What can San Francisco be taught from different world-class cities? Residents share concepts from world journey
When Vincent Korta visited his family in Paris this summer, he frequently turned to Google maps on his phone to see the quickest way to get to his next destination. Drive, walk, take public transit or bike?
Almost every time, he said, the app recommended bicycling. He often took the advice — and he couldn’t believe how bike-friendly Paris had become since a previous trip three years ago.
That city’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, has transformed Paris by adding more than 180 miles of bike lanes, expanding bike share programs, eliminating many parking spaces, lowering the speed limit to 18 mph on many roads and turning some streets into pedestrian promenades including along the right bank of the Seine. She started the work after her election in 2014, but the pandemic spurred her into high gear, and Korta praised the results.
He was one of scores of Chronicle readers who shared stories of recent travel abroad after I described the joy of riding London’s new Elizabeth subway line — faster, more frequent, cleaner and more spacious than Muni or BART could ever hope to be.
Contrary to what he saw in Paris, Korta’s adopted city of San Francisco is resuming the decades-long fight over whether cars should be restricted on 1.5 miles of JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park, ending some popular Slow Streets and doing little about speeding traffic. Mayor London Breed has not used the pandemic to transform San Francisco in any major way.
We’re the same overly deliberative, bureaucratic, cautious, argumentative, plodding city as always.
“I was shocked in a good way,” Korta said of Paris’ rapid overhaul. “Not like the 30 years it took to build the 1.5 mile Van Ness line for instance.”
Don’t exaggerate, sir. Construction of the Van Ness Bus Rapid Transit lanes only took 27 years.
While there’s a lot to love about San Francisco — few cities rival its beauty, weather, geography and food — there’s also plenty to learn from other cities that seem to work better.
More robust public transit came up a lot in Chronicle readers’ accounts — and from Breed herself. When I asked what she’d been most impressed with on her 10-day March trip to Europe to woo tourists, she said long-distance, regional rail. That’s how her team got between London, Brussels, Frankfurt and Paris.
“It was incredibly easy to leave from the city centers, the travel was smooth, and she was able to either do work or rest on our train ride,” said her spokesperson, Jeff Cretan. He said it cemented her long-standing support for California’s unrealized high-speed rail project that could whisk travelers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in less than three hours.
Others praised public transit in cities across Europe, Canada, South America and Asia. The Stockholm subway system contains 68 miles of public art, and riding it is like traveling through a giant gallery. Trains in London, Vienna and Paris arrive so frequently, readers said, they seldom had to wait, unlike the J-Church in San Francisco that frequently ghosts hopeful riders.
“Everything just works so well here!” Christopher Monnier said in a FaceTime call from Copenhagen. “It’s just so much easier to get around Copenhagen without a car than it is in San Francisco.”
He lives on Potrero Hill and drives regularly because public transportation is sparse, and he doesn’t feel safe riding a bike here. In Copenhagen, though, transit is frequent and ubiquitous, and biking is a breeze because of the expansive protected bike lanes.
Monnier said he’s also noticed how clean Copenhagen is compared with San Francisco, a frequent refrain from readers who’ve traveled abroad recently. Trash cans elsewhere are just, well, trash cans and not rocket science. In London, I saw basic receptacles — from a black box with a hole in it to a wire basket with a plastic liner — that worked just fine.
In San Francisco, on the other hand, Public Works has been deliberating over the very best, one-of-a-kind city trash can for several years. It seeks to finally place a handful of $12,000 prototypes around the city for testing soon, many months behind schedule.
Other readers said they saw far fewer homeless people in distress on the streets while traveling elsewhere — and no blatant displays of untreated mental illness, fentanyl dealing or drug use like those that exist just blocks from our City Hall.
Cities around the world — including New York, London, Sydney and Vancouver — have opened supervised consumption sites to remove drug use from the sidewalks and prevent overdoses, but San Francisco continues to wait after talking about it for more than a decade, even as one to two people who overdose every day. Asked about the timeline for opening a facility here, Cretan said he didn’t have “anything to share at this time.”
It can be refreshing to leave San Francisco’s misery behind and see cities that take care of people better than we do. I saw about a dozen homeless people in a week in London, a city that has a “No Second Night Out” initiative to get people who fall into homelessness inside as quickly as possible. Of course, countries with universal health care and more substantive social safety nets than ours will fare better on that score.
David Chu, a Sunset resident and product manager, visited family in Seoul in May said he saw very little homelessness and no obvious drug dealing or use.
“No, not at all,” he said. “I’m sure you could find it if you looked really, really hard, but it’s nothing like the Tenderloin.”
He said that in Seoul, there’s more civic pride and a sense of the common good. In San Francisco, he said, people regularly fight to prevent new housing or services near them and often get their way at City Hall, making our entrenched problems even worse.
“How is this our level of governance?” he asked. “San Francisco’s a place that should be 100% world-class, and oftentimes it’s sadly the exact opposite.”
Heather Knight is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf
