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Five injured in Mission Dolores senior housing fire

Five people were injured in a two-alarm fire at a senior apartment building in San Francisco's Mission Dolores neighborhood...

Power outage shuts SF State campus

San Francisco State University has announced the closure of their main campus for the rest of Thursday due to...

Power restored to SF State campus

Electrical service was restored at the main campus of San Francisco State University after the earlier closure of their...

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4 Comments

  1. While I totally support redesigning our streets to make them safer, I really wish the media made it more obvious that urgently needed replacement of century old utility lines is what’s responsible for most of the cost and time.

    Water mains, sewer mains, and overhead Muni wiring need to be replaced because most of this stuff is very old and it’s always cheaper to replace these utilities before they catastrophically fail. Replacing these utilities while they’re still in use is a very complex and expensive operation. Yet when most people read this article, what they take away is that the city is spending $20 million on a 1 mile bike lane, or $650 to put bike lanes and pretty crosswalks on Market St, without mentioning that most of these costs and construction related delays are because of the utilities, not the streetscaping itself.

    We need safer streets, and we need to upgrade our aging utility lines. It makes much more sense to do these at the same time. If we have to rip up the street to replace utilities, it makes a lot more sense to pave a safer street design after. But telling people that most of the costs and construction headaches caused by the streetscaping itself is really disingenuous and it creates ignorant opposition to these projects.

    • It drives me nuts that this project is to be built over 2 years (plus delays), despite 7+ years of planning. But the drawn out timing is because of infrastructure work—the resurfacing, bikelanes, and sidewalks could be redone in a few months.

      • The drawn out timeline is actually because the city refuses to just close the road to do the work. The road will remain open at all times during the project. Also they won’t work at night, so most of the day will be spent covering up their trenches in the afternoon and uncovering them again in the morning. Most work days on an SFPUC project consist of two hours of work interrupted by lunch and hours of setup and teardown on either side.

        If they would just close the road and blow it up the project would be done in a month.

        • True, but the costs of completely closing 2nd street for a whole month would be far more expensive for the businesses that are on that street. Compared with what some of those businesses bring, shutting down those businesses could be far more costly.