Livable City works to create a San Francisco of great streets and complete neighborhoods, where walking, bicycling, and transit are the best choices for most trips, where public spaces are beautiful, well-designed, and well-maintained, and where housing is more plentiful and more affordable.
Livable Neighborhoods support living, working, commerce, and culture, and maintain a diverse and distinct character.
Livable Downtown is Livable City’s campaign 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.
Parking Reform seeks 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. Car parking is one of the most important public resources in our city, but it must be managed properly to provide the best public service. The answer is not to constantly increase the amount of parking! The right amount of parking will support necessary car trips but not cause so much traffic to cause gridlock. The right parking policies will recognize the cost of dedicating so much real estate to cars, and incentive smaller, safer cars, and transit, bicycling, and walking. Livable City is focused in two areas: managing parking better in neighborhoods and commercial districts to provide neighborhood-serving parking, discourage commuter parking, and encourage sustainable transportation modes and changing parking requirements to reduce traffic congestion, make housing more affordable, and maintain neighborhood character.
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. Livable City is working to ensure that streets are designed and maintained as a safe and attractive environment that supports walking, bicycling, and public transit use. Our current efforts are to improve the City’s designs and standards to improve the appearance, safety and accessibility of city streets, protect neighborhoods from excessive traffic, and remove dangerous conditions for bicylists and pedestrians. Livable City supports streetscapes that integrate street trees and landscaping, energy- and resource-efficiency standards, and that minimize impermeable pavements to improve the livability of the city while reducing environmental impacts and infrastructure costs.
Create a Great Transit Network for San Francisco and the region that is fast, reliable, sustainable, seamlessly connected, and fully accessible. Livable City is working to secure sustainable funding sources for essential transportation services like Muni, paratransit, and bicycle and pedestrian safety
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!
Car-Free Living is Livable City’s campaign ease the lives and increase the numbers of the 29% of San Francisco households who don’t have cars. Our culture’s reliance on the automobile has compromised our personal health, community cohesion, and the local and global environment. San Francisco’s compact and walkable scale, its dense, urbane, and mixed-use neighborhoods, and its extensive public transit allow one-third of San Francisco households to live without an automobile. Livable City is dedicated to making San Francisco a better city to live in without a car by prioritizing pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders, making San Francisco’s dense and transit-oriented neighborhoods greener and safer from traffic, and supporting the creation and revitalization of walkable neighborhoods with good public transit service, a range of housing choices that includes car-free housing, and neighborhood-serving businesses and services.