9/30/2005 Letter to the Mayor After Community Meeting #4
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.
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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
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Amandeep Jawa
President, San Francisco League of Conservation Voters
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937 Valencia St.
San Francisco, CA 94110-2320
http://www.sflcv.org