It’s 2022, and the resurgent coronavirus is infecting people in record numbers across the country. Yet even as the virus rages, San Francisco is looking beyond the pandemic and discussing the future of hotly contested street changes.
Some of those changes will be most apparent along our shores, as sea level creeps ever higher. Other changes, already in effect to give bicyclists and pedestrians more priority in Golden Gate Park and several neighborhoods, are subject to fierce debate. The first few days of January have already set the tone for a year that could bring permanent transformation of SF’s streetscape.
In the city’s southwest corner, plans are afoot to close a stretch of the Great Highway to cars. It’s not the same stretch that has stirred so much passion in the past year, but its fate has been linked with the rest of the beach boulevard as an example of what, inevitably, needs to happen along more of SF’s Pacific shore.
Just south of the part that was transformed into the “Great Walkway” in 2020, then reopened on weekdays by mayoral decree last August, is a one-mile stretch called the Great Highway Extension, which is eroding into the ocean. Waves have chewed up the shore just west of the SF Zoo and a huge wastewater treatment plant, imperiling the road and critical infrastructure alike.
“If the Great Highway south of Sloat was left in place, it is likely that it would be heavily damaged by coastal conditions and likely would fail to serve as a safe corridor for the public,” said San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesperson Stephen Chun via email.
After years of work, SFMTA and other city agencies produced last week an environmental report detailing how they plan to turn the Great Highway Extension into a pedestrian and bike path and bolster the shore with reinforced cliffs and replenished dunes.
The project wasn’t a surprise; SFMTA planners noted the plan last June at a hearing on the future of the upper Great Highway (the main stretch), which at that point had been closed to traffic for 14 months. Amanda Eaken, who sits on SFMTA’s board of directors, spoke of the “inevitability” of the Great Highway Extension closure and recommended that the city pair a car-free pilot study on the upper Great Highway with an earlier closure of the extension, which she said was “becoming a road to nowhere.”
Several other SFMTA directors at the hearing said they supported this recommendation.
In a meeting last week to explain the project, most public commenters were neighbors who opposed the closure, calling it a necessary route for automobiles. SFMTA planner Julie Moore said the closure would add half a mile to car trips between the Outer Sunset and the Lake Merced area or points south. (Chun had predicted as much, noting that “the proposed project will require some modifications to travel behavior, which is often not supported by the public.”)
One environmental group that has pushed for transformation at Ocean Beach for a decade isn’t happy with the project either, but for different reasons. “Basically the plans are a dressed-up seawall,” said Laura Walsh, California policy manager for the nonprofit Surfrider Foundation.
Walsh likes the bike and walking path, but she would prefer more true sand dunes, not a “highly engineered” buried wall that she expects will require frequent maintenance, such as sand being trucked in. According to Walsh, dunes would fare better than the wall at absorbing wave energy and providing a habitat for wildlife and vegetation.
Surfrider, which helped produce the 2012 Ocean Beach Master Plan (OBMP), will submit a formal comment this month and call for more discussion, said Walsh: “The plan that’s been revealed is very different from what we… expected for the area based on the robust planning process that happened with the OBMP, so the community can’t be expected to just swallow the pill.”
The public can submit comments until Jan. 24. SF Public Utilities Commission spokesperson Chris Colwick said the city would complete environmental review by early 2023 and begin the four-year construction process later that year.
Barring more delay, the Great Highway Extension should be transformed before the end of the decade. But the rest of the road is in limbo. City planners never got to test how full closure would affect post-pandemic traffic on surrounding streets, thanks to the sudden decision to bring back cars. To the east, however, a big decision in Golden Gate Park looms.
A car-free thumbs-up
Arguments over John F. Kennedy Drive, Golden Gate Park’s main drag, have raged since the city closed it to cars in April 2020. One of the park’s most venerable tenants, the de Young Museum, has fought to reopen it. As The Frisc first reported, the museum has used a fake grassroots campaign, centered around a website, to lobby SF officials and argue that San Franciscans of all stripes want to drive their cars on JFK.
A new survey shows that’s not true. According to the SFMTA survey, released earlier this month, 70 percent of nearly 10,000 SF residents say they want to keep JFK car-free.
Of SF’s 25 zip codes, the majority of respondents from 24 were in favor. (The exception was the 94132 zip code in the city’s southwest corner, where only 49 percent of respondents were in favor.)
Based on this survey and other information, SFMTA and the city’s Recreation and Parks Department plan to submit a proposal to the Board of Supervisors for approval this winter.
Part of the contentiousness centers around the underground parking garage below the de Young, which has 800 spaces that are rarely full on weekdays and is easily accessible from both sides of Golden Gate Park. (Oddly, the de Young’s lobbying site barely mentions the garage.)
In a statement, the activist group KidSafeSF called on the de Young Museum and the California Academy of Sciences to allow free parking for the disabled and reduced fees for low-income San Franciscans. The museums have said they do not control garage rates, although as The Frisc reported in April 2021, most board members of the nonprofit in charge of the garage have ties to the museums.
Murky Lake
A mile north of JFK, neighbors in the seemingly placid Richmond district are fighting over the future of their local slow street. It’s a test of the neighborhood-level appetite for change, and may become a model for others who want to overturn slow street designations in their own neighborhoods.
Lake Street was one of the four neighborhood slow streets marked for post-pandemic continuation last summer. But it could be the first given back to cars following pushback from neighbors. (Unlike JFK Drive, neighborhood slow streets are still open to cars so residents can come and go, but through traffic is discouraged to give bikes, pedestrians, and other users priority.)
Lake’s permanent slow status was thrown into doubt in December when SFMTA said it was putting a full-car option back on the table. Last week, more than 250 people showed up at a virtual meeting — the second of three — to weigh in, most of them advocating for opening the street back up to through traffic. The only official survey, however, was in summer 2020, when 67 percent of polled residents were in favor of keeping the street free of (most) cars. SFMTA is currently conducting another survey to assess whether public opinion has changed.
Those in favor of slow Lake Street say the space has become a safe haven for children and a community gathering site. Those opposed say the closure has increased traffic on neighboring California Street, made the neighborhood less safe, and decreased access for the elderly and disabled. The claims about access and safety are demonstrably false, as The Frisc reported last month, and a summer 2021 traffic report does not support the congestion claim either.
SFMTA is collecting new traffic data which should be released this month, according to SFMTA spokesperson Erica Kato.
The issue has proven divisive, to say the least, with nastiness on both sides. On Jan. 2, a man in a Jeep drove up to a group of neighbors hosting a pro-Slow Lake block party and began swearing at them. He threatened the group, which included children, and said of one woman in the street that he would “come back with my semi and run her over.” The residents reported the driver to the police.
In another recent video viewed by The Frisc, two people walking on Lake Street call a delivery driver a “mutt” for driving on the road while the driver films them. (Delivery vehicles are permitted on slow streets at reduced speed limits.) The driver posted the video on Twitter, but has since made their account private.
In Zoom meetings the SFMTA has hosted, staff have urged residents to be civil with one another. The third and final meeting is this Wednesday, Jan. 12, at 6:30 pm. SFMTA estimates that it will make its recommendation at a hearing next month.
Amid the infighting, Mayor London Breed will address pandemic road closures including JFK Drive and the Great Highway at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting. (Follow The Frisc’s Twitter feed for live updates there.)
Long-term decisions are upon us, and it’s important to make sure our streets work for everyone. Bouts of road rage are moving us farther away from our goal, and if the pandemic has taught us one thing, it’s that public spaces are meant to be shared.
