Last week, Kris Opbroek & other City staffers working on the Valencia Streetscape Improvements gave 2 project update talks at the Mission Police Station at 630 Valencia St.

I (Amandeep Jawa), Tom Radulovich & Amy Tanner attended the second of these two meetings & here are some notes I took:

The street designs were the same as we have been discussing for the past few years. (These designs can be seen here). Fundamentally, the sidewalks from 15th to 19th will be widened from 10 ft to 13-15ft depending on turning pockets in the streets. Additionally, the sidewalks will get various amenities added such as street trees, pedestrian level lighting, etc.

Unfortunately, due to some grant-funding issues, the start date has been delayed 6 months from Fall 2008 to Spring 2009! The plan of record is now that work will begin on April 2009 & be completed by March 2010.

The expectation is that they will be working one block at a time, starting first with utility relocation & then paving, and then sidewalk amenities.

We spent a reasonable amount of time discussing a few other issues:

• Loading Zones:
  To accommodate truck loading now that we will be losing the center median, loading zones will be striped on the sides of the streets. These zones will be longer spots than exist on Valencia currently and will designated for loading.
• 26 Valencia MUNI Bus:
  The current design doesn’t include bulbouts where there are bus stops. We discussed the fact that the 26 Valencia bus is likely to be discontinued & what can be done with the bus zones in the 15th to 19 area. Various ideas for designated bike parking, to additional street cafe space to a taxi stand were discussed as possibilities. Providing bulbouts at corners, and moving the bus stop back slightly from the corner, was suggested as a way of accommodating the bus for as long as it exists, without losing the corner bulbouts at important corners like 16th and Valencia. City staff were unwilling to consider changing the curb layout, but were more open to alternative uses for the bus zones
• Side Street Bulb Outs:
  Tom Radulovich pointed out that the current design doesn’t include bulbouts on the numbered streets, and that this is a mistake. City staff responded that the corners are designed to accommodate large trucks turning, and refused to consider adding bulbouts, saying that the time for changes to the design has passed.

Kris Opbroek & other from the City staff working on the Valencia Streetscape Improvements will be giving 2 project update talks this month! They’ll be briefing the community on where things stand and where they are headed. I hope you all can come, one meeting is scheduled for the morning & the other for the evening:

Both meetings will be held at the Mission Police Station at 630 Valencia St. The first meeting will be held Tuesday, August 26th, 10-11am. The second will be held Thursday, August 28th, 6:30 – 7:30pm.

Here is the latest update from Dan Provence, of the Municipal Transportaion Agency’s Traffic Calming Program:

In a nutshell, it seems that we have received funding for 15th through 18th, and will find out in February if an additional grant comes through that will add 18th through 19th. Construction will either begin September 2008 (next year? yipes!) or February 2009 depending on whether the additional grant comes through.

‘deep

——
Hi All,

Things are going pretty well here and I think we have some good news to
report to you.

Federal SAFETEA funds, a Transportation for Livable Communities (TLC)
grant, and funds from Proposition K totaling about $5 million dollars
have been secured for construction of the Renewed Valencia Streetscape
Plan from 15th to 18th Streets. Another Transportation for Livable
Communities grant application for the block between 18th and 19th
Streets has been submitted and we will find out the decision on that
application in February.

The decision on the latest grant application will determine the timeline
for construction. We will receive the money from the first TLC grant
this summer. If we are awarded the second grant, that money will come
our way roughly 3-6 months after we receive the first amount. Since it
makes sense for the design and construction to move forward at the same
time, the project will be delayed if the fourth block is funded. If the
fourth block is not funded, we will be able to proceed with design and
construction sooner, but the project will not be as extensive (3 blocks
instead of 4). In more definite terms, construction is currently
scheduled for September of 2008 for the blocks from 15th to 18th. If
the 18th to 19th block is funded, construction will be pushed back to
February of 2009.

This project has competed against some very interesting and worthy grant
applications. Receiving the funds that have already been awarded shows
that this is a quality project and all those who worked to create it
should be proud. We will continue to seek funding for more of the
Valencia corridor and hopefully this project continues to do well. We
will look to the community as we get closer to construction to help with
some of the outreach, but it would probably be a little early for that
now.

