The Page Street traffic circles are back!
Folks who live on Page St. and remember the traffic circles fiasco on upper Page--they had to be removed after the SF Fire Department complained about maneuvering fire trucks around them---will be interested to learn that the circles are coming back, courtesy of the Planning Dept., in the Market and Octavia Plan in an attachment just added on Feb. 1. "The Market and Octavia Draft Community Improvements Program Document," Appendix C, page 91. In fact, Planning wants to turn all of Page Street. into a "bicycle boulevard," which means that "To the greatest extent practicable, stop signs should be removed from Page Street. Where necessary, stop signs can be replaced by traffic circles or roundabouts..."
Labels: Bicycle Plan, District 5, Market/Octavia, Traffic in SF
posted by Rob Anderson @ 3:29 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Well.. I took a look at the document and came across another alarming aspect of the plan: The proposed newly configured Market/Church/14th intersection.
According to the plan diagrams, vehicular traffic traveling down 14th St. will be prohibited from crossing Market St. The drawings clearly indicate the placement of concrete medians and palm trees in the 14th St. right of way!
For anyone unfamilar with the area, 14th St. is one of the few good cross-town routes!
See Market/Octavia Plan (Doc M-3.1 Page 56, Figure 9) Market Street at Church Street: Existing and Proposed
Thanks for the tip. I haven't taken a close look at the whole document yet. Note that this whole document was just tacked on to the end of the Market/Octavia Plan, which is coming before the Planning Commission tomorrow afternoon/evening. They sneak all this shit into the Plan when they think no one is paying attention. Another question: Why is the Planning Dept. carrying out the SF Bicycle Coalition's agenda? The Market/Octavia Plan is heavily influenced by the anti-motorist agenda of the Bicycle Coalition, which supports this Plan on their website. Note too the anti-parking bias in the Plan, which is contrary to the city's one-housing-unit-one-parking space rule for new housing units. The M/O Plan combines the mindless, pro-development, We Need Housing policy with the anti-car bullshit pushed by the SF Bicycle Coalition. But you won't hear any objections from the lemmings on the BOS.
I love this blog. In 2 back to back posts we see complaints about how bad car traffic is in Hayes Valley and then another complaining about bike and pedestrian improvements on 14th St. (Improvements that got "snuck in" even though they went through the normal planning proces including community meetings.) So you hate car traffic and you hate bike and pedestrian traffic. I guess we should all just stay home and prattle away on the internet, eh?
"Improvements"? Yes, that's what the bike people always call whatever they do to city streets on behalf of 1% of the city's residents, but I have a different view. I emphasize the horror that is the new Octavia Blvd. because both the SFBC and Planning are in complete denial about what's been wrought in Hayes Valley. They now want to put the Market/Octavia Plan "improvement" on top of that disaster area, which will bring thousands of new housing units and thousands of more cars into the area, not to mention the UC land-grab at the nearby extension property, which will mean another 450 housing units.
Poorly-noticed and sparsely-attended "community meetings" are just not good enough when making permanent changes to city streets. That's the whole point of the recent litigation over the Bicycle Plan. The city needs to do some serious traffic studies before they do this sneaky stuff. Could you provide some specifics as to these alleged "community meetings"? Like when or where?
In any event, what's this bicycle stuff doing in the Market/Octavia Plan? It was attached to the end of the M/O Plan on Feb. 1, even though the Planning Commission was scheduled to vote on it the next week. This is typical of the stealthy manner in which the city's Planning Dept. and the SFBC have been operating for years.
Besides, the post you're commenting on was about the Page St. traffic circles, not 14th St. Do you deny that both the Page St. residents and the fire dept. objected to the traffic circles? So why are they back, attached at the last minute to the M/O Plan?
I don't own a car; I ride the bus or walk everywhere in the city. What I hate is deliberately making traffic worse for everyone on behalf of a tiny, crackpot minority.
Post a Comment
<< Home