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Originally Posted by The North One
Oh yeah it definitely gets a lot less severe near the central downtown areas where there's more retail but they're still commonly found even there.
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7911...7i16384!8i8192
I just don't get how this happened, it's kinda bizarre. It's not like SF is a sunbelt city, and by US standards it's pre-war building stock is well preserved. Yet no other US city has this many street facing garages. |
What are you talking about? Most US cities are full of detached homes with garages and driveways, with parking lots all over the place. Yes, there are garages on residential buildings in SF as well, especially in the less dense areas of the city. In that regard, SF is the same as almost everywhere else in the country that isn't NYC.
Also, according to various definitions, SF is definitely a sunbelt city.
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It's also strange to me how this usually gets completely ignored when people laud San Francisco for being an urban outlier. Like this entire street is literally just garages and driveways, it's terrible for pedestrians. And this goes on for blocks and blocks and blocks. Endless.
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7488...7i13312!8i6656
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Maybe people don't mention it, because it's not really a problem. That street is in one of the least dense parts of the city, that was entirely built out after the car was invented. Though it still has a population density in the 15,000-20,000 range, is within walking distance to multiple retail strips, schools, the ocean, and has good public transit access. Also, many of those garages have apartments behind them. I used to live in one of them, not far from there...am i supposed to be disappointed in that neighborhood or something? It's a pretty nice area.
You know what people do on streets like that? Walk a couple blocks to one of those retail strips where they buy things or hang out. Or maybe they do it at the park or beach instead, or maybe they hop on the bus or the train and go downtown. Or maybe they hang out right there in front of their house/apartment. Maybe they have a lil garage sale, maybe their kids are playing on the sidewalk/ in the street. Maybe they walk their dog and talk to their neighbor as they water their miniature front yard, and then stop at the corner store. Maybe they're jamming out with their bros in the garage and random pedestrians stop to listen and talk (used to happen at my building lol). You have this idea that the existence of garage doors on the bottom floor of buildings means that pedestrians throughout SF are suffering, but it's not really true.
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Originally Posted by Crawford
Curb cuts are the main reason SF doesn't have quite the same street-level quality as cities on its urban tier. Boston and Philly have proportionally far fewer curb cuts (as well as narrower streets) and it makes a big difference from the pedestrian perspective.
Granted, SF still has fantastic urbanity for U.S. standards, and easily the best urbanity west of the Mississippi (and plausibly the best urbanity outside the Northeast), but the proliferation of curb cuts is a negative.
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This is subjective of course, but in my opinion SF's "street-level quality" is easily on par with Philly and Boston, regardless of curb cuts on residential streets. There's at least as much density of people and retail in SF as in those cities, it's not like things are dead due to garages.