About Livable City
People
Mission
To create a balanced transportation system and promote complementary land use that supports a safer, healthier and more accessible San Francisco for everyone.
Download our 40-year plan, The Path to a Livable City.
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.
Livable City's campaigns:
Create livable neighborhoods that support living, working, commerce, and culture, and maintain a diverse and distinct character.
The Livable Downtown campaign is working to create a neighborhood that feels like home to the thousands of new residents expected to live there within the next decade. Livable City scored a major victory for this campaign with the pending approval of reduced parking requirements for new housing in the downtown neighborhoods. The new downtown will definitely be a crowded neighborhood. Thanks to Livable City's advocacy it is more likely to be crowded with people walking and biking and playing and eating, and less likely to be crowded with traffic jams.
Reform parking policy to support livable and sustainable neighborhoods, reduce traffic and pollution, and direct subsidies away from cars and toward housing, transit, complete streets, and other neighborhood needs.
Complete the streets so that San Francisco's most important public spaces, its streets, should be safe and pleasant for all users in safety and comfort.
Create a great transit network for San Francisco and the region that is fast, reliable, sustainable, seamlessly connected, and fully accessible.
Build a greenway network, in collaboration with the Neighborhood Parks Council, seeks to create a network of “green streets” connecting green spaces throughout the city. Streets that feel more like parks than thoroughfares will go a long way toward making the city more livable!
Promote and support car-free living to ease the lives and increase the numbers of the 29% of San Francisco households who don't have cars.
A new name, and a new look...
In 2006, Transportation for a Livable City became Livable City. Transportation will remain a focus of what we do, but transportation is ultimately a means to the goal of livability, not an end in itself. In fact, the best cities require the least transportation, because they offer the greatest diversity of options for living, working, shopping, services, and experiences in the least space – more joy with less waste. Our work also addresses issues such as housing, environmental quality, a sustainable economy, and public health that are essential elements of a livable city.
Livable City lacks the cute acronym, but the new name and our new tagline — Great Streets, Complete Neighborhoods — succinctly sum up our agenda to transform our city's neighborhoods into better, safer, more sustaining and sustainable places for people to live.
Contact us
Livable City
995 Market Street, Suite 1450
San Francisco CA 94103
415 344-0489