Earlier this year, Mayor London Breed spent a few sunny hours cycling around Paris, already renowned as one of the world’s best cities for bicyclists, and likely heard how the French capital dedicated 250 million euros last year to build out even more protected bike lanes and bike parking.
San Francisco has bold goals to swap cars for bikes and other mobility options too, but our traffic interventions aren’t nearly as sweeping. While Breed endorsed a car-free JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park, her support for other car-free and car-light roads has been tepid. The most recent example comes on Lake Street, where her office has gotten involved in a fight to restore through-traffic, despite a unanimous vote by the SF Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) board last summer to make Slow Lake permanent.
The decision was not as final as it seemed. The same can be said for the permanent closure of JFK Drive, now subject to revision thanks to a ballot measure in November that aims to reopen the road (as well as the Great Highway) to cars.
Now, with the mayoral intervention on Lake Street, the city’s pandemic-inspired Slow Streets program may also soon hit a traffic jam.
On July 1, SFMTA said Lake Street would go back to the board for review — a move that was not supposed to happen under a timeline laid out months ago. Among the dozens of streets where cars are asked to drive slowly and share with bikes and pedestrians, four, including Lake, were approved for permanent status. All that was left was to craft designs.
Asked for comment, mayoral spokesperson Mason Lee told The Frisc that the SFMTA would revisit not just Lake Street but also “the entire Slow Streets program to come up with a sustainable, equitable street safety program.” Lee noted that the mayor supports this process and that she met with groups on both sides of the issue in January.
The mayor’s transportation advisor Alexandra Sweet was also present in a recent private meeting about Lake Street, an unusual step in a process that was supposed to be determined by SFMTA staff.
An email from Sweet to SFMTA director Jeffrey Tumlin and other staff, disclosed via a records request by transit advocate Chris Arvin, underscores the details on which Sweet was focused. “Moving forward on Lake Street — open it with traffic calming — informing residents on DATE — and looking to implementation on DATE,” Sweet’s email reads.
To Arvin and other slow street advocates, the email, dated 10 days before SFMTA began gathering public comment on the new design, shows that the city already knew the street’s fate: reopened to through-traffic, but with calming measures like speed bumps and more stop signs.
City Hall’s Lee disputed this interpretation, saying the email was “setting an agenda for an internal meeting to understand the next possible steps on Lake Street and what a communication would look like as decisions were made,” but that none of those decisions had been made yet.
Gwyneth Borden, chair of the SFMTA board, said last week before the email surfaced that she was “unaware of any direct efforts by the mayor asking the SFMTA Board to reconsider Slow Streets.”
SFMTA staffer Jamie Parks, who worked on the project, said in a private meeting between SFMTA staff, slow Lake advocates, and Sweet that the design that has emerged — a reopened street with calming but no physical barriers for traffic diversion — would not be adequate to make Lake a successful slow street.
It’s unclear if the MTA board’s review, coming as soon as September, could lead to a reversal of the slow designation for Lake, for the other permanent slow streets — Golden Gate Avenue, Sanchez Street, and Shotwell Street — or for Page Street, which is on a different path to permanence.
“It definitely makes us nervous,” says Molly Hayden, a steward of slow Page.
How did we get here?
In May 1971, the Department of Public Works (DPW) painted the city’s first bike lane on Lake Street.
Fifty years later, slow Lake has majority support from the neighborhood, while opponents claim that it hinders local access, makes the road more dangerous, and clogs neighboring streets. None of these claims are true, as SFMTA data have shown. (The Frisc reached out to several “reopen Lake” advocates for this story. They either declined to comment or did not respond.)
(UPDATE: After this story was published, SFMTA published results from its California Street “road diet,” which began in July 2020 and reduced that street from two lanes each way to one. California runs parallel to Lake Street. The results show very little difference in vehicle speed and a big safety improvement on California, even as it absorbed some of Lake’s through-traffic overflow.)
‘I believe we approved four of those slow streets, making them permanent, right?’
— SFMTA board member Steve Heminger in late June
Last month, SFMTA unveiled its proposed design for Lake Street: new stop signs, speed cushions, raised crosswalks, and four concrete diverters at key intersections to discourage drivers from using the street to cut through to other neighborhoods. Two weeks later, more than 3,500 people had weighed in. Practically no one — less than 2 percent of respondents — liked it. About 54 percent wanted to get rid of the slow street altogether, and 44% wanted more robust traffic diversion.
(A note on the data here: the most recent survey of Lake Street residents and neighbors shows majority support for the slow street. Results from last month’s design survey say that about 54 percent of respondents — not limited to the neighborhood — were anti-slow street.)
At the end of the comment period, the city gave advocates a heads-up in a meeting. Everything but the concrete diverters would remain in the plan. “What was made clear in the meeting was that the concrete diverters would not be implemented, they are not part of the design anymore, and there is no plan to add them back,” says Luke Bornheimer, an organizer with Community Spaces SF.
‘Sense of entitlement’
For now, Lake Street will continue to feature makeshift wood-and-sandbag warnings: “Road Closed to Through Traffic.”
Jason Henderson, a San Francisco State University professor who specializes in urban mobility, said city leaders need to be courageous in the face of the anti-slow street feedback, which he called a “reactionary stance that’s going to be quite well organized because they’re pissed, because you’re taking something away.”
“This sense of entitlement to a higher-speed crossing of San Francisco is an ecological disaster,” Henderson said, “and politicians should stand up to that.”
By the time SFMTA board members meet for their review, it will have been more than a year since their vote to make four streets permanently slow. One director was recently taken aback by the news of the Lake Street controversy. ”I believe we approved four of those [slow streets], making them permanent, right?” Steve Heminger asked in late June. “What’s the process for doing more?”
Heminger did not respond to requests for comment for this story, but other board members weighed in on the prospect of more debate.
SF has moved past the dog days of the pandemic that inspired slow streets, and “it isn’t a bad thing to look at the comprehensive picture again and ask staff to provide more info as our world evolves,” said Sharon Lai. Lai added that she has heard people on both sides of the Lake Street debate “raise valid questions.”
Borden, the board chair, acknowledged the displeasure in an email: “As we know, San Francisco is a city of process and there are many on both sides of the debate that are unhappy about what staff has proposed for implementation. We look forward to reviewing it to ensure the best outcome for San Franciscans.”
Max Harrison-Caldwell is a staff writer covering streets and public space for The Frisc and an incoming master’s student at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.