Thanks,
Dan

Dan Provence, Planner
Traffic Calming Program
Municipal Transportation Agency - Planning Division
1 South Van Ness, 7th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94103

From the Livable City newsletter of 9/20/06. Big thanks to City Staff for all their hard work on this funding application (Marshall Foster, Manito Velasco, Kris Opbroek, Dan Provence, anyone I missed). This is excellent news & means that the funding is in place to begin implementing the plan from 15th through 19th!!!

———

On Wednesday, the Metropolitan Planning Commission awarded $2.6 million to the City’s Valencia Street Project. Livable City has been working with neighbors, transportation advocates, and public agencies for over a year to make sure that the planned resurfacing of the street, scheduled for the second half of 2007, brings with it improvements for pedestrians and cyclists as well. The current plan, developed by a multi-agency team coordinated by the Department of Public Works, includes wider sidewalks (up to 5′ wider), corner bulb outs, wider bike lanes, street trees, better lighting, public art, and a narrower roadway with left-turn pockets at key intersections.

The MTC funding should allow the city to add the bicycle, pedestrian, and streetscape improvements from 15th to 19th streets. The northern end of the Valencia, from Market to Duboce, should also receive streetscape improvements from surplus Octavia Boulevard funds.

(Thanks to Tom Radulovich & Livable City for the write up)

On Tuesday, June 13, 2006 the City unveiled the plan that grew from the community workshop meetings held this year. We’re pretty excited about it - see the details here.

Hey folks - due to a mistake on my part, we lost much of the original website. My sincere (and embarassed) apologies. I’ll try to resurrect as much of it as I can, any posts dated before this one are resurrected.

‘deep

This is a summary email Amandeep Jawa sent to the Better Valencia email list after the 5th City Planning Meeting in March 2006:

———-

Hi everyone -

Thanks to everyone who carved out time from their lives to come to Wednesday’s City-sponsored Community Meeting about Valencia. After talking to various Better Valencia Project folks who were there the consensus is that the meeting was very useful as a starting point and suggests that the City has a good schedule for moving forward. Obviously, this is very good news! It was clear that while they are perhaps still developing a process for community input on streetscape planning, the City staff was engaged, motivated, and excited and had put a lot of thought and effort into the meeting.

SUMMARY: The City has set up a timetable for a series of community meetings - one every 5 weeks, starting now that will produce a community plan for the Valencia streetscape. The city staff then gave a visual presentation on various possibilities of streestcaping and sidewalk design. The meeting then broke into four tables each of which worked with various street layout elements on representative street cross- sections. The elements used were sidewalk cross-sections of various widths, bike lanes, parking lanes, etc. This excercise seemed most useful for getting the participants from the community comfortable with the trade-offs and possibilities. After this exercise each of the tables presented broad brushtroke points that they agreed upon. Of all of the points made most teams chose fairly significant sidewalk widening and an understanding of considerations needed for parking and delivery issues.

DETAILS: The meeting opened with remarks from Manito Velasco, the MTA project manager explaining the process so far breifly and introducing Marshall Foster, the Mayor’s “greening czar”.

Marshall explained the overview of the project and the timeline and goals. Marshall breifly explained the resurfacing money involved, the Mayor’s greening funds available, and the Octavia Blvd. ancillary funds available. The meeting process will be as follows to achieve an official community approved plan by June 2006: March 1: Workshop 1: Creating a Vision for Valencia St March 25: Informational Walking Tour: Follow up on 3/1 Workshop April 12: Workshop 2: Interactive design May 24: Workshop 3: Final Collaborative Design Concept

After Marshall, Jessica Perez of the DPW landscape architecture staff gave a slideshow presentation showing Valencia as it currently used and giving very useful pictorial examples of various possible design elements, especially various sidewalks widths and possibilities for cafe seating. Additionally, elements such as street lighting and street trees were also featured.

