ABSTRACT
San Francisco has an ideologically progressive politics of mobility, invoking concerns about the environment and social justice. This chapter describes how San Francisco progressives, while looking for ways to reallocate street space, come up against entrenched conservative frameworks used to evaluate and design streets, such as traffic engineering metrics that now privilege cars over other modes. Reallocating streets towards a progressive form of livability, while a laudable goal, can come with vexing contradictions, such as housing displacement near bus stops that are used by a new, ad hoc, private bus system (often given the 'Google bus' moniker). A new stratum of affluent technology workers, many commuting in these new private buses, have engendered a divisive backlash about livability at a time when livability is most needed to mitigate climate change. In that vein, the climate fight is not just a street fight, but also a struggle over the right to the city.
