law yesterday, Spride and City Carshare, the San Francisco non-profit that helped pioneer car sharing, announced a partnership to facilitate personal car sharing in the Bay Area. Once AB 1871 takes effect January 1st, the new Spride Share pilot program will allow car owners to loan their vehicles to the more than 13,000 screened and qualified members of City CarShare, offsetting the costs and environmental impact of private car ownership while providing City CarShare members with access to a greater variety of vehicles.

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[This story originally appeared on Streetsblog San Francisco]

Senator Barbara Boxer, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, US DOT Secretary Ray Lahood, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and Transbay Joint Powers Authority Board Chairman and SFMTA CEO Nat Ford at the Transbay Transit Center groundbreaking. Photos: Matthew Roth.

Though most of the California political class celebrated the groundbreaking of the new Transbay Transit Center with U.S. DOT Secretary Ray LaHood in San Francisco yesterday, significant questions remain for funding a national high-speed rail network through the federal transportation act.

The event swarmed with Secret Service and various other branches of law enforcement keeping an eye on a crowd that, as San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom joked with LaHood, was mostly made up of consultants on the Transbay project.

LaHood cracked wise several times at Newsom’s expense, repeating more comments Newsom made before the press conference to the public and the media and suggesting Californian’s should vote him in as Lt. Governor on his humor alone.

When he stopped ribbing Newsom, LaHood gushed about how far “ahead of the curve” California is on high-speed rail. LaHood said U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) had cast “courageous votes” that made the stimulus bill possible, which meant a $48 billion infusion for the US DOT or nearly two-thirds his annual budget. From the $8 billion President Barack Obama added for high-speed rail nationally, California received $2.3 billion, $400 million of that for the Transbay Transit Center.

“People who come back from Europe or Asia and have ridden high-speed rail, like many of you have, come back to America and ask why we don’t have high-speed rail in America? Because we’ve never made the investment, that’s why,” said LaHood. “This year we had 8 billion times more money for high-speed rail given President Obama’s vision to connect America with high-speed, inter-city rail.”

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[This story originally appeared on Streetsblog San Francisco]

In a city with an appetite for experimentation, San Francisco’s parklets are particularly fascinating. What began as a guerrilla arts intervention meant to demonstrate the need for more public open space has now become a fully permitted procedure for extending sidewalks into the street and has the small business community, which routinely opposes removing parking or charging more for it, aflutter with interest.

During the 5th annual Park(ing) Day in September this year, the Planning Department announced it had opened a request for proposals (RFP) period seeking applications from interested parties who wanted to re-purpose the parking in front of their buildings to build and manage parklets.

The RFP encouraged community benefit districts, businesses and non-profits to submit preliminary designs for parklets, which would be reviewed by a select committee representing various departments in the city, including the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), which manages parking and runs Muni and the Department of Public Works (DPW).

Applicants were encouraged to view parklets as sidewalk furniture meant to enhance public space. From the RFP: “Parklets are intended to provide space for people to sit, relax and enjoy the city around them, especially where narrow sidewalks would otherwise preclude such activities. They are intended to be seen as pieces of street furniture, providing aesthetic enhancements to the overall streetscape.”

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[This story originally appeared on Streetsblog San Francisco]

With childhood obesity a growing national epidemic, it is surprising that more parents don’t walk to school with their kids or organize amongst neighbors to encourage physical activity as part of the daily routine. Though San Francisco has extensive public transit and is quite walkable, the current school assignment policy results in longer school commutes, a problem city officials and advocates for increased walking blame in part for children not getting enough daily exercise.

Coinciding with yesterday’s International Walk to School Day, the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) and the Department of Public Health (SFDPH) discussed a study they have undertaken to collect baseline data on school commute patterns in an effort to encourage more walking. This initiative is especially important now, say officials, because the city will change the way it assigns children to schools starting in fall 2011 and they will have the opportunity to measure the impact local assignments will have on travel choice.

