Streetsblog New York City

The idea of removing the northern section of Highway 280 near Mission Bay in San Francisco is gaining more traction as planners look for ideal ways to usher in high-speed rail and transit-oriented development in the city’s core.

At a forum held by the San Francisco Planning + Urban Research Association last Thursday, Mayor Ed Lee’s transportation policy director, Gillian Gillett, sketched out a proposal to follow in the footsteps of the removals of the Embarcadero Freeway and a section of the Central Freeway, which revitalized the neighborhoods the roads used to divide. As Adina Levin at Green Caltrain reported, Gillett argued that replacing the elevated portion of I-280 with a street-level boulevard, from its current terminus at 4th and King Streets south to 16th Street, would improve the livability of the area, open up land to develop new neighborhoods, generate more tax revenue from real estate, and open up engineering solutions to facilitate the extension of Caltrain and CA High-Speed Rail to the planned Transbay Transit Center.

As past cases have shown, creating a surface street where that part of I-280 now stands and integrating it into the neighborhood would actually reduce overall car traffic. In a moment that would make the city’s mid-20th Century freeway protesters proud, Gillett told the crowd, “Let’s be San Francisco and take down the freeway.”

Walk SF Executive Director Elizabeth Stampe called the proposal “an exciting opportunity to re-orient our city around sustainable public transportation and create a more walkable city.”

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Less than a week after Queens Community Board 3 signed off on DOT’s PARK Smart pilot for Jackson Heights, New York’s neighborhood-level parking policy changes were given some national context on Wednesday at the National Association of City Transportation Officials’ “Designing Cities” conference.

Given the Department of City Planning’s halfhearted attempts to reduce off-street parking requirements, NYC DOT’s changes to on-street parking prices are the boldest parking reform happening in the city right now. But the panel made clear that nationally, other cities have a leg up on New York when it comes to putting the right price on parking.

New York is one of several cities across the country taking steps to reduce double-parking and wasteful cruising for scarce curbside spots by adjusting meter rates to align with demand. This type of curbside parking management can be a very effective tool to reduce congestion. In some New York neighborhoods, drivers cruising for parking constitute nearly half of all traffic.

On-street parking reform is “very much lodged in the broader effort in New York to change how the street is used,” said NYC DOT Deputy Commissioner for Traffic and Planning Bruce Schaller at the panel. By reducing the number of drivers double-parking or distracted by the search for a space, Schaller said, “it’s easier to bike down the street if you have a bike lane and it’s faster if you’re on the bus.”

While NYC DOT has achieved measurable progress with PARK Smart in Park Slope, two California cities are out in front on curbside parking reform. San Francisco’s SFpark program and Los Angeles’s LA Express Park are perhaps the nation’s most advanced on-street parking management programs.

Both cities, spurred by federal grants that help cover the cost of new parking technology, have incrementally adjusted prices as often as once a month in response to demand, installed sensors to measure real-time parking availability, launched pay-by-phone systems, and provided smartphone apps and on-street electronic signage with rate and availability information. (The apps, of course, cut both ways, since they can distract people behind the wheel if used while driving.)

Los Angeles also outfits enforcement agents with a tablet application that maps the location of every car occupying an unpaid parking space, allowing them to target enforcement. In Los Angeles and San Francisco, parking enforcement is performed by the transportation department; in New York it falls under the NYPD.

In San Francisco, the city government stopped offering free parking to its employees when SFpark went into effect and instead gave workers the option to either pay the same meter rates as the general public or buy a $1,000 permit for unlimited parking. “We wanted to put our own house in order and play by the same rules as everybody else,” said SFpark program manager Jay Primus. In New York, while City Hall has tried to cut the number of free parking placards issued to city employees, the total remains above 100,000. All those drivers with free parking perks can disrupt efforts like PARK Smart to put a more rational price on curbside spaces.

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Editor’s note: As the prosecution of cyclist Chris Bucchere, accused of manslaughter for fatally striking pedestrian Sutchi Hui, has drawn national attention, we thought this story would be of interest to our New York readers.

