Local outrage over reserving street space for transit, known as bus-only lanes, boiled over in a recent town hall meeting about adding them along 16th Street in San Francisco’s Mission district. The tension makes clear that the years-long battle over Mission Street’s “red carpet” lanes will continue.
The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is in the early construction phases of the 16th Street Improvement Project, which is due to be completed in two years. The plan includes pedestrian safety improvements; a bike lane along 17th Street connecting Mission Bay and the Dogpatch neighborhoods to Mission Street; and the minefield du jour, bus lanes.
While the Mission’s particular politics bring intense scrutiny to such proposals, evidence increasingly abounds that bus-only lanes, separating Muni vehicles from traffic, makes for safer streets and for more efficient transit service. “It’s not the gentry on the bus,” says Cat Carter, communications manager for the San Francisco Transit Riders advocacy group. Carter, a Mission resident who commutes on the 14R bus, points out that “it’s seniors, disabled, hard-working people trying to get from the Excelsior to downtown jobs … It’s unfair to tell these people that they need to spend more of their lives on the bus when we have solutions to make it faster and safer.”
Considerations about who approves what changes to a corridor or district — and how that revives long-simmering local schisms about race, class, and inequality — will likely arise in some form for a similar effort, in the wealthier West Portal neighborhood. On Tuesday, May 21, the SFMTA’s board of directors will vote on adding bus- and taxi-only lanes as part of the West Portal Transit Delay Reduction Pilot. Although the project would only cover a short stretch, West Portal is a major connection for three Muni subway lines serving over 80,000 riders daily.
Meanwhile, all available data undermines claims that bus lanes are catalysts of gentrification. The SF Examiner reported that while the ridership for the 22 Fillmore bus line (running from the Marina Green down to the Mission, then out to the Dogpatch) skews whiter and less Latino than the surrounding neighborhoods, 14 percent of its riders are black — nearly triple the share of black people in the city’s population. In addition, 78 percent of SF riders earn less than $75,000 annually and tend to be poorer overall than drivers. According to 2017 numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, 40 percent of transit commuters in the broader metro region earn over $75,000, compared with 35 percent of those driving to work alone. In San Francisco proper, though, that is reversed; 40 percent of city residents driving alone earn over $75,000, compared with 38 percent of transit riders.
“The red lanes have become a proxy for for all the ills of gentrification that have befallen the Mission,” Carter adds. “Those are very real struggles … But I don’t think that those troubles are related at all to red lanes.”
Red carpets where once were red lines
The greatest amount of blowback over bus-only lanes in the Mission comes from local merchants losing parking and some of their regular clientele, destabilizing the economic base of low-income Latinx communities struggling in what is ground zero for the Bay Area’s housing crisis. (The Frisc covers a lot going on in the Mission.) That turmoil is rooted in economic history and racial segregation dating back decades, with key implications for present-day policies.
During the New Deal period of the late 1930s, the federal government’s sponsored lender, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, “redlined” the neighborhood with descriptions of its “decadent condition,” further concentrating racial segregation and wealth disparities. According to UC Berkeley’s Urban Displacement Project, 87 percent of SF’s neighborhoods undergoing gentrification were once redlined by HOLC maps.
After the early ’60s era of “urban renewal” decimated the predominantly black neighborhoods of the Fillmore and Western Addition, Mission activists successfully resisted redevelopment proposal in the area in 1967, including organized resistance to BART. Current-day community groups have maintained cohesion from bonds formed in that era. The Mission may have been redlined, but the affluent West Portal was marked green on federal “Residential Security” maps — the opposite designation. That part of the city also has a history of restrictive covenants barring nonwhites from purchasing homes there. (Even “Say Hey” hometown hero Willie Mays had trouble buying a house near West Portal.)
Bus lanes on 16th Street would serve almost as many riders as the 14-Rapid line carries along Mission Street. According to the SFMTA, the 22 Fillmore averaged 15,700 daily boardings in the fall of 2018, while the 55 16th Street line averaged 2,300; the 14R averaged 20,600 daily boardings during the same period. What’s more, bus-only lanes on Mission Street have resulted in time savings for the 14R of two minutes in each direction — roughly 10% of travel times for the most popular stretch of the route, which is expected to grow to five minutes.
