The future of Geary Boulevard’s western span was decided Tuesday afternoon when San Francisco transit directors unanimously approved special lanes for the Richmond District’s main thoroughfare, a change that should speed up bus trips for 37,000 riders daily riders.
Before the pandemic, the 38 Geary line carried more than 50,000 riders a day, the highest for a bus route this side of the Mississippi River. While SF’s population has declined since 2020, laws mandating more housing in the Richmond and other neighborhoods could swell demand for the line in coming years.
Advocates remained disappointed that the original idea — dedicated lanes down the center median, just as the city has built on Van Ness Avenue — had been changed to painted red lanes along the curb, but they maintained the change will benefit the city’s transit-first, climate, and street safety goals.
“This project will immediately improve lives and create a safer corridor now,” said transit advocate Cyrus Hall.
According to the SF Municipal Transportation Agency, it will also shave more than five minutes from roundtrip travel along the project’s corridor, which is more than 30 blocks long.
The project will come in two phases: The first starts this fall when “quick build” elements that don’t require street excavation are put in place on Geary from Stanyan Street to 34th Avenue. This first part, necessary to take advantage of a state grant that pays to make traffic signal changes, should finish before the end of the year.
The vote came despite long-standing opposition from some Geary merchants, residents, a former Richmond supervisor, and the district’s current supervisor Connie Chan, who has been a leading critic of the plans. She fired the most recent salvo in a letter to Mayor London Breed last week, accusing the SFMTA of “ignoring the concerns strongly expressed by community members.” (Read the letter below.)
Chan cited the loss of parking spots, inadequate levels of existing Muni service, and the overall health of the local businesses. In addition, she mentioned the empty and decaying Alexandria Theater, without explaining why she is pushing to make that building an historic landmark, which would add more complexity to its potential redevelopment.
Chan and representatives from her office did not respond to requests for comment.
In her letter to SFMTA Tuesday, Breed called the project “essential” to downtown recovery and said it would “fulfill broader commitments to improve the city’s transportation network, reduce pedestrian fatalities, fight climate change, and make the city more accessible for all.”
Time and timing
Joe’s Ice Cream co-owner Alice Kim has worried about the bus project’s effect on her business for some time now, as The Frisc reported in 2021. Even with the more modest version now in play, Kim acknowledges the importance of street safety — which the new changes should improve — but is mainly concerned about the timing.
She’d like SFMTA to hold off for a few more years. The section of Geary by her shop is due for water and sewer repair, starting in 2025. She’d like the bus project to start in 2027, a request echoed in Chan’s letter. “Any changes they make now will not help us,” Kim told The Frisc. “We’re asking for time to recover from the pandemic.”
Merchants like Kim worry that the project, like the Van Ness lanes, will take longer than estimated. SFMTA took five years to install center red lanes on two miles of Van Ness, causing financial turmoil for some business owners.
SFMTA’s Geary project manager Liz Brisson countered the Van Ness example at today’s hearing, noting that the agency completed its red lanes on the eastern span of Geary, from Market Street all the way to Stanyan Street, on time and on budget in three years.
Funding for Geary bus rapid transit was approved by SF voters in 2003. More delays would also mean more death and injury, advocates said at the board meeting. Some of the changes approved include bulb-outs and other pedestrian safety features. Last year, SF had the most traffic deaths in a decade, since it pledged to get to zero by 2024 — a goal that almost certainly won’t be met. (There have been 11 deaths so far this year.)
This contested two-mile stretch of Geary has been particularly dangerous, with about one pedestrian injury or death per month. It is on the high-injury network, the 12 percent of city streets where 68 percent of traffic fatalities happen.
First World parking problem
Despite the safety improvements, Chan insisted that the project’s burden would fall “on the backs of our merchants,” with parking the prime factor. It’s the latest example of Chan’s advocacy for cars, despite her famous anti-fossil fuel pledge as a candidate for office in 2020.
It’s true that drivers will end up with less room to maneuver. SFMTA says only 3 percent of space along Geary is allotted to transit, which doesn’t align to usage: 37 percent of the street’s trips are on the bus. Once the project is finished, 33 percent of the space along Geary will be for transit.
When cities deemphasize cars and improve streets for non-drivers, businesses benefit, according to study after study after study. Geary already has a lot of non-drivers. SFMTA’s Brisson cited a 2013 study that 78 percent of people on this stretch of Geary arrive by bus, bike, or on foot.
With quick builds — that is, using paint and easy-to-install barriers and bollards instead of carving up asphalt — the agency can relocate bus stops for better flow and make other improvements. SFMTA will also eliminate unprotected left turns at 11 intersections to reduce collisions and pedestrian injuries.
“Street safety is the number one No. 1 reason to move ahead with the quick build,” Susannah Raub, who chairs SFMTA’s Geary community advisory committee, told The Frisc.
But what galls merchants and their allies, including Chan and her predecessor Sandra Lee Fewer, is turning angled parking into parallel spaces. The quick-build portion of the project will result in the net loss of 31 parking spots — less than one space per block. An earlier version of the plan eliminated 70, but SFMTA added more angled parking on side streets to appease protestors.
It wasn’t enough, however, and at the end of Tuesday’s hearing, SFMTA commissioner Steve Heminger, a longtime Richmond district resident, admonished opponents for wanting all the parking back. Saving much of what would have been lost is “a pretty good day at the office,” he said.
There were other concessions to merchants. SFMTA won’t activate parking meters on evenings and Sundays, and it will reimburse them for parklet modifications required by the project.
There are other details to tie up, including the makeup and mission of a working group that includes merchants. But the big vote from the board means an end, finally, to decades of talking about improving Geary, as Citizen Advisory Committee member and octogenarian Tom Barton said: “I’ve heard lots of discussion on this project — everything from A to Z — and as a rider of the 38, we need this project.”
Correction 8/16/23: A previous version of this story misidentified the stretch of Geary that will get “quick build” fixes this fall. The correct stretch is Stanyan Street to 34th Avenue. The story also clarifies that the entire quick-build project, not just parking spot changes, will result in the net loss of 31 spaces.
Kristi Coale covers street, transit, and more for The Frisc.