SF District Attorney George Gascón is set to bring felony vehicular manslaughter charges against Chris Bucchere later today for biking into 71-year-old Sutchi Hui in a crosswalk at Castro and Market Streets, killing him. Any traffic death on our streets deserves a thorough investigation with appropriate charges filed against the responsible party. But this high-profile case raises the question of why so few other perpetrators of traffic violence face similar repercussions.

So far, six other pedestrians are known to have been killed in San Francisco this year. SFPD and the DA have not drawn nearly the same level of public scrutiny to those cases as they have to the Bucchere/Hui case. The media, meanwhile, is captivated. The most visible difference setting Bucchere’s case apart, of course, is that he was riding a bike when he killed Hui, while the people who killed the six other victims were driving motor vehicles.

All pedestrians who are injured on SF streets (899 in 2011) and the survivors of those who are killed (17 victims last year) deserve thorough investigations and appropriate actions from law enforcement agencies to deter dangerous behavior, regardless of the mode of travel of the perpetrator. But the DA and SFPD don’t display the same zeal for prosecuting drivers who kill (save those who are drunk or flee the scene) as they have for Bucchere.

Gascón and the SFPD have improved their record in recent months by charging a few such drivers in 2011 cases, and spokesperson Stephanie Ong Stillman argues that the DA’s office has given fair attention to cases that the SFPD has brought before it.

However, the SFPD apparently doesn’t treat all traffic fatalities equally, even in cases where police investigators determine the driver to be at fault. So far, there has been no action against the drivers responsible for the deaths of 47-year-old Sena Putra and 22-year-old Robert Yegge — both of whom were killed within the last month by truck drivers who the SFPD says failed to yield. The evidence that the drivers who killed Putra and Yegge violated the law seems comparable, if not stronger, than the evidence in the Bucchere case, yet there is no word that the department will seek charges. (Streetsblog has requested a list of pedestrian fatalities presented by the SFPD to the DA’s office for investigation this year. DA staff said it is compiling the list, but we have not received it as we go to press.)

To build a legally defensible case against Bucchere, prosecutors went to great lengths to gather evidence, as is appropriate for any traffic death. They collected GPS data and surveillance footage, and spent weeks tracking down witnesses to make the case that Bucchere’s illegal behavior caused the crash (he apparently entered the intersection on a yellow light, which isn’t illegal). Sources said the DA ran into hurdles in building the case, which led to a delay in Gascón’s announcement of the widely-anticipated charges. According to a statement from the DA’s office, Gascón will try to prove recklessness by focusing on Bucchere’s pattern of behavior leading up to the crash, during which he allegedly sped and ran stop signs — a case which the SF Bay Guardian said rests on questionable grounds.

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Tom Radulovich, the executive director of the local non-profit Livable City, describes the recent livable streets achievements in San Francisco as ”tactical urbanism” — using low-cost materials like paint and bollards to reclaim street space.

That willingness to experiment was a big reason that the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) gave its 2012 Sustainable Transport Award to San Francisco (an honor shared with Medellín, Colombia). In this Streetfilm we profile the innovations that earned SF recognition from ITDP.

Perhaps the city’s most exciting new development has been the parklet program, which converts parking spaces into public space complete with tables, chairs, art, and greenery. These mini-parks are adopted and paid for by local businesses, but they remain public space. The concept has its roots in the PARK(ing) Day phenomenon started by the SF-based Rebar Group in 2005.

San Francisco has also seen an impressive 71 percent increase in bicycling in the past five years, despite being under a court injunction that prohibited bicycle improvements for most of that time. The city aims to have 20 percent of trips by bike by 2020. Sunday Streets, San Francisco’s version of Ciclovia, has also drawn huge numbers of participants and continues to expand.

The city has also taken the lead on innovative parking management with the SFPark program, which uses new technology to help manage public parking in several pilot neighborhoods. It aims to make it easier to find a parking spot by adjusting prices according to demand, helping to reduce pollution, traffic, and frustrations for drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists.

