The pandemic gave San Francisco a once-in-a-generation chance to reshape its streets. With the mayor’s pen stroke, City Hall created unprecedented space for pedestrians and cyclists.
The nearly overnight transformation has given way to more deliberate — and permanent—changes to the streetscape. Last month, the city officially made more than a dozen streets “slow” by limiting car traffic.
Now the SF Municipal Transportation Agency, which oversees streets and transit, is launching an overhaul of SF’s 14-year-old citywide bicycle plan. A final draft is due in mid-2024.
The agency has begun asking for input, especially in neighborhoods that historically have been overlooked in transit-related planning and investment, including the Tenderloin, Bayview, and the Mission.
This will take a while. The final Active Communities Plan, as it’s known, will emphasize equity for communities who feel marginalized by the clamor to move beyond cars. With more than a year of planning ahead, the hope is the deliberate pace will result in a more inclusive bicycle network.
“We need a plan that can represent the full range of users, accommodating their needs and making them feel welcome and safe on the network,” said Justin Hu-Nguyen, director of advocacy for the San Francisco Bike Coalition, which is supporting the community engagement.
Slow streets should be a big part of the bike plan. The SFMTA board of directors voted unanimously last month to make 16 of them permanent, and told agency staff to return before April with a plan that reaches more neighborhoods. Page Street joined the permanent network last week through a different vote.
Slow streets have added 25 miles of bike- and-pedestrian-friendly pavement to the city’s bike network, but mostly don’t connect or link neighborhoods. (Planners added 22nd Street in the Mission to help sync up with the city’s bike network.)
The more comprehensive the network, the easier and safer longer bike trips will be, which is crucial to convince people to change their habits, move beyond a car-centric city, and meet climate, safety, and long-ago-pledged transit goals.
A bigger bike network will need much more than white-striped bike lanes, “sharrows,” and the bike box that was the major innovation of the old plan. The new plan must bridge complex and contentious needs of people riding on two wheels and those driving on four.
Jessie Fernandez, “bicis del pueblo” coordinator for the advocacy group Poder, says all options have to be on the table, and points out that transportation is linked to other issues such as housing and employment.
“You have to look at the jobs people have in a community and how they get to those different places,” Fernandez says.
Can’t just jump on a bike
Fernandez, who works with immigrant and Spanish-speaking San Franciscans, wants more bike lanes and infrastructure, including storage. As part of Poder’s bike program, he refurbishes bikes and distributes them at little to no cost. He also teaches people how to ride and be safe in the Mission, which is not always easy.
But he adds that it’s important to acknowledge not everyone can use a bike: “We’re not interested in dictating how people get around.”
Some people in Poder’s community have jobs, like construction and house cleaning, that require hauling equipment to sites throughout the city. Many also have children to drop and pick up at school on workdays. Unlike families whose kids can strap into the cargo or passenger space of an e-bike, many of Poder’s families need their cars, according to Fernandez.
Even if they wanted to bike, there are logistical problems. Many families crowd into congregate living situations with no space for a large bike. (Storing it on the street is not an option.)
When asked about charges of gentrification — like the pre-COVID pushback against bike share in the Mission, or SF supervisors who said banning cars from Golden Gate Park’s JFK Drive was racist and elitist — Fernandez says more bikes and lanes can change the “desirability” of a neighborhood, but they are necessary. His comments echo an August 2021 study that says bike-friendly streets raise concerns over displacement, but they’re not a cause of it.
The study looked at 29 U.S. cities, accounting for 11,000 miles of bike lanes, over 10 years. Locally, SF Recreation and Park data on JFK showed the car ban didn’t change the mix of people visiting from all corners of the city.
While Fernandez is working to make bikes available to those want them — or want to learn — it’s the city’s job to make them feel safe enough to ride. There are bike lanes in the Mission, but, as The Frisc has reported, not all are created equal.
More lanes with better protection could go a long way to make bikes a real choice for those who don’t always need a vehicle. Despite some claims that neighborhood slow streets and other bike-friendly spaces make car use impossible, there are ways to coexist.
Sidewalk squeeze
Safety along the streets is also on Eric Rozell’s mind. The co-chair of traffic safety for the Tenderloin Community Benefits District has seen a big uptick in e-bikes and e-scooters in the neighborhood.
Many folks don’t feel safe riding in the streets and instead make their way along the Tenderloin’s sidewalks, already crowded with open-air drug dealing, unhoused residents, and foot traffic.
Rozell is quick to note that every street in his densely populated neighborhood is part of the city’s High Injury Network, the 13 percent of SF streets where 75 percent of fatal and severe traffic injuries occur.
SFMTA has deployed various traffic safety programs in the Tenderloin, including restricting right turns on red, lowering the speed limit to 20 mph, and sidewalk widening. But, as in the Mission, things are complicated, Rozell notes.
For starters, multiple nonprofits are based in the Tenderloin, and for many of their employees, especially those who don’t live in SF, public transit isn’t an option.
What’s more, the neighborhood’s one-way streets serve as pass-throughs for Muni, fire, and police vehicles going from one part of town to another — not to mention major arteries for commuters driving to and from freeways. Meeting all these needs is complicated, adds Rozell: “How do you prioritize the health and safety of the community that lives here over the people who come to work here or pass through here?”
More space for bikes, scooters, and even the many motorized wheelchairs piloted by residents would ease some pressure, but the cramped, 50-square-block neighborhood doesn’t have the street space that other neighborhoods do. Making protected bike lanes and street parking coexist will be tough. Slow streets have been proposed but nothing has materialized.
To do what they need to do, the city’s going to have to piss off drivers.
eric rozell, Tenderloin Community Benefits District
Rozell has some outside-the-box ideas, like priority parking for employees of nonprofits and others serving the neighborhood in vital ways. Another is congestion pricing to reduce pass-through driving, which New York City has passed but has yet to implement.
Eventually, the city is going to have to reduce the number of cars that come through. “To do what they need to do, the city’s going to have to piss off drivers,” says Rozell.
The new bike plan is at least a year away, full of discussions and outreach, but when it arrives it will have a weapon to fight the inevitable legal challenge — this is SF, after all. A 2020 California law authored by Scott Wiener, who represents SF in the state Senate, makes transit-related projects including bike lanes exempt from the state’s environmental regulations, known as CEQA.
A CEQA challenge, asserting that more bike lanes and fewer parking spaces would increase pollution, was used to hold up the city’s previous bike plan for years. That’s worth repeating: An environmental law was used to block a program to encourage more biking and less car driving. Hopefully, as SFMTA spends the next year listening to community input, the voices of those who want to hold SF back from critical progress will start to fade.