On a recent weekday afternoon, new mothers Anne Stotler and Carrie Agarwal were pushing strollers down Sanchez Street in the heart of Noe Valley. Both live on neighboring streets, but for fresh air and exercise, Sanchez is their jam. Of all SF’s slow streets, Sanchez has the least amount of traffic, and those vehicles mostly respect the special 15-MPH speed limit.
“It’s the place to be when you’re on maternity leave,” says Stotler. Agarwal, who had her yellow labrador Kini tethered to her baby’s stroller, said it’s a great dog meet-up spot.
Those conditions have turned Sanchez into a de facto mile-and-a-half promenade, with more than 1,000 pedestrians on a typical weekend day, according to the SF Municipal Transportation Agency.
By all measures, Slow Sanchez is a success, but many of SF’s 19 slow streets aren’t getting the same results. With the city’s limited funds, Sanchez would seem to be a low priority for traffic-calming upgrades, yet SFMTA is spending an additional $277,000 for more changes there, which could include traffic circles and concrete islands — permanent concrete additions that can’t be easily reversed — as well as painted corners.
Meanwhile, other streets where recent deaths have caused outcries remain nearly untouched. In April, a champion cyclist was killed on Arguello Boulevard in the Presidio, triggering official calls for urgency. The Presidio portion of the road is seeing changes, but nothing on SF property yet.
Last month at 4th and King Streets, a driver killed a 4-year-old girl and severely injured her father in a crosswalk, prompting SFMTA to remove one of two right-turn lanes and add a yellow arrow to the traffic signal.
It costs money to build or change infrastructure that slows cars and protects bikers and pedestrians. Why is SF spending nearly $300,000 on Sanchez Street?
Some streets are slower than others
While the Sanchez money is a tiny sliver of SFMTA’s $1.4 billion budget, SF’s spending plan for street improvements is at a critical juncture.
Despite a pledge 10 years ago to eliminate traffic deaths by 2024, last year was the city’s deadliest of the decade, with 39 pedestrian and cyclist deaths. This year’s tally is 16 through Aug. 31. SF street planners are also gearing up for a major bike network expansion, which will require redesigning many streets to de-emphasize car use.
Slow streets, permanently approved in late 2022 after pandemic experimentation, are supposed to form much of the new bike network’s backbone. But they aren’t all living up to their name.
According to SFMTA’s May 2023 report, most have lowered average traffic volume to SFMTA goals of less than 1,000 per day, but many still see average speeds above the target of 15 MPH. (As traffic experts have noted, a person hit by a car at 20 mph has a 90 percent chance of survival. If the car is going 40 mph, the odds drop grimly by more than half.)
Some slow streets have minimal infrastructure to slow traffic, like Lake Street’s small purple signs and a few low-rise “cushions,” while others have significant barriers and detours, like Page Street, where eastbound cars are forced to turn onto Divisadero Street, for example.
Some streets, like Minnesota (in the Dogpatch), Noe (Duboce Triangle) and 20th (the Mission) still need hearings and outreach before getting a final design. “The agency is tackling each of these streets individually,” says SFMTA spokesperson Stephen Chun.
But the Sanchez money can’t be spread elsewhere, according to the letter of a city law written 20 years ago.
Use it or lose it
The money to upgrade an already-Slow Sanchez comes from the Neighborhood Transportation Improvement Program (NTIP), approved by SF voters in 2003 via the Prop K sales tax. NTIP funding is meant to improve mobility and transit access, especially in lower-income or underserved “equity priority” neighborhoods, and to give those neighborhoods more say in projects that encourage biking, walking, and public transit.
The fund, which was set to expire in early 2023, allocated $700,000 to each supervisorial district for five-year cycles. Some districts are less equity-priority than others, but the money couldn’t be shifted from one to another. District 8, where Slow Sanchez is located, includes just a small segment of an equity priority community, bounded by Guerrero, Clinton Park, Dolores, and 15th streets. Sanchez is nowhere close.
The funding is also use-it-or-lose-it, so when the fund was about to expire, District 8 had some spending to do. While supervisors usually recommend projects within their district, in this case SFMTA approached Sup. Rafael Mandelman’s office with the Slow Sanchez proposal.
The Slow Sanchez neighborhood group didn’t know about the money until it was approved by the SF County Transit Authority, says the group’s coordinator Andrew Casteel. (The SFCTA board, which votes on funding sources and projects, is composed of the city’s 11 supervisors.)
Casteel certainly isn’t unhappy about the money. The group’s June survey showed more than half of respondents want more safety improvements, including slower traffic. (Prop L, the half-cent sales tax approved by voters in 2022, started up in July and will continue funding this program.)
If you have to convince someone of the merits of a slow street, and Sanchez is as awesome as possible, you can say, ‘Have you ever been to Sanchez? It’s just like that.’
Annie Fryman, SPUR director of special projects
But if SFMTA’s priority was upgrading District 8 slow streets, it could have gone another route. Both Arlington and Noe streets are there, and neither has met the average speed target. Moreover, Noe averages 1,690 vehicles a day, more than five times the traffic volume of Sanchez. But SFMTA says it made the Sanchez request before it had completed the slow street report released in May.
Apart from slow streets, District 8 also has segments of 11 streets in the city’s high-injury network, which is where 68 percent of serious or fatal injuries occur. When asked why SFMTA wanted to spend more money on Sanchez, spokesperson Chun says the request was “based on the needs and opportunities as understood at that time.”
Double down on slow
There’s an argument to make for the extra Sanchez funding, because successful slow streets could be even slower. That’s according to Annie Fryman, director of special projects at SPUR, an SF urban planning think tank.
If you make Sanchez “as awesome as possible,” says Fryman, you get a real-world demonstration of the usefulness of street changes, which often trigger pushback from residents and merchants. (The loss of parking spots is a common complaint.)
“Instead of having to convince someone unfamiliar with a proposal, you can say, ‘Have you ever been to Sanchez? It’s just like that,’” says Fryman, who’s been seriously injured twice by cars, once as a pedestrian, once as a cyclist.
SFMTA’s Chun says other District 8 streets, like Slow Arlington and Noe, will get consideration in the next budget cycle. But threats of a fiscal cliff loom; this year’s budget was sealed before the arrival of expected fallout from plunging property values and business taxes.
Potentially worse, SFMTA must generate some of its own revenue through transit fares and parking fees, both of which haven’t recovered from the pandemic. Every dollar — or 277,000 of them — will have outsized value in future budgets.
Back on Sanchez, a nice day can feel otherworldly. At the Noe Cafe on Sanchez and 26th Street, kids sometimes sit by the parklet and make chalk art on the street, and the cafe hosts a rotation of pop-up food vendors. Cafe manager Zach Thomas, who also lives nearby, glances out the window at the street scene and mentions that some of his out-of-town customers ask why so many people are in the middle of the street. “I forget that this seems strange to others,” he says.