At this point, the meeting was split up into four design teams facilitated by city-staffers. The first part of the exercise was simply to write various descriptive terms about Valencia’s blocks and various types of usage on a large block-by-block photographic map of Valencia. Then the teams were given a cross-sectional view of a typical mid-block of Valencia and was given cut-out elements such as a 10ft sidewalk, a 2ft sidewalk extension, a 4 & 6 ft extension, 9 ft parking lane, 10 ft street lane, and a few others. Each team was to lay the elements out on the cross-section and to come up with a plan for the average midblock. Then the teams did the same exercise for a cross-section of Valencia at the corner as opposed to mid-block. These exercises were very useful to get the participants aware of the various tradeoffs and opportunities involved in laying out the street. They were not very useful for actually presenting options for a real block design mostly because each block would probably have different needs. Additionally our group didn’t often come to a consensus before we ran out of time, though other groups seemed to have fared better.

The final phase of the meeting was brief presentations from each design table with a listing of various items of consensus from each group.

This is a version of a letter Amandeep Jawa sent to the Mayor and various other City officials at the end of September 2005, after the fourth community meeting.
——-
Mr. Mayor -

As a homeowner on Valencia Street, longtime Mission-dweller & President of the SF League of Conservation Voters, I share your concern for making the city more livable for all its inhabitants. To that end, I have been attending the Valencia Street Planning meetings & thought I should pass along this update on the state of the process after the 4th meeting. Valencia St. has great potential to be a showcase for our city, but this is an opportunity that must be seized and the meeting showed that considerable hurdles remain.

Unfortunately, the start of the meeting was completely different in tone from the last three meetings. Whereas the previous meetings had begun to focus on the clear highest priority of the community, namely the pedestrian environment on Valencia, this meeting was initially dominated by a focus on the medians and left turn lanes.

After some strenuous objections to the direction of the meeting, it became clear that community was much more interested in issues of sidewalk widening, street lighting, street trees, mid-block crossings and bulb-outs than left-turn bulbs and median striping. To be sure, the questions of left-turn lanes and median issues have some place in the discussion, but the general consensus from the community was that the current traffic experience on Valencia is relatively adequate, whereas the pedestrian experience is not.

As the main planner, Kevin Keck, and landscape architect John Thomas, began to understand the priorities of the community, they repeatedly made the point, however, that widening the sidewalks would simply be too expensive, and that the community would be better served with median improvements and perhaps street trees. At that point, various points were made by the community about the funding situation - including the fact that no budget has been established anyway, various signs of political will exist for raising funds, and the fact that various other projects had been funded and implemented eventually, once a compelling plan had been laid out.

At this point, various issues were discussed: questions of cost estimates (the staff had none at this time), possibilities for lane re-striping (taking 4 feet from the 14′ center median to give to the sidewalks), which blocks should be converted (14th-24th), possibilities for linking the project with the Octavia Blvd work proceeding on Valencia, possibilities for widening the sidewalk without relocating the sewer grates and thus reducing costs, etc.

Other discussion topics (from various points in the meeting) included the need for truck loading and unloading, the legality of median parking and its intractability, safety and street lighting.

Here are a few points which I would say were the consensus of the meeting:
- Valencia Street is a vibrant pedestrian street despite itself. This must be addressed.
- Since there is no dedicated funding anyway, why start of with a plan that no one is particularly excited about and will not fight for. We’d be better off creating a plan that people are excited about and then fighting for funding.
- The addition of the bike lanes and median striping a few years ago have resulted in a workable traffic flow on Valencia and does not need to be fixed much. Median parking is a problem, double parking in the bike lane is problem, but overall the street is adequate in regard to traffic flow.

Mr. Keck agreed that the next meeting should be more focused on plans, options, and cost estimates relating to sidewalk widening and the pedestrian experience.

On a bigger picture level, I had feared that the entire Valencia planning process would be halted after the previous lead planner, Nick Carr, was transferred and thus I am somewhat heartened that at least the planning has not stopped altogether. Thus having to start over from the beginning with a new planner has not been completely disheartening because I am hopeful that this meeting simply represented an understandable hiccup in the process: a new planner has been dropped in to an established series of meetings and needs to come up to speed; and also the planners seem to have traffic backgrounds, and thus need to be re-focused on Valencia since it is primarily a pedestrian and urban design problem rather than a traffic one. With any luck, we have helped them better understand the needs of the community, and the process can now move forward productively.

The proof will come with the next meeting I suppose.

‘deep

———————————-
Amandeep Jawa
President, San Francisco League of Conservation Voters
———————————-

937 Valencia St.
San Francisco, CA 94110-2320
http://www.sflcv.org