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Eric Fischer
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| Hey, remember that time they added a lower deck to the Golden Gate Bridge?
Oh yeah, I guess they didn't. | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment   |
| I am getting horribly sloppy about actually writing any of this stuff up any more. The weekend of September 12-13 I spent two afternoons walking around on east-west streets in the Tenderloin (5.4 miles of walking, 4.6 unique) and Nob Hill (8.1 miles of walking, 5.8 unique). Updated map and GPS map.
The giant longitude line marked in the Civic Center is not actually correct, as far as I can tell, or at least is from some other datum.
Amity Alley is unsigned and gated, but the mail was being delivered and the postman and a resident let me walk down it to the end. Cohen Alley is gated and is apparently no longer legally a street.
There is one single family house sitting weirdly all by itself in the Tenderloin.
There are many nonstandard street signs: Golden Gate and Leavenworth, Eddy and Leavenworth, Ellis and Mason, Security Pacific, aka Bagley, and Shannon. The most nonstandard street sign of all is this handwritten one for Lame Lane, which is not legally a street at all, but is apparently somebody's name for the midblock passage from Washington to Clay east of Taylor. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| The San Francisco Planning Department has a new revision of the Better Streets plan available.
One good change is that it increases the recommended and minimum sidewalk widths. It also supposedly has a stronger "discouragement of use of pedestrian push-buttons," as they put it in the summary, than the previous version, but the actual wording on this, as far as I can tell, is almost unchanged. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Thanks to Google Book Search, I finally know that the children's book I could never remember the title of, where people were going around and around in a circle on a raft on an underground river looking for "a better place," was Journey Outside by Mary Q. Steele.
Oh, and the other one I never knew the name of is apparently Ronia, the robber's daughter by Astrid Lindgren. The line we misremembered as "Blood will run now, ho ho!" was actually "Now the blood will run, ho ho!" | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Oh wow -- according to Popular Science from 1915, the pre-1920s generation of San Francisco street signs were backlit and set into the curb!
I wonder how durable they were... it seems like that must have been a maintenance nightmare.
It looks like the picture is at Stockton and Geary, looking west across Union Square. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| The American City reveals that the blue San Francisco street signs of the 1920s were made by the California Metal Enameling of Los Angeles and cost $18 apiece.
But in the picture from the article:
the signs have rounded, not square, letters! Artistic license, or yet another street sign stylistic variation that I have just not seen in person yet?
Meanwhile, another book, from 1919, suggests that before the blue signs there was a previous generation of white-on-brown signs. I would be surprised if I were ever to see one of those. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| If you've ever wanted to see the maps from the 1947, 1948, 1950, or 1951 San Francisco transportation plans, or where the Twin Peaks Freeway, Marginal Freeway, Western Freeway, Crosstown Freeway, Mission Freeway, Central Freeway, Sunset Freeway, Richmond Freeway, or Panhandle Freeway would have run if city planners of the time had got their wishes, I scanned in a bunch of these recently and posted them to Flickr.
Also, I just noticed that the 1913 Report on the Improvement and Development of the Transportation Facilties of San Francisco is now available in full text for free on Book Search, and it is well worth reading if you are interested in that kind of thing. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Valencia Street and Guerrero Street are named after people who lived near Mission Dolores in the 1850s, but strangely, it turns out, neither street ran through the property of the person for whom it was named.
This map is from Candelario Valencia's land claim. It will probably look a lot more familiar rotated and superimposed onto a present-day street map:
The Valencia lands were most of the block from Dolores to Guerrero, from 16th to Dorland. Francisco Guerrero's (or, as it is spelled here, Gueraro) were the remainder of that block, plus another lot on the east side of Dolores between 15th and 16th, plus a large lot northwest of the corner of Alert and Dolores.
Of the other names on the map, Fremont and De Haro still have streets named after them elsewhere in the city. Duboce used to be named after Robert Ridley, but is no longer. I don't know who the Brown was who owned the lot at the corner of 16th and Guerrero through which Gaiser Court now runs. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | No, I'm not, but apparently Tim Monroe has rollerbladed every street in Oakland, Alameda, Piedmont, and Emeryville! The things you stumble across in random unrelated web searching. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| I was surprised this morning to find I-238 with three westbound lanes open, and totally uncongested. I'm sure the induced demand will kick in soon and clog it up again, but for a moment it's sort of possible to understand the technological optimism that made the automotive utopia seem possible and worthwhile.
And then of course five minutes later it's a gigantic mess at the San Mateo Bridge interchange. Utopias never last long. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| How did I miss this? The Nikon Coolpix P6000 camera has a built-in GPS receiver for automatic geotagging of your pictures. It's expensive, though.
And hey, the Samsung CL65 camera (Samsung makes cameras?), available next month, has a GPS receiver too.
Looks like automatic geotagging from real cameras, not just phones, is on its way to being mainstream. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| In today's neighborhood boundary news, Everyblock is asking people to draw maps of the edges of their neighborhoods, either just so they can get the news for areas that they care about or to share with the rest of the world. I hope they get some interesting consensus. Meanwhile, Mapping Oakland still just says "Coming soon" when you ask for its maps.
I just realized too that my own Walking San Francisco map was missing January 17th's South of Market walk. That should be fixed now.
Which also leads me to wonder: who approved a new alley called Scott when there is already a Scott Street? Wasn't that the kind of thing that the 1909 street renaming was supposed to have fixed for good? | | comments: Leave a comment |
| When I've been walking around San Francisco lately, for the most part I've been doing it casually, without a map. But I haven't totally forgotten about trying to walk the city comprehensively.
On February 16, I went walking around in Eureka Valley. 5.6 miles of walking, 3.9 unique. And 6 months later, on August 16, I walked from Montgomery BART to Lower Pacific Heights, back and forth a few times, and back to BART. 12 miles of walking, 10.1 unique. Updated map and GPS map.
I was reminded of the Eureka Valley walk today because of the Streetsblog SF piece on paper streets, including the park that is signed as Mono Street but is mapped as part of 19th Street. I also walked up and down a bunch of stairs.
On the way to Lower Pacific Heights, the most interesting street signs are the bilingual signs on Webster, which also include the house number as part of the main sign instead of on a separate tab.
I also took, but didn't post, some new pictures of the embossed Meacham street sign. The street is gated off, and one of the residents wondered what I was doing taking pictures of his street sign and came out. But he didn't chase me off; instead, he let me walk down it and explained that the residents of the street didn't particularly want it gated off, but were forced to by the city (it is an unaccepted street, so residents are responsible for maintenance) after someone setting a fire on the roadway came dangerously close to igniting a gas main.
Muni's Presidio Division has some great decoration above the door and a Market Street Railway manhole cover. The name of this corner store reminded me of ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) rissymonster even though it's not spelled right. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| | Bay Area map geeks might be interested to know that the newly announced DataSF web site includes a new street centerlines file that is much more up to date than the version (said to be from 2005) that was previously available from the SFGov GIS page. I should go through it and make a detailed comparison of what changed, but it has things like Octavia Boulevard now. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
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Eric Fischer
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