For those of you not in San Francisco: we have an old freeway running right past the ocean. It is falling into the ocean, and for decades had been closed like 20% of the time as backhoes regularly had to be deployed to haul sand dunes off the freeway.
So eventually sane minds at SFMTA said, "Well this fucking sucks, let's just close it and make it a park" and the voters overwhelmingly said yes.
People love it, merchants love it.
But it turns out that there are so many car-brains in the Sunset District ("The Staten Island of SF") that they will literally burn the world to the ground if it makes them have to drive 2 blocks out of the way. Like they have recalled their supervisor over this, filed multiple specious lawsuits, and constantly vandalize the artwork in the new park. Oh, and after that recall, our car-brain millionaire Mayor Danny Bluejeans spectacularly stepped on his own dick, which was just... *chef kiss*.
Anyway,
Judge tosses lawsuit claiming Great Highway closure was illegal:
A San Francisco judge denied all arguments in a lawsuit that sought to undo Prop. K and return cars back to the coastal road. The voter-approved ballot measure to turn the Upper Great Highway into a park remains intact.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
"the Sunset District ('The Staten Island of SF')" is a great line! 👏
I love the Great Parkway (or Sunset Dunes or whatever), and even more so for having seen the large numbers of people using it even in bad weather. But the ocean doesn't care, and we will still have to defend it, freeway or parkway.
- I have yet to understand what the dude that owns the Riptide is hell bent to kill it (and Valencia bike path)
I am convinced that every merchant who complains about parking spaces is actually complaining about exactly one parking space, the one in front of their business where they park their personal car all day starting at 6am. Car Brain makes everyone act against their own interests. Cars are the Cordyceps of Cities.
same dynamic on Ocean where the OMA is fighting the red lane. What about “people driving by and not stopping to buy stuff” don’t they get!
You're almost certainly correct.
I was involved in a street improvement project in Toronto and some shop owners claimed they'd go out of business if any of parking was removed.
The math didn't make sense though, so some activists went out and recorded when the parking spaces were being used, with the goal of showing how many customers actually used the parking.
In almost every case, there was only one car parked in the spot all day: the owner of the shop.
There have been a few attempts in Sweden to have free parking in certain neighbourhood shopping districts and they have all turned out complete failures b/c the parking spots always end up being used by the shop owners themselves who call each others to warn whenever a parking enforcement officer is sighted.
@jwz
...part of me wonders if a 'reasonable' compromise would be to let _them have theirs_.
Make it easier to eliminate 90% of the problem, it makes it waaay easier to see how much better things get, and to then get more improvement...
(but I may be underestimating the proportion of the spaces used by such people, so.)
in the UK on a high street you can only fit one or two spots per shop anyway. Owners and staff can block all available space on their own
all SF city arguments are like this. It is a mistake to assume people are arguing about anything other than personal convenience. They don't care about a 6-story condo on the corner. They just don't want the construction. The end result is irrelevant.
Related is how merchants fabulously overestimate how many of their customers drive to the store. You might remember the Polk Street bike lane project when merchants' estimates on customers who relied on cars were off by about 4X.
In my neighborhood a project to convert 4 lanes of car traffic into 3 car lanes + 2 bike lanes (a.k.a. road diet) was carefully design to have zero impact on parking. Yet during the year plus public outreach meetings, opponents reflexively and loudly complained about the nonexistent "loss of parking". Even after being corrected multiple times in the same meeting, they still feared this ghost.
I am not enjoying the "everyone is an expert" atmosphere of public engagement.
YM the "Bankruptcy Lane" of course.
Ironically/stupidly, at least as of about a year ago, the Riptide had a giant parklet in front of it. There are no parking spaces there.
The L is right there at the end of the block, which is how people should be getting to and from an outlet that exists to get people drunk.
Even more ironically/stupidly, the area is overwhelmingly residential and after 6 pm. You know, well before prime time for a bar, when all the parking is taken up by people living there.
This happened to a couple of shops near us (convenience store and cafe owned by the same guy) the council started enforcing the double yellow lines outside them, queue lots of moaning that he his mates couldn't park there any more
Can confirm, this is exactly what happened in Clifton in Bristol (UK).
The council decided to implement parking restrictions, local businesses complained saying it was the worst thing ever and that they would all go out of business.
Result: None of them went out of business, most of them are still there ten years after the parking restrictions were introduced.
The original plan would have removed the Great Highway by now anyway -- putting it to a vote only accelerated the timeline by about a year. So arguing about it now is entirely a moot point.
Tear down the very inefficient park and build THE GREATEST HIGHWAY! A triple-decker highway on the beach, it will be an ode to vehicular efficiency and a new SF landmark. Visualize the postcards: the sun setting behind the 3 levels of bumper to bumper traffic, the colors enhanced by heat and tire dust.
Fuck the kids, let’s drive on it.
I've officially been in The Sunset for a-year-and-a-half now (I refuse to say I "live" in this unheated flophouse where I'm stay with two assholes who repeatedly catch COVID).