Nevertheless, some Mission activists say that those transit improvements shouldn’t come at the expense of local businesses. Roberto Hernandez, an organizer with Our Mission No Eviction, describes the Mission Street red lanes as a “disaster” that the transit agency should fix before replicating elsewhere. “It was an experiment, and the experiment did work to get the buses to move two minutes faster, but it put the economic suffering on the businesses on Mission,” he tells me.
The acutely polarized political discourse of the Mission can present opportunities for less altruistic actors to co-opt serious concerns from the Latinx community. For example, Rick Hall, a local landlord representing United to Save the Mission, was among those who shouted “Who pays you?” at SFRT’s Cat Carter during the 16th Street town hall, according to Mission Local. Hall is also a member of Livable California, a statewide group formed to oppose higher density in urban areas. (Livable California founder Susan Kirsch has decreed that new apartments near transit would undermine “the pillars of Western civilization,” a trope echoing culture-war rants from supporters of President Trump. Hall, for his part, doesn’t think a proposed proposed tea parlor on Mission Street would save Western civilization.)
In contrast, the Mission Merchants Association raises specific concerns that reflect the city’s own information. In 2016, the SFMTA found that 22 percent of businesses surveyed reported a decrease in business, and 60 percent were concerned about parking. Survey results recommended returning half of the on-street parking back by restricting right-hand turns to every four blocks, instead of every two blocks. Meanwhile, the merchants association itself surveyed 357 businesses and reported that 14 had closed their doors since the red lanes were put down, and 301 reported an overall loss of revenue. It would like to see limits on parking on Mission only during peak commute hours, from 6 to 9 am in the northbound direction and 4 to 6 pm southbound.
Lay of the lane
Although retail has been in a nationwide slump that may account for some of these trends, local data continue to indicate positive results and safer conditions from bus lanes. For starters, Muni ridership has been on the rise since the depths of the Great Recession, based on SFMTA’s latest annual report. Despite the proliferation of around 500,000 private automobiles on city streets every day, 25 percent of all trips in the city occur on public transit, and 23 percent on foot. While 48 percent of all trips are taken in private vehicles (27 percent driving alone), the SFMTA estimates that circling for parking accounts for 30 percent of all driving in the city.
The SFMTA found that parking access was scarcely affected along the red lanes. As for safety, the total number of injury collisions dropped by 24 percent.
On Geary, the busiest bus corridor west of the Mississippi, construction on a bus rapid transit project began after 20 years in the planning process — but we’re already seeing major benefits. A 2017 evaluation by the SFMTA found that existing red lanes on Geary, O’Farrell, and Third streets reduced the travel time ratio between traffic and transit from 2013 to 2015 — in other words, car traffic did not slow down bus speeds nearly as much as before.
Contrary to business owners’ concerns, the SFMTA found that parking access was scarcely affected along the red lanes in this evaluation. Parking meter occupancy increased, at most, by 5 percent, leading the agency to conclude “that the use of red treatments does not impact access to on-street parking.” (Italics are mine.)
As for safety, the total number of injury collisions dropped by 24 percent on the routes studied, while the citywide total remained relatively unchanged. The Mission Street red lanes have been beneficial as well.
What do riders think of all this? It should come as no surprise that red lanes remain popular among them. A 2017 pedestrian survey by the SFMTA found that 90 percent of customers on Geary arrived on foot or via transit, compared with just 6 percent who drove. Transit riders and pedestrians also frequented local businesses more often, with 68 percent of respondents saying the bus-only lanes had improved service along the corridor. Last year, a citywide poll conducted for the Chamber of Commerce found that 55 percent of respondents supported the Mission’s red lanes.
This widespread support is less apparent when outraged neighbors and activists face down city officials, though it will (should?) ultimately take precedence. “It’s really hard to make the case for people who aren’t at town halls when they aren’t there,” says Rachel Hyden, executive director of the San Francisco Transit Riders Union. “When the SFMTA does these surveys showing transit riders want these bus lanes, we believe them.”
Diego Aguilar-Canabal is the former managing editor of the Bay City Beacon and also writes for the East Bay Express. Follow him on Twitter: @daguilarcanabal
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