This is the fourth part in Streetsblog’s series profiling 11 officials who are bringing American cities and towns into the 21st century when it comes to transportation and planning policy. Read the earlier profiles in part one, part two, and part three.

Jay Primus

Manager, SFMTA’s SFPark program

In your average city, parking policy is pretty rigid: The parking meters have their rates, and the rates don’t change, no matter how much cruising and double-parking results from prices that don’t reflect demand for curbside space.

That’s not how things work in San Francisco. For the last few years, the SFMTA has been rolling out a groundbreaking program called SFPark, which recognizes that curbside parking is a scarce good and should be priced in response to demand. Headed up by Jay Primus, SFPark could be the model for parking policy that cities all over the country seek to emulate.

Applying the theories of UCLA professor Donald Shoup, SFPark promises to reduce cruising and double-parking by adjusting prices and distributing information, so that drivers find available spaces quickly instead of searching fruitlessly ad nauseam. It’s called “dynamic parking,” and it adds a whole new level of sophistication and intelligence to parking policy — not to mention a mountain of data.

Overseeing the interpretation of and response to all this data is Primus. Managing the parking data — not to mention the public communications challenge that comes with an overhaul of parking prices — is a big job. Primus has been hard at work at it now for three years.

There have been bumps, and as one would expect, some backlash when the program has expanded into areas that currently don’t have meters. Encouragingly, the rollout has gone smoothly in areas that already have meters. Primus himself has said it is too soon to judge the effect of the program.

But there’s no disputing that Primus is leading San Francisco to a new frontier of parking policy. And the lessons learned from SFPark will prove valuable for cities everywhere.

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[Editor's note: We had to share this story out of Streetsblog SF with our New York readers. As badly as NYPD bungles crash investigations, they hardly have a monopoly on mishandling traffic cases.]

On their ride home from a Valentine’s Day dinner, Ian Long and Johanna Weaver were harassed by an angry driver and allegedly threatened by a police officer who didn’t want to hear their story.

Long and Weaver were riding in the right-hand lane of Oak Street along the popular Wiggle bike route around 8 p.m. on February 14, when they say a Toyota Prius driver approached from behind and began honking before swerving in front of Weaver first and then Long. After the driver and the couple all turned right onto Scott Street (following the topography of the Wiggle), the two say the driver slammed on his brakes and caused Long to crash into the back of the car, causing injuries to his hands. The driver stayed at the scene, though Long said he was initially unresponsive to his questions.

The two officers who responded weren’t much more helpful, according to Long, Weaver, and at least two other witnesses. According to a video interview with the couple and Long’s roommate, who drove to the scene, San Francisco Northern District Police Officers Joshua Olson and Melvin Maunu seemed reluctant to take testimony from the victims and other witnesses.

Long said that as he attempted to explain his side of the story, Olson interrupted him and threatened to throw him in jail “for vandalizing the vehicle,” even as Long’s finger bled “quite profusely.”

In fact, Long said he feared the officer would have arrested him had he not accepted medical attention from paramedics. Witnesses say although Olson interviewed the driver, he refused to listen to Weaver or many other witnesses.

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It’s too soon in the development of SFPark to draw any conclusions about the effectiveness of demand-responsive pricing on parking habits, says the SFMTA’s Jay Primus, who manages the SFPark program.

Primus got in touch yesterday when the Streetsblog Network highlighted a blog post from Michael Perkins at Greater Greater Washington which claimed that the results of the experiment, which began in April, are showing that “prices affect parking less than San Francisco expected.”

“To date,” wrote Perkins, “the most crowded blocks have typically continued to be crowded even after adjusting the prices upward, while under-occupied blocks have not filled up even after dropping the price.”

Primus responded in the comments and spoke with Streetsblog to address points raised by Perkins and other readers. “The ‘expectations’ that Michael wrote of are simply and nothing more than his own expectations,” Primus said. It’s also worth pointing out that Perkins’ post didn’t include any specific data or sources that support his assertion.

