San Francisco Greening its Streets August 1st, 2023
Via Robert Brears, a report on one of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission’s (SFPUC) flagship green street projects as part of its 2050 stormwater management goal:
In most communities, streets make up a significant percentage of publicly owned land. Green streets use a variety of green infrastructure solutions, including vegetated curb extensions, sidewalk planters, landscaped medians, vegetated swales, permeable pavement, and street trees, to reduce stormwater, improve water quality, enhance pedestrian safety, and beautify neighbourhoods.
Multiple benefits of green streets
Green streets can provide multiple co-benefits in addition to managing stormwater runoff and improving water quality, including:
Reducing the urban heat island effect
Increasing biodiversity
Generating green jobs
Improving air quality
At the same time, the visible nature of green infrastructure offers enhanced public education opportunities to teach the community about mitigating the adverse environmental impacts of our built environment.
San Francisco greening its streets
SFPUC is implementing a range of innovative green infrastructure programmes, policies, and projects to manage 1 billion gallons of stormwater annually by 2050, including the greening of streets. Over the past several years, SFPUC has been constructing a series of flagship green infrastructure projects across the city’s watersheds to test green technologies and evaluate their long-term effectiveness, with one such project, Sunset Boulevard Greenway, having just been completed.
Sunset Boulevard Greenway
The two-mile stretch of Sunset Boulevard has become a green street that includes 30 new rain gardens to manage 5.3 million gallons of stormwater annually. Collectively, the rain gardens cover nearly 30,000 square feet along the thoroughfare, with the gardens comprised of native and drought-tolerant plants. The plant species were chosen for their resilience during both wet and dry weather conditions. The green street also features informational signs and an education learning hub that will inspire students and younger residents to champion sustainable water practices.
The take-out
Green infrastructure not only manages excess water but inspires the next generation of environmental leaders.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 1st, 2023 at 2:55 am and is filed under Green Design, Resilient Infrastructure. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Black Swans / Green Shoots examines the collision between urbanization and resource scarcity in a world affected by
climate change, identifying opportunities to build sustainable cities and resilient infrastructure through the use
of revolutionary capital, increased awareness, innovative technologies, and smart design to make a difference in the
face of global and local climate perils.
'Black Swans' are highly improbable events that come as a surprise, have major disruptive effects, and that are
often rationalized after the fact as if they had been predictable to begin with. In our rapidly warming world, such
events are occurring ever more frequently and include wildfires, floods, extreme heat, and drought.
'Green Shoots' is a term used to describe signs of economic recovery or positive data during a downturn. It
references a period of growth and recovery, when plants start to show signs of health and life, and, therefore, has
been employed as a metaphor for a recovering economy.
It is my hope that Black Swans / Green Shoots will help readers understand both climate-activated risk and
opportunity so that you may invest in, advise, or lead organizations in the context of increasing pressures of
global urbanization, resource scarcity, and perils relating to climate change. I believe that the tools of business
and finance can help individuals, businesses, and global society make informed choices about who and what to
protect, and I hope that this blog provides some insight into the policy and private sector tools used to assess
investments in resilient reinforcement, response, or recovery.
