Kristi Coale, Alex Lash, and Lisa Plachy contributed to this report.
The city’s street and transit commission has approved a new design to replace the controversial Valencia Street bike lane.
The new curbside lanes will end a one-year-plus experiment. In June 2023, SFMTA installed center running lanes along eight blocks of Valencia. Many merchants were outraged – and one went on a 30-day hunger strike.
They claimed their businesses tanked during the experiment. Sales data show that Valencia has been one of the slowest neighborhoods to recover from the pandemic, but the city controller said the woes predated the center lanes, with “no statistical basis for linking the two.”
SFMTA pushed ahead this year with a replacement. The agency says it worked closely with merchants and others on a plan that wouldn’t sacrifice safety and appease as many people as possible.
“We’ve done everything we can to incorporate business needs directly into the design,” said SFMTA project manager Paul Stanis at today’s hearing. “We have really had to go through every single inch of the corridor.”
Still, in a letter to the SFMTA last week, the Valencia Corridor Merchants Association (VCMA) gave a conflicted assessment of the new design, which eliminates dozens of parking spots: “While we believe that the side running bike lane could be an improvement from its current state we find this solution equally problematic and cannot endorse it.”
None of the changes that merchants asked for, including the return of left turns to the corridor, were granted during today’s hearing.
Construction will begin in January to avoid holiday disruption and could take a few months.
Back to the curb
The saga of the Valencia bike lanes began because the original design – curbside lanes without protection – was dangerous. Bicyclists have used Valencia as a key north-south route through the Mission District for decades. It’s flat, it doesn’t have buses, and it runs straight through to Market Street for commuters and other neighborhood connections.
The new design goes back to the curb, but with a lot more protection. And unlike pre-pandemic days, it has to deal with parklets. The new lanes will slalom around most of them.
Of the 26 parklets in place, however, two will be dismantled and three will switch to a “floating” model. This design, borrowed from other cities, lets merchants keep a few parking spots intact.
But it adds a complication. The bike lane hugs the curb between the sidewalk and parklet. SFMTA said it will try to keep bikes from hitting parklet patrons by adding signs and a raised walkway that slows down bicyclists.
At today’s hearing, VCMA president Manny Yekutiel, who runs a cafe and community space on Valencia, apologized for voting in favor of the center-lane experiment when he was on the SFMTA board last year. He called the lanes a “disaster.”
Other merchants spoke today about the detrimental effect on their businesses. They all said they want more parking, not less. But the new plan in fact eliminates 79 parking and loading spaces. SFMTA project manager Paul Stanis said remaining spots will have more flexibility, switching from loading zones in the morning to customer parking later in the day.
To ease parking concerns, Stanis said two nearby public garages are often under capacity, and the agency would work to direct drivers to them. (It’s unclear, however, if those garages have space nights and weekends when the corridor attracts a lot of night life.)
The design also adds more motorcycle parking spaces. This is in response to the number of food delivery scooters that were “kind of parking all over the place,” Stanis said.
After the vote, Yekutiel told The Frisc that merchants “continue to be concerned” about the loss of parking and lack of left-hand turns, “but are glad that the center running bike lane will finally be taken out of the street.”
(Disclosure: Yekutiel’s business is a sponsor of The Frisc’s newsletter.)
No turn on left turn ban
SFMTA says it won’t budge on the left-turn issue because of safety. According to city data from 2018 to 2024, left turns are the second leading cause of injury collisions and the cause of 17 percent of injury crashes.
Data from the center lanes showed that most bike-related collisions were due to illegal vehicle left or U-turns at intersections. (Overall, mid-block collisions between vehicles and bikes are lower than before the pilot, though scooter-related collisions are up.)
Stanis noted today that left turns could be reinstated down the road, but only with an overhaul of the street’s aging traffic signals at a cost of $1 million per intersection – money that SFMTA doesn’t have.
The agency is facing a fiscal cliff for its Muni service with emergency pandemic funding about to run out and nothing to replace it.
Merchants around the city have blamed bike lanes for woes. Many on Valencia scoff at the controller’s report that there’s no evidence for correlation. A growing body of studies show that bike lanes typically are neutral for neighborhood merchants – and often give a boost to business.
The economic vitality of the Valencia corridor is critical to the neighborhood and the city. And so is the success of the bike lane there. To get people out of cars, improve safety, reduce congestion, and meet climate and equity goals, San Francisco needs Valencia as a key connector in a new citywide bike network.
And that’s coming up fast. Soon after the Valencia vote, the SFMTA board was scheduled to discuss a draft plan for the new network, known as the Biking and Rolling Plan. The final version is expected early next year.