“SFMTA has taken a very empirical approach with SFPark,” said Primus, “and this is a demonstration project that is just getting started, so it’s a little early for anyone to say how well it’s working, especially without proper analysis and evaluation.”

See the full statement from Primus after the break:

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New York City is moving forward with plans to use sensors to improve parking management, along the lines of San Francisco’s pioneering SFPark system. The program will be unveiled next year, Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan announced at a conference on transportation and technology held last Friday at Columbia University.

For now, DOT is only dropping tantalizing hints about the program. During her presentation Sadik-Khan showed an illustration of parking sensors and an SFPark smartphone app guiding drivers to open parking spaces. When asked by an audience member whether the new system would only be used to alert motorists to parking opportunities or to manage the pricing of on-street spaces as well, Sadik-Khan replied, “both.”

Using sensors to manage the price of parking could be transformative. SFPark covers eight San Francisco neighborhoods and roughly one-quarter of the city’s metered spaces. Data gathered from sensors embedded in the road, enables the city to adjust meter prices with the goal of ensuring that there is always one parking space available on each block, reducing the traffic caused by cruising.

Last year, DOT put out a request for expressions of interest in a program that could be even more far-reaching. At the time, the agency expressed interest in a system that could not only enable dynamic pricing of parking, but also automatically alert the NYPD to parking meter violations, crack down on parking placard abuse and synchronize with pay-by-phone technology.

DOT did not respond to Streetsblog inquiries seeking more information about Sadik-Khan’s announcement, so it is not yet clear how robust a program will be rolled out next year. The possibilities, though, are substantial.

San Francisco launched the world’s most ambitious and innovative parking project yesterday, a federally-funded trial that could revolutionize the way cities manage the public supply of parking. SFPark promises to make it easier for motorists to find spaces in busy commercial districts, while reducing congestion, speeding transit, increasing safety for pedestrians and bicyclists, and improving air quality.

The milestone for SFPark was celebrated at a packed press conference in the North Light Court at City Hall yesterday morning. SFMTA Chief Nat Ford was joined by Mayor Ed Lee, parking guru and UCLA Professor Donald Shoup, and other dignitaries to announce the SFPark iPhone application and real-time parking availability data.

The demand-based parking pilot is being implemented over the coming months, covering 7,000 of the city’s 28,800 metered spaces and 12,250 garage spaces. Drivers, thanks to street sensors, or magnetometers, will be able to check their iPhone application (an app will be available for Android in the coming weeks), or computer, to get real-time data on the availability and cost of parking spaces in 15 commercial districts.

“How many of you have been dumb in your past? How many of you have acted dumb? I know I have,” said Mayor Lee. “You know, when you’re driving around looking for a parking space and you’re double parking and you’re running around trying to see whether something will open, you’re dumb.”

“We want to be less dumb about this, and that’s why I’m so happy to launch today’s pilot program, SFPark,” Lee said. “That’s going to be our San Francisco version of congestion pricing.”

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You might be shocked at how much traffic consists of drivers who have already arrived at their destination but find themselves cruising the streets, searching for an open parking spot. In some city neighborhoods, cruising makes up as much as 40 percent of all traffic. All this unnecessary traffic slows down buses, endangers cyclists and pedestrians, delays other motorists, and produces harmful emissions. The key to eliminating it is to get the price of parking right.

So what’s the right price for curbside parking? According to UCLA professor Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking, “the right price is the lowest price you can charge and still have one or two spaces available on each block.” Depending on the demand for parking at a given location, the right price could be higher or lower than the static prices you see at traditional meters. You need a dynamic system that adjusts the price based on demand.

The city of San Francisco has been putting Shoup’s ideas into practice on an unprecedented scale with its SFpark program, which will fully launch later this week. In addition to strategically adjusting curbside meter rates, SFpark sets prices in city garages to make them an attractive alternative to on-street spots, and distributes real-time information about parking availability to help drivers find open spaces. It is the most ambitious project in the United States to cut traffic and improve quality of life by getting the price of parking right.