Things I love:
Things I despise:
Danny Denim cherry-picked specific non-white Karens to rep this area, and we've seen how that's turned out. Sunset Dunes is great (the air is actually breathable and the sky is visible, now that there's no smog!), and I can only hope that Danny's stupidity torpedoes any attempt to change it back.
I applaud you for considering both Sunset Dunes and the Haight as within walking distance despite being 4 miles apart. If more able bodied people thought like you, a large tranche of our country's problems would evaporate.
I'm a born-'n-raised San Franciscan - walking is what I do. When I was a broke-ass teen, I couldn't even afford the cable car, so I'd regularly walk the length of Powell (yes, from the BART station all the way north on a regular basis. I'm the sorta person who'd have to be super-exhausted to not walk to a place on Market or Mission St. (or be somewhere far off like the Sunset, Fort Mason, or Twin Peaks, where getting there is an odd journey).
Sometimes I feel like Chris Rock in Dogma: "Back in the old days with JC, we used to walk everywhere!"
I've been in the Sunset for ten years now (though I could be 4 miles from you, since it's so sprawling), and while I love-love-LOVE it out here, I hate-hate-HATE the Karens. We had to walk blocks around those myopic loudmouthed tablers so as to not get into altercations with them, for real.
We're at the Sunset Dunes all the time, and most folks are just out enjoying the awesome instead of stewing in their own nasty recall-obsessed juices.
But also, I really miss our former supervisor, Gordon Mar, who was also our neigbor and a really nice guy! Things have been pretty unhinged since. Totally fantasized about having him back, post-recall. But noooooo, we get the refrigerated pet-corpse lady. Fail.
Hell, Dead-Pet Lady was a true "blink and you'll miss it" tenure. The new-new guy is only there for one terrible reason:
JFC, this guy... 🙄
I mean, the Car Brains have made it abundantly clear that you only get to be their supervisor if you hate parks, so this was inevitable. If he didn't hate parks, they'd have replaced him with someone who did.
Also the "compromise" of "demolish the skate park and turn the whole thing back into a freeway for only 5 out of 7 days" is some serious "Solomon cutting the baby in half" judicial thinking.
[flips table] Right, this new dipshit. I'm going to stand outside Gordon Mar's house with big sad eyes until he agrees to re-emerge.
Are the "car-brained millionaire" and "spectacularly stepped on..." links supposed to point to different places? Right now, they both point to a Mission Local article about the incompetent hired to replace the ousted Supervisor and how she resigned in like a week.
Fixed
Create a special assessment for them, specifically, to "repair and maintain" it since they want it so badly?
Your comment : "Cars are the Cordyceps of Cities"
😘
I lived on Great Highway near the end of Taraval, then a few blocks inland for nearly a decade, and I don't understand the people opposed to closing upper Great Highway.
You have to be on it all the way from Sloat to Lincoln, so it's not really useful for getting around the Sunset. I always thought it was more for peninsula dwellers to get to work.
The only possible legit complainant could be the Zoo since one of their entrances is on the section that's falling into the ocean. (protip, if you walk along the zoo fence on Sloat you can see into the kangaroo enclosure for free.)
You know, I've been here most of my life and I've never been to the SF Zoo. They've always just seemed like Animal Jail.
(Somehow aquariums don't seem like Fish Jail, though. Maybe I just don't respect fish.)
Accurate. I lived walking distance to the SF Zoo all that time and went there one time. You have to remind yourself that legit zoos (SF's is a good one) do a lot of good conservation, rescue, etc. work to offset seeing a depressed polar bear. The animals are largely the 'show' to earn income to do all the work you don't often hear about.
San Diego Wild Animal Park (ahem, 'Safari Park') is the closest thing I've seen to a non-depressing zoo.
Jeez, I sound like a zoo fanboy. I've literally been to maybe 5 zoom is my life. But it's hard to forget that fucking polar bear.
No, I realize that zoos as organizations do good work, but still.
I've been to the San Diego zoo... probably in like 1990? And it was certainly less jail-like, but I still found it creepy.
Oh! I forgot that I went to the Disneyworld zoo in Florida in like 2006 or so, and those habitats seemed actually pretty non-creepy. But, you know, nobody knows how to lie like Disney.
Sometimes my friends are like, "why don't you have any pets" and I say, "I have pets! I've got dozens of finches and three crows! They live right on the other side of my window. We all like it that way."
Found a car-brainer
and of course it has a spelling error.
I see he got a shave and a haircut.
People with Mad Car Disease are quite difficult to cure.
Darn. Looks like I missed the The Great Park Naming contest.
(was so looking forward to Parky McParkface)
At last, a small good thing! Whooo!
Womp womp:
Danny Denim's hand-picked D4 choices are going super-well. Like... so great.
I will say that I'm genuinely disappointed that Chyanne Chen (one of the few progressives left on the Board of Supes) signed on, but I am happy to
Sorry: "...happy to see it fail so spectacularly."