Tag Archives: San Francisco

Parking, Census, & Maps

Some cool map-related items:

San Francisco’s Parking Census – with one of those ideas that’s so obvious that no one ever thought of it before, San Francisco has completed the first known census of all the publicly available parking spaces in an American city.  The census found 441,541 spaces in the city, just 280,000 of which are on-street spaces – occupying an area comparable to the city’s Golden Gate Park.

The release of the public parking space census coincides with the redesign of the website for SFPark, an occupancy-based parking management trial funded with a $19.8 million federal congestion mitigation grant, which among many objectives, seeks to manage the supply of parking by adjusting the cost to match demand. To put that in laymen’s terms, if SFPark works well, there should be enough parking at the curb so that drivers don’t have to circle the block endlessly searching for that elusive space. By gradually adjusting the price of parking up or down in the pilot areas, the city expects to create roughly one or two free spaces per block face at any time, the original purpose of parking meters when they were introduced in the 1930s.

Jay Primus, who directs the SFPark trial for the MTA, said the parking census was the first step toward a better understanding of how parking works in San Francisco, filling a void where city planners could only make rough estimates previously. “If you can’t manage what you can’t count, doing a careful survey and documenting all publicly available parking was a critical first step for the MTA for how we manage parking more intelligently,” he said.

The importance of this data, especially to this level of detail, cannot be understated.  Applying this type of information to performance pricing systems is just one potential application.   The study’s accompanying PDF map shows just how detailed and granular the data is:

SF_Parking_Census_2

SF_Parking_Census_1

Each dot along the streets represents a meter, the larger circles within blocks represent off-street parking.   Garages and non-metered street spaces with less than 25 spaces per block aren’t even shown.

The real Census also has some cool maps – the Census Bureau’s Take 10 map allows you to see real time (relatively speaking) response rates by census tract for DC:

CensusMap_3-30-10

Currently, DC’s response rate stands at 44%.  Tract 4902, highlighted above, is only at 39%.

Street spaces over 100 years

For a nice Saturday morning post, David over at Greater Greater Washington points to a great video from San Francisco, circa 1905.  The video is shot from a cable car traveling down Market Street, San Francisco’s great axial street.  The clock tower of the Ferry Building terminates the view, all while pedestrians, horses, cars, streetcars, and just about every other mode of transport share in the controlled chaos of a street where all modes share space.

Our streets weren’t always so compartmentalized, with segregated spaces for cars, pedestrians, bikes, and so on.  David gives a hat tip to the Ludwig von Mises Institute for the video, where the free-market libertarians posting the comments attribute the resulting order to the power of markets to organize themselves.

Several, however, note the limitations of such an example as a case for removing all traffic restrictions and separations – changes in technology, mass, speed, and so on – as well as the fact that managed and planned order can indeed be more efficient than this type of organic order.  Another notes that some of the chaos may not have been completely authentic:

I saw this video before, with a commentator talking alongside it. The car that crosses the tracks and is barely missed by the streetcar is actually part of the filming team, asked to do that to keep things interesting. If you pay attention, you see him cutting accross [sic] many times, actually crisscrossing in front of the streetcar.

Yet another commenter points to an almost exact re-creation of the same video from 2005, this time making use of travel along the F-Market streetcar line.

The arrangement of street space, obviously, has changed.  So has San Francisco’s urban fabric, now complete with skyscrapers.  The older video just predates the devastating 1906 earthquake and fire, a major factor in re-shaping San Francisco’s urban form.  The comparison between the two is stark, both for the things that have changed, as well as for the things that have not.

Back at GGW, commenter Lance throws a few barbs about overhead wires obstructing vistas.  It’s worth noting that DC’s current streetcar plan does not have any long stretches of track along the main vista avenues, such as Pennsylvania Ave.  Under the idea of a hybrid solution and careful routing, we might not even need wires to cross those main vistas, yet alone run along them. It’s also worth noting that San Francisco’s wires in the 2005 video are not just for streetcars, but also electric trolley buses – a few of them are seen in the video itself.  Since trolley buses do not run on steel rails, they require two wires to act as a ground.

Links – bad day for the Midwest

Soldier Field, US v. Honduras World Cup Qualifier, summer 2009. CC image from flickr

Soldier Field, US v. Honduras World Cup Qualifier, summer 2009. CC image from flickr

The US has narrowed their list of potential host cities for the US Soccer Federation’s bid to host either the 2018 or 2022 World Cup – and shockingly, that list does not include the Windy City.

