The Many Efforts to Improve Mid-Market

There is no shortage of efforts and opinions on improving Mid-Market. I've been bookmarking this work through delicious. Taken together, the links provide a sense of all the activity.

Progress on Mid-Market Visioning, by Cindy Talley

There was a time when the character of city life was unrelated to the quality of urban space. Around the turn of the century, streets were full of people completing the necessary arrands of the day. This film of Market Street -taken in 1906- shows just how bustling the street was.

Today, Jan Gehl explains, we are often able to plan our lives so that we don't need to use the public realm. This means that the quality and content of our streets and parks have a major impact on how frequently they are used. In mid-market's case, the decline of first-run cinemas mid-century left a stark void on the street. As I curate temporary program and design interventions to last until Market's repaving around 2015, I am striving to build upon existing activities and create new attractions that will once again bring people the area. A better used mid-market means a safer, more delightful place.

2010 SUMMER INTERN PROJECT – VISUAL POLLUTION BASELINE REPORT

San Francisco Beautiful is happy to welcome as our summer intern Tomas Sanguinetti an Environmental Science major at Dickinson College (Carlisle, PA).

Tomas will work to develop a baseline report on the regulation of billboards and other outdoor advertising that will:
- examine alternative regulation and enforcement mechanisms
- understand legal precedents and cases in the US, California and San Francisco
- understand best practices nationwide
- develop a roadmap of alternative next steps SF Beautiful can take on the regulation and enforcement of general advertising and signage

San Francisco Beautiful will use this Baseline Report to develop an Action Plan to help guide the organization and a Summary Report will be used to:
-brief politicians
-brief the media
-inform neighborhood groups

Types of outdoor advertising to be covered:
-billboards (general advertising)
-electronic signs
-wheat pasted
-on furniture, by city contract (kiosks, bus shelters, news racks, etc)
-on transit vehicles
-banners on poles
-mobile billboards
-temporary billboards in vacant storefronts
-A-frames
-For sale/for rent signs

Stay tuned as Tomas will be writing a regular blog on his efforts. Follow him as he makes his way through LexisNexis, newspaper clippings, library stacks and whatever other rock he must look under to find his answers. Good luck, Tomas!

San Francisco Beautiful Debuts Market Street Visions Project

Following on the heels of last November’s defeat of Prop D which would have plastered the Central Market Street area with wall-to-wall billboards, San Francisco Beautiful has debuted the first annual San Francisco Beautiful Urban Realm Prize designed to create positive change in this neighborhood. The Prize was won by Cindy Talley, a recent graduate of the University of California Berkeley with a Master of Landscape Architecture, and provides a stipend for three months work. Teamed with SFB’s Public Affairs Committee, in cooperation with SFB Board member Scott Preston and his team at Design + Planning at AECOM and the San Francisco City Planning Department, we will present the city with a vision of what this troubled neighborhood could become. We are studying Market from Fifth to Van Ness, including the U. N. Plaza area and Fulton Mall, and Grove Street from Market to Van Ness.

The plan will present a conceptual vision, tying together ideas about how best to use the public realm – for pedestrians, cyclists, trolleys, and motor vehicles – to address what John King, Chronicle Urban Design writer recently characterized as “forlorn at one moment, threatening the next, and it has persisted for more than four decades …” He goes on to quote former long time planning director Dean Macris, “If there was ever a reason to rethink it, this is the time.”

Rethink it we are, including everything from sidewalk widths, traffic mix and location, lighting, landscaping, drainage, and ways to activate the sidewalk and plazas to attract pedestrians and ultimately economic activity. SFB’s work in the 1990s to make it easier to permit sidewalk cafes has paid off all around the city, and most recently even in the central market area which now has its fist and popular such venue.

Cindy will be adding to the San Francisco Beautiful Blog as she makes her way down Market Street. Come back to see what she is discovering.

Jim Chappell Named Interim Executive Director

San Francisco Beautiful welcomes Jim Chappell as its Interim Executive Director. Contact Jim at jim@sfbeautiful.org.

Advertising California Out of Debt

As many of you know, San Francisco Beautiful has been taking on the blight created by general advertising, and in particular flashing, digital billboards for years. This editorial in the Sacramento Bee came to our attention and felt that it was worthy to share with you. Governor Schwarzenegger  wants to sell advertising space on state highway message boards in order to fill the state's depleted coffers.

Editorial:
Flashing road ads? Why stop there?

Published: Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2010 - 12:00 am | Page 14A

Unwilling to pursue revenue options that have the word "tax" attached to them, the Schwarzenegger administration has floated yet another grasping-at-straws idea to fill the state's depleted coffers.
This time the governor wants to sell advertising space on state highway message boards.
You laugh? Don't.
The proposal is serious. If approved, existing message boards - the ones used to alert drivers to road hazards ahead or abducted children - would be upgraded with LED technology and converted to colorful commercial grade electronic billboards. The state would lease the billboards to outdoor advertising firms and collect the money upfront to help balance the state budget - as much as $2 billion over 20 years for 500 billboards.
But there's a hitch. Because the billboards would operate within the rights of way of interstate highways, the proposal requires a change in federal law. State Transportation Department officials have sent a waiver request to federal highway administrators asking permission.
A federal review of electronic billboard safety is already under way, suggesting the governor's idea is not as far-fetched as some might think. But the review involves e-billboards alongside highways, not on the road itself.
Frankly, we're both hoping and betting that the state's waiver request doesn't go anywhere. Billboards are ugly, and LED billboards are blinking ugly. Not only that, but they could pose a traffic hazard if they distract motorists already distracted by the lunch they are eating and the cell-phone calls they are conducting.
If the Schwarzenegger administration follows this path, it may soon embrace an idea first suggested by Board of Equalization member Bill Leonard - sell naming rights to various state buildings.
"Major corporations pay big bucks to have their names on sports arenas," Leonard said in his weekly newsletter. "It's time California joined the auction. "
Think about the possibilities. The California Environmental Protection Agency headquarters in downtown Sacramento could become the Chevron EPA Building.
The California secretary of state's office could be sponsored by Diebold, the controversial maker of digital voting machines.
The Board of Equalization building? Perhaps Clorox could sponsor it - since a lot of bleach is needed to clean up that mold.
Crass? Yes, but preferable to electronic billboards in the middle of state highways. At least a big Terminix sign on the Capitol dome wouldn't be a road hazard.
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