Blog » blog

What are unaccepted streets and paper streets, and how can they help make San Francisco a greener place?

SPUR’s 2011 Piero N. Patri Fellow, Sarah Moos, spent this summer studying the city's unmaintained and underused rights-of-way. The resulting project, Unaccepted Streets: From Paper to Reality, proposes to transform some of the city's overlooked areas into a publicly accesible network that would link communities to open spaces such as the Blue Greenway, as well as to each other.

An “unaccepted street” is any public right-of-way not accepted by the city for maintenance. A “paper street” is an unimproved street that is demarcated on maps and legislated as a public right-of-way but that may not actually exist on the ground. Below are four examples: an uprow, or unimproved utility right-of-way; a pedestrian street, designated for pedestrian-only use; a private parking street, a street being used for parking and under private jurisdiction for maintenance; and Guerrero Park, a Pavement to Parks project.

With the aid of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Moos, a master's candidate in UC Berkeley’s Landscape Architecture and City and Regional Planning program, surveyed 2,224 unaccepted streets and 323 paper streets in San Francisco. She filtered the data through spatial overlays to identify the areas within the city that provide the best opportunity for transforming these not-quite-real streets into useful public spaces.

After investigating the existing conditions of the streets in real life, Moos identified ten typologies of unaccepted streets. She then developed a toolkit of interventions such as stairs, benches and plantings that could be applied to transform these sites, improving their condition, accessibility and connection to a larger network of linked public rights-of-way.

Moos singled out nine areas of targeted study in San Francisco’s southeastern neighborhoods. She then met with neighborhood groups, city officials and others to determine which design interventions might work best for these sites.

Her research is the first step toward connecting these rights-of-way to improve neighborhood access to green space and connect southeastern San Francisco to a broader open-space network.

Learn more about the Piero N. Patri Fellowship >>

Stop by the Urban Center to pick up a hard copy of the final project map or download it below.

On Tuesday, Congress returned to Washington with only 11 days to pass essential legislation: the reauthorization of all major national transit and highway projects and the gas tax that funds them. Stalemate or delay will cost billions of dollars and millions of jobs, shutting down highway and transit construction projects nationwide and putting hundreds of thousands of Americans out of work in the midst of an unstable, jobless recovery.

Passage of regular infrastructure spending packages used to be routine in Washington, but in today’s fractious Congress, all bets are off. Already this summer we’ve witnessed costly Congressional standoffs over the raising of the debt ceiling and the funding of the FAA — other spending measures that used to attract bipartisan support.

In less contentious times, a federal surface transportation bill is passed roughly every six years. This regular package uses our current gas tax of 18.4 cents per gallon to generate the billions of dollars necessary to maintain our interstate highway network, many transit systems around the country, bicycling and pedestrian facilities, and freight-rail operations.

Even in periods of divided government, infrastructure investment has typically provided an area of consensus. Investment in reliable roads and transit provides immediate construction jobs and lays the foundation necessary for long-term economic growth.

Yet in today’s hyper-partisan environment, the two parties have failed to agree upon a new bill, allowing nearly two years to pass since the last package expired. During this time the nation’s infrastructure has relied on a series of tensely negotiated extensions that provide no new direction or funds for the improvements desperately needed to the country’s decaying bridges, highways and transit networks.

The mounting shortfall in government spending is undermining the economy more and more. The most recent report by the American Society of Civil Engineers states that “glaring deficiencies in America’s surface transportation systems drained households and businesses of nearly $130 billion last year, including about $97 billion of increased costs to operate and repair vehicles and $32 billion of increased travel time because of congestion and delays.”

Investment is sorely needed, but the latest temporary measure authorizing spending on federal infrastructure is about to expire, and the divided Congress is likely to spend the next two weeks bickering over another mere extension.

In fact, what is desperately needed is not another extension, but a new long-term bill — one that raises the gas tax.

In most of the developed world, users pay a duty on gasoline at the pump. The revenue goes directly into investment in the country’s transportation infrastructure. Since 1932, maintenance of the United State’s transportation infrastructure has been largely funded through this kind of user fee. Every president Since Herbert Hoover has raised the federal gas tax to keep apace with the country’s transportation needs. Presidents Reagan and Bush Sr. raised it the most of any. But since 1993 the fee has been stalled at 18.4 cents, a mere 5 percent of the $3.62 that the average American paysfor a gallon of gas and about a tenth of what the average European pays.

Our political leaders’ failure to raise the tax for the last two decades means the Highway Trust Fund faces what the Washington Post calls “a near term insolvency crisis”— just as most of America’s midcentury infrastructure has started to need upgrading. Experts from Gregory Mankiw of the Wall Street Journalto Dan Akerson, the CEO of General Motorshave insisted a gas tax is necessary to maintain safe and functional roads, bridges and transit — and to reduce the economic losses caused by the inadequacy of the country’s transportation network.

Our current gas tax is much too low to support a first-world level of infrastructure. And we will be lucky to see it merely extended this fall. Raising the gas tax is a political non-starter in a Congress cowed by the specter of the Tea Party.

