End of the road

Will a compromise ballot measure finally end the long war over cars in Golden Gate Park?

By Cameron Scott

Even as the grand reopening of a rebuilt de Young Museum takes place to great fanfare and anticipation, there is still one final chapter to be written in a long and sordid saga that has pitted powerful museum patrons against the more purist users of Golden Gate Park, those who have been working to minimize the impact of automobiles on this urban oasis.

In November voters will decide on Proposition G, a compromise measure allowing cars to enter the underground parking garage being built beneath Golden Gate Park's Music Concourse without having to widen a quarter-mile stretch of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

Prop. G sounds innocuous enough, but it is actually a troubled cease-fire in a long-standing war between Wells Fargo heir Warren Hellman and other trustees of the Academy of Sciences and the de Young Museum, on the one hand, and some scrappy activist groups on the other, among them the Sierra Club, Walk SF, the San Francisco Bike Coalition, and the San Francisco Green Party.

It is a compromise measure negotiated between the two sides that both are supporting, although there are still those not yet ready to lay down arms in this bitter struggle, such as vocal activist Katherine Roberts, who says it's impossible to vote on Prop. G without taking sides on the larger issue of the future of Golden Gate Park.

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The garage wars began in 1998, when voters passed Proposition J. Prop. J authorized Hellman's nonprofit group to build a garage to serve the two museums – the de Young and California Academy of Sciences – that flank the concourse. Prop. J assured that no public money would be used, garage revenue would go to the city, and entrances and exits would be outside the park. It promised to satisfy the museums' thirst for more car-driving visitors while turning the concourse into a "pedestrian oasis."

Seven years later, the concourse has a garage paid for with bonds that the Parks and Recreation Department will repay by sacrificing its right to the garage's revenue. One of the garage's two entrances lies inside the park. Over the summer, the dream of a pedestrian center was reduced to three new stop signs, signs prohibiting through-traffic, and a 15 mph speed limit.

John Rizzo, a Sierra Club member who holds the environmentalist seat on the Golden Gate Park Concourse Authority, the city commission that oversees the project, said the traffic plan was "better than it could have been." That's because activists who challenged the plan in court lost, leveraging Prop. G as a compromise after the Board of Supervisors entered the fray with threats to rein in more car-friendly plans.

Dick Young, the executive director of Hellman's nonprofit, the Music Concourse Community Partnership, seemed to confirm Rizzo's perception. He told us that the original voter information brochure had nothing in it "that said that traffic would be excluded." Young called the results "terrific" and believes the goal of "traffic calming" has been achieved.

Susan King, of the Green Party and the Alliance for Golden Gate Park, a group formed in opposition to the project, said of Hellman and his allies, "I don't think they ever had the intention or even a desire of creating a pedestrian oas is – what they wanted was the garage, and what they got was the garage."

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Prop. G is the bastard child of this dispute. It stems from a lawsuit the city brought in 2003 to validate its interpretation of Prop. J in the face of challenges by activists. The lawsuit gave opponents 30 days to raise any objections, and both the Alliance and Roberts's group, Trees Not Cars, responded.

This June 13, Judge James Warren ruled in the matter, requiring just one change to bring the city into compliance – that the entrances in the park have dedicated access lanes leading directly in and out of the park. The plan to widen MLK was the Concourse Authority's response to the judge's order. But neither the Concourse Authority nor the activists want to see the road widened, so Sup. Ross Mirkarimi worked with the tentative allies to write Prop. G.

Prop. G garners only lukewarm support but almost a universal belief that it's better than where things stand now. Rich Coffin, of Walk SF, told us, "It's kind of the best of a bad situation." The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition is remaining neutral, although the Transportation Working Group has recommended an endorsement.

Trees Not Cars is the only group opposing Prop. G. Its opposition, Roberts explained, is based on the clause that claims euphemistically to "clarify" the language of Prop. J to all ow for an entrance inside the park. Prop. G's authors say that, in order to overrule Judge Warren, the measure must contain that language.

But Roberts stands on principle. "Why bother voting at all if people can do whatever they want and come back two years later and say, 'Oops, we made a mistake – come back and fix it'?"

Roberts is the Cassandra of this story, predicting that traffic congestion on MLK will lead the Concourse Authority to widen it later anyway. Coffin counters that Prop. G specifies that MLK could be widened only to add a transit lane. He thinks transit lanes "could be a good idea – if they're enforced."

King plays the Polyanna role. She calls Prop. G "an opportunity for all of us to work together and put aside our differences and try to do what's best for the park." In exchange she hopes museum backers will eventually consent to closing John F. Kennedy Drive on Saturdays as well as Sundays. "That's a big prize," she said.

Even so, King and other activists believe traffic will increase, rather than decrease, in the concourse as a result of the Prop. J projects. There is, however, a silver lining in this cloud that serves for many as a warning about the dangers of public-private partnerships. Mirkarimi amended the traffic plan to allow the city to take additional steps to limit traffic in a year if, as Board of Supervisors president A aron Peskin predicts, the concourse "is the speedway that it used to be."

So perhaps this isn't the last chapter after all. For more information and our endorsement of Prop. G, see page 24.

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