Here’s one big takeaway from San Francisco’s yearlong experiment with unusual bike lanes along Valencia Street in the Mission: You can’t please everyone.
The city’s streets and transit agency, SFMTA, opened the center-running bike lanes in August, pledging to try them as a pilot program to collect data and keep the flexibility to make changes.
The first three months of results are in. Overall, bike and foot traffic have not materially changed, according to the SFMTA, but vehicle traffic is down 26 percent. (This is compared with the three months before construction started.) The drop in vehicles has not added more congestion to neighboring streets, the agency says.
In addition, safety has improved in some ways. Because bikes and cars are now separated, there have been no “doorings” or collisions within blocks. However, the odd design — one of only a handful of center bike lane installations installed in the United States — has come with left-turn bans along the eight blocks of the project, and six bicyclists have been hit by drivers making illegal left turns. There also were four collisions involving pedestrians, two of which resulted from people walking out of the crosswalk and were not related to pilot conditions, SFMTA reports.
Agency staff presented the data at Tuesday’s board meeting just hours after three Valencia Street merchants filed claims alleging that the bike lane pilot has had a negative impact on their businesses. The action is a precursor to taking the city to court.
No Valencia merchant showed up or called in for public comment during the meeting, though, which board vice chair Stephanie Cajina noted, all while acknowledging the complaints about the bike lanes. The pilot has retained 95 percent of parking spaces; however, the mix of customer parking and commercial loading zones has shifted, which merchants say has caused confusion and obstacles to goods and services. “We did receive lots of letters, and one told us ‘I lost $40,000,’ said Cajina. “Folks have had losses in the early stages of the pilot.”
But it’s unclear if the losses are actually due to the pilot. Data presented by SFMTA transportation planner Shayda Haghgoo suggested Valencia businesses along the new bike lanes, which run from 15th to 23rd streets, were experiencing broader challenges.
In the third quarter of 2023 (which includes the first two months of the pilot) five other commercial corridors, including Hayes, Mission, and Polk streets, all reported similar sales tax drops relative to the same period in 2021. (What’s more, sales taxes from the Valencia corridor appear to have outperformed the sales tax from the entire 94110 zip code.)
Nevertheless, Haghgoo began her presentation warning that the data came with plenty of caveats, including the use of sales tax as a barometer in such a small sample size.
There is mounting evidence that businesses get a boost when streets are made safer for cyclists and pedestrians, including research out of Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Toronto, as well as San Francisco. Businesses fault bike infrastructure and the loss of parking that comes with it for negative impacts, even as data suggest otherwise.
In an open letter, the Valencia Corridor Merchants Association countered that the sales tax data were “being used to prove that everything is fine.”
“People are avoiding Valencia Street, and we can feel it,” wrote association vice president Sean Quigley, whose shop Paxton Gate is smack in the middle of the eight-block bike lane stretch. The merchant group called on the transit agency to end the center-lane pilot and install a side-running alternative by June.
People are avoiding Valencia Street, and we can feel it.
Valencia Corridor Merchants Association
Business owners weren’t the only ones with that request, but board members declined to change course, voting instead to press on with the center-running pilot with tweaks to improve safety, parking, and loading conditions. The board also underscored that the agency must simultaneously develop plans for side-running protected bike lanes in consultation with merchants.
That process has already begun. But as the meeting progressed, it became clear that whatever the outcome, not everyone will get everything they want. And like the experiment itself, what everyone wants is a work in progress.
Prepare to pivot
A year ago, a coalition of safety advocates and residents, with help from then-SFMTA board member Manny Yekutiel, now the president of the Valencia corridor merchants, built support for the center bike lane pilot. That effort became known as Friends of Valencia Street.
What sweetened the deal for organizations like the SF Bicycle Coalition and KidSafe SF was the addition of a ban on left turns from Valencia, along with lower speed limits for cars. In return for their support, the groups sought SFMTA’s commitment beyond the one-year pilot to fully protected bike lanes, and for Valencia to eventually become a one-way street.
But Friends of Valencia Street and its member organizations are now pumping the brakes on support for the center lane. While praising the center lane for eliminating dooring as a hazard for cyclists, Friends of Valencia’s Zach Lipton called the configuration “unsafe” and called for curbside lanes.
Other organizations like the Bike Coalition — under interim leadership of Christopher White — called on the agency Tuesday to finish the pilot, but “be ready to pivot” to curbside lanes. The coalition’s director of advocacy, Claire Amable, cited a member survey in which a majority of respondents felt the center lanes were safe, yet a majority also wanted side-running bike lanes with parklets at the curb.
SFMTA director Jeffrey Tumlin echoed that sentiment — finish the pilot, then be prepared for something different — in comments Tuesday. The problem, as SFMTA engineer Paul Stanis emphasized, is the corridor’s parklets, which take up curbside space. Their numbers are down from pandemic peak levels, but plenty of parklets remain, and merchants are loath to give them up.
So Tumlin and staff are already contemplating two parklet options. Floating parklets allow bike lanes to cut between the parklet and the curb, but they require careful engineering to minimize the risk of bikes crashing into servers and customers moving back and forth from the sidewalk. (Stanis said restaurants along Oakland’s Telegraph Avenue have done this well, as has the Friends School on Valencia, which has built a floating student pick up/dropoff zone.)
The second option is bike lanes that “slalom” around parklets. There’s no risk of crashing into restaurant workers and customers, but the slalom angles cut off extra parking and loading zones.
After stumping last year for the center lanes, KidSafe SF’s Robin Pam now feels a change is needed. “Given the data presented, we support the agency’s plans to complete a full design for side-running bike lanes with curbside parklets,” Pam told The Frisc.
Pam and others, including SFMTA board chair Amanda Eaken, raised the idea of eliminating cars from Valencia, as the city has done with the JFK Promenade in Golden Gate Park. But Tumlin and Stanis stressed there’s no money for a mini-pedestrianization project for now, and the agency has plenty on its hands just dealing with the bike lanes.
Valencia is not a cookie-cutter street with cookie-cutter businesses. That’s a big part of its attraction, and also why this project has become so difficult. For example, SFMTA project engineer Kimberley Leung noted that Valencia is 10 feet narrower between 15th and 19th streets — with less space to squeeze in all the features everyone wants. (This makes a safe side-running bike lane more challenging to design, according to Leung.)
Going back to side-running lanes will likely require a ton of legwork for a city agency already strapped for time and money. For example: Individual parking meters were swapped out for the pilot with a single payment kiosk for each block, but confusion about parking instructions might require bringing back the meters. With that, Haghgoo suggested asking each merchant about the type of parking meter best suited for their business.
So there’s a lot of work to do between now and August, when the center bike lane pilot is set to end. That’s on top of everything else SFMTA has on its plate this year — including getting quick-build treatments into the remaining 30 percent of the high injury network and finishing the updated bike plan (called Active Communities Plan), among the usual transit operations and improvements.
Now it’s time to apply what the agency says it has learned from the pilot into practice in the hopes of balancing greater safety with the priorities of businesses. Will that please more people? That’s likely the easier question.
Correction 2/21/24: Due to an editing error, this story previously misidentified the speaker presenting sales tax data at the SFMTA meeting. The speaker was SFMTA transportation planner Shayda Haghgoo, not Marianne Thompson.