Chris Carlsson
Recent Posts
For a City of Panhandles! Copenhagenize it!
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Mona Caron’s rendition of 24th and Folsom after we’ve made a few basic changes. (Thanks to Mona Caron for this image, originally published in the Bay Guardian in 2006.) We’ve been waiting for years now to see some physical changes to accommodate the huge increase in daily bicycling. We did get an odd set of […]
CBS 5’s Joe Vazquez Has a Critical Math Problem
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Critical Mass, March 2009. Photo by Bryan Goebel. I got a call a week ago from the SF Bike Coalition‘s media person. She was looking for someone to talk to Joe Vazquez of CBS 5, a reporter who was going to do a piece on Critical Mass. I declined, having been interviewed far too often […]
Of Teamsters and Turtles, Plumbers and Progressives
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Cultures meet over real work at Heart of the City Farmers’ Market Ever since the much-promoted alliance between “teamsters and turtles” at the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999, there’s been a renewed hope that the decades-long opposition between organized labor and environmentalists might be resolvable. The original Teamsters and turtles weren’t really in much […]
Another Model of Convivial Spaces
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Crowds stretch down Glasgow, Scotland’s Buchanan Street pedestrian-only zone. In Glasgow, Scotland a few weeks ago I had the opportunity to reacquaint myself with a lovely feature of many European cities: broad central city streets converted to pedestrian only. In Glasgow it’s on Sauchiehall Street and makes a grand turn onto Buchanan, covering over 20 […]
Moralism vs. Utopianism–of Red Lights, Helmets, Bike Lanes and…
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Flickr photo: Dear Knucklehead The Oregon Legislature has flushed an effort to bring the Idaho rolling stop law to that state. It’s a bit of a surprise, given both the simple and proven efficacy of allowing cyclists to make rolling stops, as well as Oregon’s big reputation as a bastion of cycling sanity. I’ve been […]
Over the Pond
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⁞Cyclists disappear in bus lane while a pedestrian bolts across the street in South London. Editor’s note: While changes appear to be in the works in London on the public space realm (check out our latest Streetfilm posted today), Chris Carlsson got a slightly different take when he visited there last week. I’m on a […]
The Slow, Beautiful Road to Community on the Streets
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Mona Caron contemplates her next stroke on her new mural at Jones and Golden Gate in San Francisco. Mona Caron is a visual troubadour of street life in San Francisco. Her murals have become increasingly famous in their gorgeous detail, portraying San Francisco’s romantic past juxtaposed to inspired visions of its future. Equally powerful is […]
Will We Ever Get Market Street Right?
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“Rebuilding Market Street has become a civic obsession in San Francisco. The city’s main street has been torn up and rebuilt completely at least once in every generation since the Civil War.” —Carl Nolte, San Francisco Chronicle, July 5, 1988 Apparently it’s time again. San Francisco faces another massive effort to remake Market Street, trying […]
A New Mural in the Tenderloin
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The mural is being painted on the white building in the second square from left, as seen from the Bell Tower atop St. Boniface Church on Golden Gate. (Photo LisaRuth Elliott) A new mural is taking shape in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, at the corner of Jones and Golden Gate, diagonally across from St. Anthony’s Dining […]
Critical (Soggy) Move
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Soggy cycling volunteers move the Bike Kitchen, one posse seen here at 9th and Mission, Sun. Feb. 22. On Sunday, in a relentless rain that rarely stopped all day, several dozen die-hard enthusiasts rode their bicycles back and forth between the new Bike Kitchen at 650 Florida (back where it once was between Alabama and […]
A Garden Bike Tour in Bayview
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A lot of what makes living in a city so fun is the ability to walk or bike around and see surprising things that you wouldn’t expect, made possible by being in the streets and moving at a human pace, without the membrane of a steel box and corporate radio to mediate your experience. It’s […]
Good Roads?
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I just finished an interesting journey that took me to the World Social Forum at the mouth of the Amazon River system in Belem, Brazil, and then to Los Angeles and finally home, just in time to attend a presentation last night at CounterPULSE of Rick Prelinger’s Lost Landscapes III. The show consists of rare […]