Last July, Mayor London Breed wrote that San Francisco’s Slow Streets program should evolve from an ad hoc entity to a network that supports people as they walk and bike, as well as help the city meet its climate goals. She also noted that the program, largely serving affluent areas, needed to include lower-income communities.
Nevertheless, city transit officials issued a recommendation Monday for a much smaller program: 15 streets that mostly don’t connect with one another, and where entire districts are left out.
What’s more, many excluded neighborhoods have several streets that are part of the high injury network — the 12 percent of city streets that see 68 percent of the severe and fatal injuries.
This is not what a local coalition had envisioned, after reading Breed’s post, when it drew up its own proposal for a much denser network that would add 100 miles of Slow Streets by 2024, including underserved neighborhoods. SF Bike Bus advocate Luke Bornheimer, who helped draw up these plans, says this is more in line with residents’ wishes, noting the Nov. 8 election results as evidence.
“The success of Proposition J and failure of Prop I show that the vast majority of SF voters want more car-free areas in the city,” Bornheimer tells The Frisc, referring to the initiatives on JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park and the Great Highway out west.
SFMTA released its plans for the scheduled Dec. 6 hearing on slow streets as an “initial proposal.“ Other streets could come later, according to SFMTA spokesperson Stephen Chun. “The intent is to establish an ongoing Slow Streets program, but for streets in denser parts of the city, we’ve found more extensive redesign efforts are required to address more complex needs,” he writes in an email.
It’s a good thing SF is sticking with the Slow Streets program, a remarkable transformation of public space that came about during the COVID pandemic. But the rate at which the city works on making its streets fit for various modes of transit — Better Market Street being one deferred dream — it could be a while before we see a safe network for transportation without a car.
In, out, all around
SFMTA says it has done a lot of work to improve conditions along the most congested corridors. For instance, the agency has reconfigured most streets in the Tenderloin by reducing traffic lanes, adding protected bike lanes and pedestrian safety improvements over the last three years. (More than half of the city’s traffic deaths and serious injuries are borne by pedestrians and bicyclists.)
Yet earlier this month, the SF county transit authority — known as the SFCTA, and made up of members of the Board of Supervisors — was given a five-year update on the city’s progress toward its pledge of zero traffic deaths by 2024. On this goal, there’s little to show for nearly a decade of work: There have been 30 traffic deaths this year so far, whereas there were 31 when the city began the Vision Zero program in 2014.
The Slow Streets program gave the city’s most exposed road users more room, and many people have called into SFMTA meetings to share that it’s why they started biking to get around. As former SFMTA planner Sarah Jones told The Frisc earlier this year, Slow Streets provided a relatively easy way “to fill out a bike network.”
Most streets selected for the program were activated during the pandemic, including Sanchez St., Shotwell St., and Golden Gate Ave. Two new streets — 22nd St. from Bryant St. to Chattanooga St. (substituting for 20th St.) and Cayuga Ave. from Naglee Ave to Rousseau St. — will be considered for inclusion.
To be added to the Slow Streets program, a road needs to meet certain metrics for traffic volume (a daily average target of 1,500 but no more than 3,000 vehicles) and speed (a target of 20 mph but no faster than 25 mph).
Page Street was left off the list as it is already designated as a neighborway, with diverters and other elements to slow traffic along the east-west route.
Notably absent from the roster is hotly contested Lake Street, which the agency has elected to send to its board without a recommendation. The SFMTA board could vote to include Lake as a slow street as it did so unanimously in August 2021.
James Le of Friends of Slow Lake Street sees the “no recommendation” as a positive sign for the Richmond district route since the SFMTA approved its inclusion already. “Hopefully the board will stand by their decision from last summer,” he says.
With or without Lake, the network is much smaller than it had been in the pandemic. At its peak in the summer of 2021, there were nearly 30 streets covering 47 miles. The current proposal has cut this in half.
While the existing slow streets do connect to the bike network, as the SFMTA map shows, not all bike lane miles are created equal. Of the 466 miles of bikeways, only 43 miles are protected lanes. Most of the city’s bikeways are the so-called sharrow roads — where bikes ride among cars along with the plain painted bike lane — which The Frisc recently demonstrated can be somewhat intimidating.
For Bornheimer of SF Bike Bus, what SF has now, even with the 15 slow streets, is not really a bike network. “Children, seniors, and parents are not using the ‘bike network’ because they don’t feel comfortable because it’s not safe,” he says.
SFMTA says next month’s hearing will not be the final word on slow streets. It plans to set up a process for bringing more into the network as they meet the criteria and have community support.
Kristi Coale covers streets, transit, and open spaces for The Frisc.
