Visionary Thinking

In the neighborhoods -- the Mission, the Richmond, the Panhandle -- neighbors will learn there is a tall apartment building planned for their block, and they won't protest to City Hall. They won't be worried about losing parking spaces to the building's new residents because it will be easy to get around by bus and by bicycle. As a result the city will fill with new artists, janitors, writers, and grocers. Stores will occupy the bottom floors of the new buildings. Instead of driveways there will be doorways, both commercial and not, with people going in and out of them. At the most enticing of these, about half of the passers-by will turn and look in; half will smile. Some will do a double take as they pass people whom they think they know -- maybe they met them on the bus, or in the bike lane, on the sidewalk or in one of the shops. "Perhaps," they will think to themselves, "I will start a conversation next time." Streets, once purely for transit because they were clogged with cars, will develop another use: They will be for living.

Our city's public life, which is now sparse, will flourish; tolerance will thrive; loneliness will dissipate; people will walk and cycle everywhere.

Paris' bus-only lanes could be a model for San Francisco's future.

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Paris, despite Pompidou's legacy, is like this. Parisian street life, nourished by the humus of wide sidewalks, miles of seven-story apartment buildings, and endless storefronts, pulls a pedestrian along as though by electromagnetic force. It's generated by human dynamos: a crowd of 100 Algerian men tugging urgently on each other's elbows; 20,000 morning shoppers in an outdoor vegetable market; 150 people sitting and schmoozing, or idly gossiping as they meander past storefronts.

In San Francisco and the rest of California, visionaries spent the 1950s and '60s narrowing sidewalks and tearing down buildings so streets would only have a transit function. I have a vision that during the political skirmishes that will accompany implementation of the X Plan, residents of the Richmond, the Sunset, the Excelsior, and West Portal will speak out in favor of rapid-transit bus and trolley service, and against the current street system that heavily favors the car. I envision that the X Plan is fully built out, and residents can move from anywhere to anywhere else by public transit within 30 minutes.

In my vision, we'll have access to everything.