Recent Streetsblog SF posts about Chris Carlsson

A Public Space Renaissance in San Francisco

By Chris Carlsson | | 21 Comments
Crowds gather on eastern slope of Dolores Park near 18th. One of the ongoing dilemmas for landscape architects, city planners, and yes, even transit geeks, is the chicken-and-egg question regarding public space. If you build it, will they come? Is there a “public” demanding wider sidewalks, public squares and plazas, pocket parks, and depaving, and […]

The Ghost Streets of San Francisco

By Chris Carlsson | | 38 Comments
Ghosts cavort where Castro Street should be! Intrepid explorers of San Francisco regularly stumble upon the many ghost streets that still hide all over town, rewarding the patient pedestrian for their diligence. Mostly they are on hillsides where steep grades impeded road building at earlier moments in history, but they’re still presented as if they […]

Train Strike!

By Chris Carlsson | | 9 Comments
View of Market Street during 1907 streetcar strike (from San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library) On Sunday BART workers might strike, throwing Bay Area transportation into chaos. It’s a tiny echo of the kind of warfare that used to erupt regularly a century ago on the streetcar lines of San Francisco. 1,500 streetcar men […]

Wreckless Riding

By Chris Carlsson | | 22 Comments
Photo by Bryan Goebel. In 1978 I was a field manager for an environmental group’s canvassing operation and was driving "my crew" in an old beat-up Volkswagon from one suburb to the next. From about 3 p.m. we’d visit every house in a given area, knocking on doors seeking donations and support, ending around 8:30 […]

Is Sunday Streets the Next Critical Mass?

By Dave Snyder | | 22 Comments
Flickr photo: Michael Bolger Though it occurred for just four hours on two miles of streets in the Mission, this week’s Sunday Streets event has transformed the livable streets movement in some of the same ways that Critical Mass transformed San Francisco’s bicycle rights movement in the early 1990s. “Even better than Critical Mass,” was […]

Farming, Park Parking and Empty Promises

By Chris Carlsson | | 22 Comments
The Potemkin Victory Garden during Slow Food Nation, August 2008. Gavin Newsom is running for President, er um, I mean Governor (you gotta take these things one step at a time). Maybe he’ll make it, maybe something will wreck his chances. It’s an interesting drama from the point of view of recent American history, as […]
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