[This is Part Two in a three part series examining alternative transit in the Bay and what can be applied to Louisville]

Walking in the San Francisco Bay area is a very foreign experience to a Louisvillian. It is a totally different endeavor altogether. Its not just that the engineering is better, but also its as if human nature is different.

We walked extensively in three different cities:

Berkeley - an upscale, quiet bedroom community for the rest of the Bay, but also the location of the UC Berkeley campus. Its the only place we walked where people actually lived.

San Francisco - We tromped around the CBD and Lil' Italy. Very built up, very good infrastructure, and a pedestrian tide of epic proportions.

San Jose - We 'strolled' the downtown -  but also hiked sprawl and through expressway interchanges into the the airport. Outside downtown, few appeared to walk, but there was still a strong effort to accommodate peds.

Engineering

The hard truth is, the Bay has completely surpassed us in every single area of engineering for pedestrians. The difference is akin to the difference between bushwacking through a forest and walking on a new sidewalk. I don't know if they think more about it, but they certainly do a lot more about it.

The streets are designed so that crosswalks are conveniently located where you actually want to cross, not where its convenient for motorists. In all our walking - probably 15 miles worth - I was only tempted to J-walk two times. In Louisville we can't even get the full four crosswalks at the corner of Baxter and Broadway. Sheesh!

Berkeley has dispensed with vehicular stop bars at stop signs entirely, instead reallocating the paint to make explicit what, in Louisville, would be an implicit crosswalk. That's a good idea, it makes the purpose of the stop bar much more clear, and also makes the criterion for edging out over it more clear. We should replace stop bars with crosswalks.

We also never encountered a Pedestrian Time Wasting Button on a 3-lane or narrower road. They were extremely rare throughout, and totally missing in downtown SF. They just assumed peds were present, without forcing them to suffer the indignity of pressing the button. If you're thinking that pressing a button is no big deal, get out of your arm chair and actually walk around Louisville sometime. You will find that the buttons are confusingly placed, often bordering on hidden. Its not clear what button controls which direction. Its an unclean public surface. And if you're carrying a  heavy load in one hand and an umbrella in the other, its hard to do without getting wet. These buttons suck, and the bay has done a good job of minimizing them. What about a starter-goal for Louisville? - to systematically eliminate crosswalk buttons on all 2- and 3-lane road crossings - just assume the peds are there, waiting to cross.

Pedestrian countdown timers were actually 100% properly installed, so that they counted down to the yellow light. That gives the pedestrian useful information about crossing the street. In Louisville, recall that they mostly count down to some arbitrary time in the middle of the stop cycle, well before the yellow. As a result, the efficient Louisville ped behavior is to completely disregard the countdown and looks to the traffic light for guidance, which only has a 4 second yellow. Countdown crosswalk timers in Louisville are broadly mis-configured, and should either be fixed or replaced with the old non-countdown timers which everyone already holds in contempt. It was so refreshing to have countdown timers actually confer some useful information.

There were bountiful archipelagos of pedestrian shelter islands throughout intersections. Walking to the airport in San Jose we went "island hopping" over at least three islands. All of these islands had at-grade channels so that wheelchairs didn't have to roll up just to roll down. I was surprised at how much more pleasant this made things for me on two feet - I didn't have to multi-task between stepping down and looking at traffic.

Berkeley Bike/Ped Bridge

Sidewalks were luxuriously wide, generally accommodating two people side by side in the burbs, or a moderate crowd in the cities. Businesses were not allowed to put out any kind of impediment to walking, or at least they didn't do it while we were there.

Finally, there were tons of Bike/Ped bridges. A bike/ped bridge is a bridge for the sole use of non-motorized modes. Louisville currently has two. We ran across about a dozen in our travels. When every other method of connecting people to places fails, these can be a valid expedient.

Cultural Issues

San Jose

As stated before, we ambled through their downtown, which seemed to be infinite blocks of fairly upscale retail, mostly restaurants and bars. It was like taking the random soulless Stonybrook stores, and shoehorning all that retail into a Transit Oriented Development with 6 story buildings atop each, and immaculate walkable 2-lane streets. Walkability was fine. We had no trouble to move around, and eventually ditched our iPhones for simply consulting with the friendly natives.

