San Francisco Citizen

Here’s what 6th and Stevenson is like today…

Auweia – click to expand

…and here’s the vision for its future, below.

So, just as the horrible SFMTA recently conducted focus groups on the future of Polk, 6th Street is getting its turn.

I’ll tell you, if I were in charge of making 6th street safer, I don’t think I’d put  “Slower Cars” at the top of the list.

How about “Less Untreated Mental Illness” instead?

Anyway, our blessed SFMTA will be  hosting ”an interactive activation project on 6th Street (between Market and Stevenson)” on May 18th, 2013.

And Twitter will be there too, sort of.

In a better world, Twitter would participate because it wants to, not because it’s contractually obligated to do so.

(And Twitter would pay its fair share of taxes under the rules signed into law by that wild job-killing radical, Gavin Newsom, all the way back in 2004.  Twitter, just give me your tax returns and I’ll figure how much more you should have paid and then you can write a check for the difference and send it in to the General Fund.)

NEWSFLASH: The people from the residential hotels you don’t like on 6th Street aren’t going anywhere.

By law.

Oh, and lots of people working at Twitter would still prefer to labor in northern San Mateo County, just saying.

Anyway, on with the show:

“Slower Cars. More sidewalk space. More mid-block crossings. Brighter lighting. Cleaner streets. These are among the ideas and desires recently expressed by the local community for a safer 6th Street.

Safer 6th Street is a collaboration between SFMTA, District 6 Supervisor’s Office, Twitter, Neighborland, SPUR, URBAN SPACEship and other community organizations to address the issue of safety in the 6th Street corridor, and gather further input from the local community as to what can be done to create a safer area for residents, workers and passersby alike.

There is an on-going community process to implement safety measures in the 6th Street corridor, including:

- Sixth Street Improvement Project led by SFMTA, for permanent traffic calming and pedestrian improvements in the corridor

- Supervisor Jane Kim’s District 6 Pedestrian Safety Workgroup, which has been advocating for traffic calming on Sixth Street for the past several years

- Activation projects led by the Mayor’s Office of Economic Workforce and Development

- The recent establishment of The Sixth Street Safety Hub, an SFPD sub-station

In alignment with this process, we ask – how can we, as a community, create a safer 6th Street?

On Saturday, May 18th, between 12-6pm we will be hosting an interactive activation project on 6th Street (between Market and Stevenson), to engage the community and gather ideas and feedback towards this question, with the aim of envisioning a vibrant area and helping to prioritize treatments to the 6th Street design.

Pick your medium – we’ll have a Neighborland board for you to freely write on, a Twitter photo booth, and a collaborative mural installed by ArtIsMobilus.

Until then, share your ideas and comment on others here or on Twitter using the hashtag #safer6th. Through a new integrated platform between Neighborland and Twitter, your tweets will display on the Question page. Any tweets that start with “I want …” and contain the hashtag will auto-magically become ideas on the Question page.

Come join and take part in creating action on the ground!”