San Francisco Vignettes, or, City Life Can Be Draining
Walking down the street in the city, I like to take stock of “the most San Francisco thing” I see every day. Sometimes it’s the guy hoverboarding or riding his electric unicycle down the middle of Valencia Street during the weekend street closure. Sometimes it’s someone riding at night on their tricked-out bicycle, playing loud music with lots of flashing lights, like a miniature carnival. Or women walking their dogs, sunglasses on, drinking boba, maybe carrying a yoga mat too. Or it’s just the grandmother in her puffy jacket walking her small puffy-jacketed charges to school, or the dad jogging while pushing the running stroller, or yes, the tech bro with his hoodie and corporate logo backpack, often in a small pack of similar bros, loudly talking about crypto or ChatGPT or whatever.
And sometimes I look at the parade of ornately decorated houses on the street where I run, and realize that families have been living here for decades, each one living their San Francisco lives. I wonder what their histories are. I found a great website, foundsf.org, that has an architectural tour of Shotwell Street, my main running route. Today, Shotwell is designated as a “Slow Street,” prioritizing pedestrian and bicycle traffic, with bollards and signage to reduce car traffic and encourage sharing the street. This makes it a great place to run and to take in the 19th and early 20th century houses.
It’s probably impossible to uncover all the quirks of a city of 800,000 people, even if it’s only a 7 mile by 7 mile square. (Speaking of which, you’ll often see “7x7” as shorthand to represent SF, which refers to the fact that the city is roughly a 7 mile x 7 mile square in shape. Getting across the city, though, is usually not as simple as a straight line, thanks to the aggressive topography of the roughly 42 hills.) But one of the quirkiest things I have learned about recently is the SF PUC’s “Adopt-A-Drain” program (that’s the Public Utilities Commission, which regulates water, power, and sewer). For the low investment of regular drain-cleaning, any SF resident can adopt a storm drain on the street, and give it a silly name. I think what really gets me about this program is twofold:
It capitalizes on our local sense of humor, which relies heavily on puns and absurdity. Sample drain names near me: The Rain In Vain Flows Unobstructed Down This Drain; Shania Drain; Grate Expectations
It reflects how truly bad our public services and infrastructure are, in that we are relying on the goodness of individual citizens to maintain a critical infrastructure network. It rarely rains here, but when it does, it usually floods, because it appears that the stormwater system is not really designed to handle much of anything. So this program is essentially an admission that SF PUC is unable to maintain the stormwater drainage system, so would everyone please help out, thanks.
San Francisco, it turns out, has a combined stormwater-sewer system, which is unusual for California and means that when it rains, the sewer system gets directly impacted, and can lead to the release of untreated sewage into the Bay. For reference, older cities often have combined systems, like New York City, which has about 60% of its system as a combined system, and 40% as separated systems. With a separated system, by contrast, you can separately treat sewage and stormwater, so that in times of heavy or ongoing rain, clean stormwater can be released directly to the water system without any sewage release. I should note though, that most cities don’t treat their stormwater at all, which is its own problem, since stormwater flushes all the trash, oil, and everything else from our streets, so it’s not exactly clean water most of the time. Despite the combined system, San Francisco doesn’t have to release sewage too often, since in the 1990s, the city built a series of underground sewage storage tanks, to help store the extra water during prolonged rain. This reduced the amount of sewage release significantly, and seems like a reasonable compromise. In typical (dry) times, all sewage and stormwater gets treated before release, while during the infrequent periods of heavy rain, some sewage is released, but not as much as with a typical combined system.
So all that being said - I guess it’s now my civic duty to adopt a drain. I’m now accepting submissions for what to name it. If I can come up with a convincingly ridiculous drain name, then I’ll do it.
In conclusion: Just don’t call our city Frisco. Or San Fran. We will silently judge you. If you need to call it something shorter, “the city” will do. (Sorry San Jose, you may be bigger, but you will never be “the city.” There can be only one.)