"restricted" turns out not to mean "prohibited", nor "difficult"

We also walked to the airport from our hotel, something that was a mile away by map. About half a mile away, we started to see these ominous signs. Carefully parsing the language; however, we noticed that they did not actually forbid us from proceeding, so we sallied forth! Nobody else was on the streets, except sequestered inside the protective confines of their cars. As we drew nearer, another of the signs loomed. Boy, they must be serious, but what's that in the distance? An overpass with pedways along the side? We took those and came to the outskirts of the airport - and the big barrier that was an obstacle to walkability? A 10-foot-wide, 2-foot-deep slope of loose gravel that we easily loped over. That was it. That was the big barrier that someone had put out all those signs over. What does this reveal? Well, one, an institutional attention to walkability that is quite lacking in Louisville. Here we routinely close sidewalks and leave the corresponding roads open. In the SJ airport, there were several places where they annexed vehicular lanes to make room for walkways, which were themselves displaced by construction.

Even under construction, they were able to get an accessibility ramp in place for a tiny 2" curb

Vehicular lanes annexed in the name of pedestrian rights

However, for all this hard attention to walking, the actual human beings in the airport neighborhood seemed unaware that walking was a viable form of transportation. The hotel staff looked at us blankly when we asked for directions, then tried to persuade us to try the 'free' shuttle. The airport staff told us it was better to sit in the hot sun waiting for a shuttle than try to walk between terminals, even though the physical infrastructure guys had been hard at work making sure that that walkway was 100% accessible - more accessible than a typical Louisville sidewalk even, despite the fact that no other airport denizens used it.

San Francisco

San Francisco is dense. Walking is the dominant mode there. Transit and automobiles vie for #2. On any sidewalk that goes anywhere, there are plenty of people and you'd best step lively or get in someone's way. There are numerous public plazas and park benches, there was no shortage of places to get out of the hustle and bustle, but those amenities definitely were not taking space away from the places where foot traffic naturally wanted to flow. Everyone was doing it.

In Louisville, the average build is 'fridge-like'. In San Francisco, people were normal, healthy weights. And I got to see a lot of people, because everyone was out walking. Interesting correlation, that.

Berkeley

This was the most fun community to walk in. The level of development is about like our neighborhood in the Highlands, so we felt right at home. We stayed a few blocks away from the sheeshy upscale grocery (8oz flavored yogurt: $1.25, vs $.60 in Louisville). Everywhere we wanted to go, there was a sidewalk, if not a separated footpath. Where we wanted to cross roads, there was a crosswalk and a yield or stop sign. Motorists obeyed these signs religiously, never crowding us or 'pushing it'. Motorist speeds were incredibly low - 25mph on all the mid-arterialals we walked, 25mph in the CBD, just basically 25mph everywhere. Even if it was technically higher, the cars never saw 30mph just based on the light timings. As a result of all these improvements to favor peds, we blitzed overland for several miles, never having to break stride. It was great!

By contrast, the Louisville walking experience now feels like: 'Hurry up and Wait'.

Conclusion

In every city profiled, the pedestrian is an expected member of the streetscape. Both from an engineering and driver's perspective, we are provided for. There is no look of surprised annoyance when a motorist realizes that your crosswalk traversal is blocking his or her path - its just a normal part of doing business, no different from the car in front of you making a left turn. 

I won't say it was uniformly an excellent experience - there were some sprawling stretches of San Jose - but there was never a public land design decision where we felt 'screwed'. Like Louisville, these cities were created for pedestrians. Unlike Louisville, they never took their eye off the ball, and always protected that initial design. In places they have improved the original design by incorporating new features like traffic islands, extra park space, and tightly constrained vehicular speeds. Louisville, by contrast, has put all its effort into optimizing automotive throughput. Its nice to see other communities make the right choice. When the facilities are there, the walking experience is easily twice as fun.

We can do it here.

We should do it here.

We will do it here.
(right?)