Officials plan to collect data at the fifteen schools participating in the Safe Routes to School program, as well as others that are not, and they hope the resulting information will demonstrate how effective improved traffic engineering, enforcement and eduction can be.

Ana Validzic, a SFDPH pedestrian safety coordinator, was at Fairmount Elementary School in Noe Valley yesterday to raise awareness for Walk to School Day. Fairmount and nine other schools were added to the city’s Safe Routes to School (SRTS) program this year, in addition to the five from last year. These schools are at the top of the city’s priority list for traffic calming treatments and better enforcement of traffic safety violations.

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[This story appeared originally on Streetsblog San Francisco]

Climate change is a national security risk that will be exacerbated if Californians pass Proposition 23, the voter initiative on the ballot this November that would suspend California’s AB 32 climate change law, say opponents of the measure, such as former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz.

Shultz and financier Thomas Steyer, co-chairs of the No on Propostion 23 campaign, held a media briefing today on what they described as the threats to America’s energy security and economy if California’s landmark 2006 climate change law was suspended.

“The issue of climate, the issue of economics, the issue of national security all point us in the same direction. We need to get control of our use of energy and the way we produce it, the way we use it,” said Shultz, a former marine who fought in World War II and later served as Secretary of State for President Ronald Reagan.

Steyer said Prop 23 would continue to mire America in an unstable energy policy. “Our energy use, our approach to climate, the health of our economy, our ability to develop new technologies and build new businesses, all of these factor into our national security,” he said, adding that “dismantling rules that foster innovation and that make us more energy secure doesn’t make sense.”

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[This story originally appeared on Streetsblog San Francisco]

Image: SFCTA

The Presidio Parkway/Doyle Drive project will move into the second phase of construction early next year, but planners are already touting a unique public-private partnership, or P3 in their shorthand, which they say forges a new model for delivering massive infrastructure projects for less money and greater financial oversight.

Assuming all the necessary approvals are in place by the end of the year, the Presidio Parkway P3 contract will be awarded to a consortium called Golden Link Partners and will rely on significant foreign investment from two European companies.

As SFCTA executive director Jose Luis Moscovich explained to Streetsblog recently, the P3 is the first of its kind in California and resembles P3s that have worked well in Canada and Europe for years.

“We are well on our way to creating, through the Doyle Drive project, essentially a new paradigm for delivering these big, monster projects in the state,” said Moscovich. “It’s a paradigm where you take into account the entire life-cycle of the project, the design, the construction, the operations and the maintenance. We’re ensuring the project will be well-maintained and there will not be a gap in the maintenance commitment to the project.”

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[This story originally appeared on Streetsblog San Francisco.]

Chinatown’s crowded sidewalks, unsafe crosswalks and poor pedestrian signage are not likely to be among the endearing physical characteristic featured in any tourist brochure. Yet in a recent study — the San Francisco Chinatown Pedestrian Safety Needs Assessment [pdf] and Safety Plan [pdf] conducted by the Chinatown Community Development Center (CCDC) — those issues were identified as several of the highest priority concerns for tenants, merchants and visitors to the popular area.

Chinatown is the densest neighborhood in San Francisco, according to the study, and has the lowest rate of automobile ownership, at 17 percent. The neighborhood is made up of a large percentage of transit users and pedestrians, many of them seniors. From the report:

The 2000 Census reported the median income for the neighborhood as $18,339, with a median age of 50. The proportion of the population living below the poverty level in 2000 was 21 percent versus 11 percent citywide.

Although Chinatown has the lowest rate of car ownership, it has the highest volume of traffic of any San Francisco neighborhood. Seventy eight percent of households live within 150 meters of a truck route. The proportion of Chinatown households living with traffic-related air quality hazards is 100 percent compared to 68 percent citywide.

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[This story originally appeared on Streetsblog San Francisco]

Unfortunately for San Francisco transit riders, new revenue projections for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), which runs Muni, show a decline in parking citations and a resulting budget deficit, just as the agency has been trying to restore service that was cut in May.