What the United States really, desperately needs is not another temporary extension, arrived at after extended and wasteful posturing. We need real investment in our roads and transit. That means passing a comprehensive new surface transportation bill and raising the gas tax to a level that can support first-world transportation infrastructure for our first-world (last time we checked, anyway) country.

For more information, visit Transportation for America and America2050.

San Francisco’s Market Street has a long and fascinating history: from its ambitious beginnings as an over-scaled boulevard, laid out by Jasper O’Farrell in 1847, to its heyday as the city’s vibrant theater district in the early twentieth century. Market Street rose to prominence after the 1906 Earthquake, survived a series of urban planning experiments in the mid-twentieth century, and absorbed the important yet disruptive insertion of BART beneath its surface in 1972. Today, Market Street displays the varied, accumulated layers of intervention. How can we remedy the vacant storefronts, improve pedestrain and traffic circulation, and reduce crime and other issues that prevent Market Street from being a true civic spine?

Several city agencies, including the Mayor’s Office, the Department of Public Works, the Planning Department, the Transportation Authority and the SFMTA, along with residents, merchants and community groups, are trying to answer these questions with the Better Market Street project. The project seeks to revitalize Market Street from Octavia Boulevard to the Embarcadero by reestablishing the street as a premier cultural, civic and economic center of San Francisco and the Bay Area. As the city undertakes this important project, we must ask: What imprint will we make on Market Street’s future?

Reclaim Market Street! – SPUR’s newest exhibition— seeks to inspire a new vision for Market Street, learning from the past and drawing upon examples of successful urban design and street design trials. The exhibition will draw from Market Street’s history, citing ephemeral events that have shaped the spirit of the street and created the rich heritage it will draw from in the future. Provocative national and international examples such as Paris’ Plages, Bogota’s Cyclovia, and New York’s Times Square pedestrian plaza will be illustrated with films, images, and descriptions connecting San Francisco to efforts around the world advocating for more livable streets.

The exhibition, on display at SPUR from September 6, 2011 until January 6, 2012, will be accompanied by a series of interactive events, which will encourage participation and discussion about Market Street’s future. These include the staging of three interventions for the street, plaza and sidewalk, as well as walking tours and film screenings.

Join us on Tuesday, September 6 at 6pm for the opening party at the SPUR Urban Center Gallery. The party will feature talks by the Studio for Urban Projects, SPUR and UC Berkeley Professor of Architecture Margaret Crawford and refreshments.
 

Register for the opening party >>

See the full lineup of Reclaim Market Street! events >>

In many neighborhoods in San Francisco, the opening of a new grocery store is notable. But in the Bayview, a new Fresh & Easy store that opened on August 24 filled a full-scale grocery store gap that had persisted for more than 15 years. “It’s all about health, about neighborhood vitality, about jobs, and about fulfilling old promises,” explained Mayor Ed Lee at the opening. “That is what this store represents.”

The store opening, planned since late 2007, marked the success of a partnership between Fresh & Easy and a number of city agencies and advisory groups. In 2007, the Southeast Food Access Working Group, which is supported by the Department of Public Health, released a survey showing widespread support for more grocery options in the Bayview. Responding to this desire, staff at the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development (MOEWD) reached out to many established grocery chains in San Francisco, including Safeway, Whole Foods, Andronico’s, Trader Joe’s and others, seeking a company that would open a store in the neighborhood. All of them declined to set up shop, except for Fresh & Easy.

With a lot of recent focus on incentivizing the creation of grocery stores in food deserts through programs such as the federal Healthy Food and Financing Initiative and the California Endowment’s FreshWorks Fund, it’s worth noting that the City of San Francisco did not provide any direct subsidies or loans to Fresh & Easy. Instead, MOEWD helped make the project a reality by assisting the developer in changing its building plan to make space for the grocery store while still adhering to code; helped spearhead a change to the city’s restrictions on alcohol sales in full-scale grocery stores so that the store could offer some alcoholic beverages; and facilitated the availability of federal New Market Tax Credits for Fresh & Easy’s participation in the development of the project. And, as the project moved forward, the Bayview Hunters Point Project Area Committee, which advises the city’s Redevelopment Agency, also provided feedback. This concerted effort by multiple city agencies and groups helped seal the deal for Fresh & Easy.

The store isn’t without controversy. Labor groups are critical of Fresh & Easy’s stance on unions, some neighborhood activists oppose the store’s sale of alcohol, and others argue that the development as a whole should include more affordable housing. Protesters with picket signs joined those who came to the opening to shop for groceries.

But neighbors’ enthusiasm was even more apparent. When Fresh & Easy CEO Tim Mason touted the store’s policy of not stocking food with transfats, “ingredients you can’t pronounce”, and focusing on fresh options – some in the crowd began applauding.

After the speeches, the doors opened to the public. And, for the first time in many years, Bayview residents could walk the aisles of a full-scale grocery store in their neighborhood.