Liveable City

Location: San Francisco, CA

Website: www.liveablecity.org

Mission -

To create a balanced transportation system and promote complementary land use that supports a safer, healthier and more accessible San Francisco for everyone.

Goals -

Promote policies which shift travel from automobiles to more appropriate means.

Safety, livability, and economic vitality in a growing city are dependent on a reduction in our dependence on the automobile. To accomplish this goal, Livable City will promote the alternatives to the public, work with public agencies at their request to improve the provision of alternatives, and assist the various alternative transportation advocacy groups.

Improve the pedestrian environment...

Livable cities are built for walking, with bicycling and public transit as complementary modes. Livable City is working to integrate pedestrian improvements into neighborhood plans and street and corridor projects, advocate for completion of pedestrian projects citywide, support revitalization of the City's plazas and public open spaces, and support the efforts of neighborhood groups to improve the walkability of their neighborhoods through technical support and advocacy.

Livable City works with other pedestrian advocacy groups, including Walk San Francisco and Senior Action Network, to advocate for better planning, design, traffic management, education, and enforcement to improve pedestrian safety and promote walking in San Francisco.

Improve conditions for bicycling...

Support the Bicycle Coalition's charitable and educational efforts to promote the bicycle for everyday transportation. Livable City's goals include creating a bold and thorough bicylce plan for the city that will facilitate an increase in the percentage of trips made by bicycle from 3-5% today to 10% by 2015.

Improve public transit...

Muni will need continued public support to secure needed funding for operations, maintenance, and capital improvements and to establish transit priority in important corridors. Livable City worked to secure funding for Muni improvements in Propostion K, San Francisco's successful transportation sales tax, and is working to implement a citywide network of rapid transit and transit-priority routes that will improve Muni's speed and reliability, lower its operating costs, and attract new riders. Livable City also supports upgrading Caltrain to rapid transit-type service and extending it to the Transbay Terminal, and improving the accessibility and connectivity of the BART system.

Build an effective coalition for broad-based transportation reform.

Projects include our organization of a sustainable transportation summit, our participation in the Housing Action Coalition, greater participation by Livable City in the regional coalitions that already exist, and a new project to gain consensus support for the construction of significant amounts of affordable housing in walking-, biking-, and transit-accessible locations.

Integrate ecological design into the transportation system...

Transportation has an enormous impact on the local and global environment. 27% of the energy generated in the US goes to transportation, and transportation accounts for two-thirds of the petroleum consumed in the US. The waste and inefficiency built in to our automobile-based transportation system also threatens to consume greater and greater amounts of government and private resources; parking expert Donald Shoup estimates that the amount of money spent in the US each year subsidizing parking alone is equal to the amount spent on Medicare or national defense.

Livable City is dedicated to lessening the impact of transportation on the environment by encouraging human-powered transportation (walking and bicycling), discouraging automobile use, promoting compact and mixed-use development that minimizes the distance and cost of transport, and greening public transport by encouraging electrification of diesel bus and rail lines and improving the energy and resource efficiency of lighting, buildings, and vehicles. Livable City also supports integrating more "green infrastructure"—street trees, landscaping, permeable paving, parks and squares, "green streets", greenways, and greenbelts—into the city's transportation system.

Create a long-term, comprehensive traffic-calming plan for the City...

Livable City has worked over the past few years to change city standards and policies to include greater emphasis on pedestrian accessibility and safety in street design. We are working to make the city's upcoming streetscape master plan an opportunity to institute traffic calming measures on a citywide scale, as well as create detailed neighborhood-scale transportation and streetscape plans.