San Francisco Bike Blog

Not just Daly City - all of us.

That’s the impression I had while listening to the Daly City Design Charrette proposals. I listened to three out of four before I decided it was time to go home and get hammered. Maybe by the time I woke up, I reckoned, I’d have forgotten what I’d just seen. I was wrong.

There were some good insights, but the overwhelming message from the meeting was, “How can we accommodate cars and traffic better, but make things a little bit less drab?”

The day’s session was just a big idea factory - which is fine, but I don’t like hearing about the car-centric nature of our planners. These are the people who are going to decide our future. And we all suffer from car-centric, car-dependent development.

There is no way that these people had ever heard of Complete Streets, or Streetsblog, and there was no way that they could imagine that ‘induced demand’ could apply to bicycles, too. They could not possibly know how disastrous cars and parking are to society, and certainly never heard of The High Cost of Free Parking.

These people are planning our collective future.

There was one design which actually seemed to call for fully, physically-separated bike lanes. Score! So, there is hope.

I couldn’t figure out a way to suggest a comment - there was supposed to be some type of question and answer session at the end, after everyone had finished their proposals, but the whole thing seemed…off. You need to be able to get feedback on your design before it’s finished, don’t you? What is the point of a Q&A at the end of the day, after 12 hours, after everyone is full (from Chinese food for dinner and yummy cupcakes) and exhausted? The point is, of course, to make sure that nobody can question what the planners have in store for Daly City. It wasn’t a charrette - it was a charade.

There were a few comments from the presenters that stood out over the course of their presentations - only the first three of which I saw.

• One presenter suggested that she and her team had walked around their area to get a sense of what was going on on the street. ‘Awesome!,’ I thought - they’ll, like, totally get the right idea - they’ll know intuitively how dominant cars are in the corridor and how they’ll need to really work the place over to give pedestrians and cyclists the room and comfort they need to actually be able to move around and up and down Mission Street without being terrorized by cars. Then she noted how ‘most of the cars in the area are going 90 miles per hour through there’ - this lady was like a gift! ‘This is someone who really gets it,’ I thought. And then she said her team decided that they didn’t want to impede car traffic through the area so they decided to put some greenery up around the streets, some trees, some green trinkets on the sidewalks, and that would hopefully slow the cars down a little bit. I put my face in my hands (really), tried to compose myself, found my inner power animal, cooled out, and started thinking about what I was going to have to drink later that night.
• These folks will do anything for cars. They will absolutely go that extra mile. They’ll sacrifice the future of Daly City for cars. They were talking about 3 levels of car parking below grade. They were talking about parking garages on every street corner. They were talking about car parking underneath and along the entire stretch of Mission that is being redeveloped, and at the same time as they were talking about all the wonderful car parking they were going to install, they had the nerve to mention ‘density.’ They talked about shifting streets and lots by a couple of degrees to make room for more parking. It was awesome.
• One guy who was actually pretty funny was this older, grouchy, embarrassing, outspoken architect-type. Things didn’t start well when he talked about driving around in cars and vans to get a look at everything. I guess if you want to promote private car use, you need to see it from the point of view of someone driving a car. Makes sense. Each of the four teams had a ‘Team Leader’ - this older guy was the team leader for his team. He talked about creating a ‘PiccaDaly Circus’ - a big tent-like thing with trinkets in it and cars and pedestrians - he didn’t say, “and plenty of bloodshed, too,” but I guess that was just a given. The idea would be fine with me without the cars - I don’t care what they build - just give me dedicated, physically-separated bike lanes - and ideally, wider, walkable sidewalks - and you can put whatever monstrosity you want in your CBD.
• Lots of folks were talking about ‘the greening of the auto industry.’ I kid you not - these folks think that they are going to make Daly City a better place by turning all of those crappy auto repair shops into crappy ‘green’ auto repair shops. Really. And maybe they think they’re going to save Detroit while they’re at it. I thought it was very telling how prominent cars were to these folks - it seems about all they talked about. We’ll have some new ‘green car research showcase’ entity, and right across the street we’ll have a ‘green car vocational school’ so kids can go across the street, and if they make it alive, they can pull a Vanna White and show off some green car stuff in the showcase showroom thing. Or something. ‘We have some ideas for how to save the Daly City auto industry,’ they told a hopeful crowd - eager to hear how the benevolent automobile would be spared the wrath of humans who were slowly waking up to the incredible ills brought about by the automobile. Daly City, they seemed to be saying, was going to battle reality until the end - and they’ll fight until the last man (is run down by a car).
• There were a couple of folks who let the word ‘pedestrian’ slip once or twice from their lips, and you could tell how committed they were to the idea of having people roam the streets, because you know how many new retail shoe stores they proposed along the route? None. And you can guess how many bicycle shops they proposed would also spring up on this new pedestrian and cycling paradise? None.
• Most of the planners knew nothing about Daly City. One lady mentioned ‘the bowling alley or shop thing where they selling bowling balls or something.’ That’s fine, as far as it goes, but it kind of goes to the heart of having people who don’t live in Daly City designing Daly City. Again, it was ‘just an idea factory,’ but who knows how much of this idea factory will make it into the end design of Mission Street? Exactly how much new parking can we expect? A local planner who was serious about success would know in intimate detail the functions and roles of that quirky bowling shop. That it exists at all is a bit of a miracle - surely there must be something special about it. And maybe Daly City planners will pay attention to local retailers, or maybe they’ll just prescribe some more parking and be done with it.

Daly City has 2 BART stations in or near it (Daly City and Colma), a major bus transit hub (the top of the hill, at Mission and San Jose), and it is one of the most dense cities in the country - yet the people planning its future are firmly dedicated to the private automobile. They’ll build mountains of parking, all while screaming ‘Density!’ from the top of their lungs.

And yet there’s still hope. That someone was audacious enough to make a little drawing allowing for physically-separated bike paths is not something to be dismissed. Things are not set in stone, yet. Daly City residents who care about the future of their town can still help shape it - I’m sure of that.

…One of the design proposals mentioned building an entertainment-style complex like the Sony Metreon in downtown SF. Maybe it’s possible they’ll do it right, but I hope they don’t duplicate the ’success’ of what we have here in SF:

Nearly three years after purchasing the troubled Metreon complex, Westfield and Forest City have settled on a plan for its rebirth.

Sources briefed by the developers say that food and culture rather than retail will drive the reconfigured four-story building. Opened in 1999, it first symbolized the optimism of the dot-com era in San Francisco — and later, its ultimate disappointment.

Building on the cultural density of the Yerba Buena neighborhood — within two blocks are more than a dozen cultural institutions, ranging from SFMOMA to the Cartoon Art Museum— most of the second floor will be converted for cultural uses like museums or performing arts. Meanwhile, the ground floor will feature more than a dozen food options, from standalone restaurants with entrances on Fourth Street to smaller 500-square-foot kiosks like those found in San Francisco Centre’s basement food court. Some of those spaces could end up as retail.

Maybe a huge, ugly, gaudy, unwelcoming, intimidating, ‘entertainment movie-whatever complex building’ could work in Daly City, on the main drag, or maybe it’s a terrible idea. I don’t know - but I can imagine what it must be like for the management of that joint to try to get people to actually want to come in there - Mission Impossible. I don’t know if there’s another structure in the entire city that says, ‘Get away from me,’ the way the Metreon building does. And, granted, this idea did come from ‘the kids,’ which I appreciate, so it deserves attention and respect, but don’t doom Daly City to the same blight we have here in San Francisco. I mean, if you really want a Metreon, take ours - we’re not using it.

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