This week's StreetsWiki entry highlights an intriguing storyline that our colleagues at Streetsblog San Francisco will be covering in the months ahead. The Better Streets Plan aims to establish a citywide template for street improvements:
ThePlan describes a set of policies for the City and County of SanFrancisco to follow to achieve a more livable streetscape environment.It creates a street typology system for making streetscapeimprovements, and describes appropriate standard and optional elementsfor each street type. For each element, there is a set of guidelinesfor appropriate location and design. Finally, the Plan will describeways that the City can fund, maintain and enforce Better Streetsimprovements.
The folks at local advocacy org Livable City
say the street types in the plan are a step up from the traditional,
car-centric classification system, but caution that the current draft
lacks critical components:
Importanttasks, like identifying which streets are of what type, and creatingstandards for essential elements of successful streets (street lightingand pedestrian-friendly building fronts, for example) are missing sofar. The Better Streets project also shied away from addressing thespeed and volume of traffic, two critical elements for creating safeand livable streets. Governance (how city agencies plan and coordinatestreet projects) and a strategy for funding and implementation alsoneed to be addressed.
Starting in January
you can read about the evolution of Better Streets in the cyber pages
of Streetsblog SF. In the meantime, members of the Livable Streets
Network familiar with the plan should feel free to dive in and flesh
out this wiki entry.