In a quarterly financial presentation to the SFMTA Board of Directors yesterday, acting Chief Financial Officer Terrie Williams revealed that first quarter fiscal year 2010 revenues were down by $5.8 million, due largely to a $7.5 million decrease in parking citations over what was budgeted, and despite stronger than expected transit fares.

If the current revenue numbers trend over the course of the fiscal year, the SFMTA would be facing a nearly $24 million deficit for the year, despite an effort to find extra funding to restore the service the agency promised by January, 2011.

Though SFMTA managers haven’t produced a line item analysis to explain exactly why the parking citations were down, staff offered numerous theories at the meeting to explain the trend, from temporary events to structural changes in travel patterns and labor issues..

Foremost among the temporary events that disrupted PCO citation schedules was the St. Francis Circle rail replacement project, which at times diverted up to 20 parking control officers (PCOs) daily from their normal citation routes. Numerous traffic diversions around the Transbay Terminal construction also led to the agency using PCOs for traffic management instead of citations. In both cases, the salaries for the PCOs will be reimbursed from the capital budgets associated with the construction projects, but the lost citation revenue obviously cannot be recovered.

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[This story originally appeared on Streetsblog San Francisco]

Photo: Myleen Hollero/Orange Photography

The Obama administration got a lot of attention earlier this year when it raised fuel efficiency rules to an average 35 miles per gallon across the nation’s fleet of automobiles that will be produced between 2012 and 2016. Now the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), a division of the U.S. Department of Transportation (US DOT), have laid out an ambitious road map [pdf] to push tougher greenhouse gas emission and fuel economy standards for passenger cars and trucks built from 2017 through 2025, standards that hypothetically could push the national fleet average up as high as 62 mpg.

“We must, and we will, keep the momentum going to make sure that all motor vehicles sold in America are realizing the best fuel economy and greenhouse gas reductions possible,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. “Continuing the national program would help create a more secure energy future by reducing the nation’s dependence on oil, which has been a national objective since the first oil price shocks in the 1970s.”

GHG and MPG levels analyzed for various scenarios. Source: US DOT

Today’s report provides an initial assessment for a potential national program for the 2025 model year horizon and outlines next steps for additional work the agencies will undertake to meet the yet-to-be established GHG reduction goals. Depending on the scenario eventually chosen, the industry will have to reduce CO2 production across the national car and truck fleet from a minimum 3 percent (or the equivalent of 47 mpg) up to 6 percent (or the equivalent of 62 mpg).

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Photo: Myleen Hollero/Orange Photography

Though San Francisco has been getting a lot of attention recently for its trial pedestrian plazas and “parklet” sidewalk extensions in former parking spaces, which has drawn interest from cities around the country and even spawned a copycat in New York City, the Big Apple has raised the bar considerably on improving pedestrian safety with the release this week of the NYCDOT’s groundbreaking Pedestrian Safety Study and Action Plan.

Given the recent high-profile bicycle fatality at the hands of an allegedly drunken driver on Masonic Avenue and the perpetual danger to pedestrians in San Francisco (4.33 fatalities per 100,000 population, significantly higher than New York’s 3.49, and nearly four times the rate in one of the safest pedestrian cities, Stockholm, Sweden), pedestrian advocates and city health professionals are urging city leaders to conduct a similar study and develop a comprehensive action plan for the streets of San Francisco.

“I think the document itself that they’ve prepared is a statement from the city that pedestrians are in fact a high priority,” said Paul Supawanich, a member of the Pedestrian Safety Advisory Committee of the Board of Supervisors, about New York City.  “We’ve yet to have anything nearly as comprehensive in San Francisco.”

“I think the fact that [New York City] was able to create something the ties existing pedestrian conditions and injuries with action plans including planning, enforcement, and performance measures is quite a feat,” he added.

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