The final cities are Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Dallas, Denver, East Rutherford, N.J., Houston, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Mo., Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, Seattle, Tampa, Fla., and Washington.

“With Chicago, I think there was some Olympic fatigue,” Gulati said, referring to that city’s unsuccessful bid to host the Summer Games in 2016. “And in this group, Soldier Field was one of the smallest stadiums.”

Good news for DC – both FedEx Field and M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore made this cut, which almost assures the region of hosting some World Cup games should the US win the right to host. This list of 18 cities will be trimmed to a final list of 12 stadiums.

However, the exclusion of Chicago is baffling.  Chicago regularly hosts US World Cup qualifiers, Gold Cup matches, is home to an MLS team, and hosted many matches the last time the US hosted this event in 1994. Renovated Soldier Field is indeed small in terms of capacity, but this is Chicago we’re talking about here.

Only slightly less confusing is the exclusion of any stadia from the San Francisco Bay Area, but at least this can be explained by the poor quality of the extant stadiums in both SF and Oakland.  However, the San Francisco 49ers stand to get a new football stadium in the near future, certainly before 2022 rolls around.  Likewise, given Dan Snyder’s constantly rumored talks about wanting to build a new stadium for his micromanaged Redskins, DC could be looking at a new stadium, too.

Point being, 12 years is a long time from now.   Leaving off two of the US’s greatest cities from a bid that’s meant to showcase not just America’s stadiums and hosting abilities but the host cities as well is just inexplicable.

(advice to the USSF folks – it’s 106 miles to Chicago.  Hit it.)

Picture of Detroit Industry mural. CC image from flickr

Picture of 'Detroit Industry' mural. CC image from flickr

Detroit is another city that hosted World Cup matches in 1994, but was left of this bid’s list.  That obviously isn’t the focus of Detroit’s current issues.  Mammoth directs our attention to a piece by Bruce Katz on re-industrializing Detroit.  Katz looks to international precedents (Turin, Bilbao), addresses the need to Detroit to shrink and shift – even with re-development and re-industrialization, and the huge impact this might have on the shape of the city.

Obligatory DC connection:

Detroit has to change physically because it simply cannot sustain its current form. It was built for two million people, not the 900,000 that live there today. Manhattan, San Francisco, and Boston could all fit within Detroit’s 139-square-mile boundary, and there would still be 20 square miles to spare. Even more than its European counterparts, which had much less severe population losses, Detroit will have to become a different kind of city, one that challenges our idea of what a city is supposed to look like, and what happens within its boundaries. The new Detroit might be a patchwork of newly dense neighborhoods, large and small urban gardens, art installations, and old factories transformed into adventure parks. The new Detroit could have a park, much like Washington’s Rock Creek Park, centered around a creek on its western edge, and a system of canals from the eastern corner of the city to Belle Isle in the south. The city has already started on the restoration of the Detroit River waterfront, largely bankrolled by private philanthropy. The city has created a new “land bank,” which can take control of vacant and derelict properties and start the process of clearing land, remediating environmental contamination, and figuring out what to do next with the parcel, whether that’s making it into a small park, deeding it to a neighbor to create a well-tended yard, or assembling large tracts of land for redevelopment or permanent green space.

Also from mammoth, Rob Holmes takes a peek at the massive scale of some new solar infrastructure, linking to this post on the sprawling SEGS facility in California – conveniently located next to the world’s largest boron mine for scale comparisons.

Similarly, the scale comparisons remind me of a video recently shared with me about mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia.  The video comes from Yale University’s Environment360. the 20 minute video is extraordinarily well shot and edited, and well worth a watch.  Given DC’s proximity to Appalachia and our (relative) reliance on coal power in this region, it’s definitely of interest to those of us in the Mid Atlantic region.

At a bare minimum, the images in the video alone are worth a watch.

When I think of tools for urban living, GMC trucks aren’t the first thing that come to my mind.  I guess using that kind of comparison is like saying a jackhammer is a tool for hanging picture frames around the house.

Portland hasn’t seen big shifts in travel modes recently, as Jarrett Walker notes.  However, Jarrett and a few of his trusty commenters seem to have a bead on to the potential cause – relatively cheap parking.

In other recent work we’ve been doing, we’ve repeatedly seen that parking price is the most powerful locally-controlled lever for shifting people out of single-occupant cars, in the absence of more direct congestion charges.  Increases in parking costs drive big shifts to transit or other options.

In my experience working on various transportation demand management programs, this is absolutely true.  Since TDM programs do not usually have the scope to implement congestion pricing, parking pricing is the single biggest contributor to mode shifts.