When Vincent Korta visited his family in Paris this summer months, he frequently turned to Google maps on his phone to see the quickest way to get to his upcoming vacation spot. Travel, wander, consider general public transit or bicycle?
Practically just about every time, he said, the app recommended bicycling. He often took the advice — and he could not believe how bicycle-helpful Paris experienced become since a previous excursion 3 several years back.
That city’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, has transformed Paris by adding far more than 180 miles of bike lanes, growing bike share applications, reducing a lot of parking areas, lowering the pace restrict to 18 mph on a lot of roads and turning some streets into pedestrian promenades together with together the correct lender of the Seine. She started out the work right after her election in 2014, but the pandemic spurred her into superior equipment, and Korta praised the outcomes.
He was just one of scores of Chronicle viewers who shared stories of current travel overseas soon after I described the joy of using London’s new Elizabeth subway line — quicker, more recurrent, cleaner and far more roomy than Muni or BART could ever hope to be.
Contrary to what he saw in Paris, Korta’s adopted metropolis of San Francisco is resuming the a long time-extensive fight over whether cars should be limited on 1.5 miles of JFK Push in Golden Gate Park, ending some well known Slow Streets and doing tiny about dashing targeted visitors. Mayor London Breed has not utilized the pandemic to remodel San Francisco in any major way.
We’re the similar overly deliberative, bureaucratic, careful, argumentative, plodding city as always.
“I was stunned in a good way,” Korta said of Paris’ fast overhaul. “Not like the 30 decades it took to construct the 1.5 mile Van Ness line for instance.”
Really don’t exaggerate, sir. Design of the Van Ness Bus Rapid Transit lanes only took 27 many years.
Even though there is a ton to really like about San Francisco — few cities rival its beauty, temperature, geography and foodstuff — there is also lots to study from other cities that feel to operate better.
Extra strong general public transit came up a large amount in Chronicle readers’ accounts — and from Breed herself. When I asked what she’d been most impressed with on her 10-working day March trip to Europe to woo tourists, she stated lengthy-length, regional rail. That’s how her staff acquired among London, Brussels, Frankfurt and Paris.
“It was exceptionally straightforward to go away from the town centers, the journey was sleek, and she was ready to either do work or rest on our educate journey,” claimed her spokesperson, Jeff Cretan. He mentioned it cemented her lengthy-standing aid for California’s unrealized high-pace rail task that could whisk travelers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in significantly less than three several hours.
Many others praised general public transit in cities across Europe, Canada, South The usa and Asia. The Stockholm subway program is made up of 68 miles of public artwork, and using it is like traveling through a big gallery. Trains in London, Vienna and Paris arrive so commonly, viewers explained, they not often experienced to wait around, in contrast to the J-Church in San Francisco that regularly ghosts hopeful riders.
“Everything just will work so very well below!” Christopher Monnier mentioned in a FaceTime contact from Copenhagen. “It’s just so a lot less difficult to get all around Copenhagen without having a automobile than it is in San Francisco.”
He lives on Potrero Hill and drives routinely for the reason that public transportation is sparse, and he does not feel protected riding a bicycle here. In Copenhagen, however, transit is frequent and ubiquitous, and biking is a breeze simply because of the expansive shielded bicycle lanes.
Monnier claimed he’s also discovered how clean Copenhagen is in comparison with San Francisco, a frequent refrain from audience who’ve traveled abroad not too long ago. Trash cans somewhere else are just, very well, trash cans and not rocket science. In London, I noticed fundamental receptacles — from a black box with a gap in it to a wire basket with a plastic liner — that labored just great.
In San Francisco, on the other hand, Community Functions has been deliberating around the very ideal, a single-of-a-sort town trash can for a number of decades. It seeks to eventually area a handful of $12,000 prototypes about the city for screening shortly, quite a few months driving plan.
Other audience said they observed much fewer homeless folks in distress on the streets though traveling in other places — and no blatant displays of untreated mental ailment, fentanyl dealing or drug use like all those that exist just blocks from our Metropolis Hall.
Metropolitan areas all over the environment — together with New York, London, Sydney and Vancouver — have opened supervised usage web-sites to remove drug use from the sidewalks and reduce overdoses, but San Francisco proceeds to wait around following chatting about it for extra than a 10 years, even as just one to two people today die each day of drug overdoses. Questioned about the timeline for opening a facility right here, Cretan claimed he did not have “anything to share at this time.”
It can be refreshing to leave San Francisco’s misery driving and see towns that get care of people superior than we do. I observed about a dozen homeless individuals in a week in London, a metropolis that has a “No Next Night time Out” initiative to get individuals who fall into homelessness inside of as promptly as possible. Of class, nations with common health and fitness care and more substantive social basic safety nets than ours will fare better on that score.
David Chu, a Sunset resident and item manager, visited loved ones in Seoul in May well reported he observed extremely minor homelessness and no obvious drug working or use.
“No, not at all,” he claimed. “I’m absolutely sure you could come across it if you seemed definitely, definitely really hard, but it’s almost nothing like the Tenderloin.”
He stated that in Seoul, there is additional civic satisfaction and a feeling of the widespread superior. In San Francisco, he said, persons routinely fight to reduce new housing or expert services in close proximity to them and usually get their way at City Hall, producing our entrenched problems even worse.
“How is this our stage of governance?” he requested. “San Francisco’s a spot that should be 100{0b5b04b8d3ad800b67772b3dcc20e35ebfd293e6e83c1a657928cfb52b561f97} earth-class, and oftentimes it’s unfortunately the specific opposite.”
Heather Knight is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. E mail: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf
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