Banning cars on SF’s Market Street, once a radical idea, approved unanimously
San Francisco officials will decide the fate of the city’s main civic spine Tuesday, when they vote on whether to ban cars from the east strip of Market Street — the nerve center of downtown.
The Better Market Street plan that kicked off nearly a decade ago could take shape as soon as next year, with a ban on private cars east of 10th street, restricted loading zones for commercial vehicles and an extension of the Muni-only lane from Third to Main Street, among other changes.
What may have once seemed like a radical idea now has broad support in City Hall, including from Mayor London Breed, who sent a letter to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency board on Monday to endorse the project.
“After a lengthy public planning process that included hundreds of outreach meetings and conversations with stakeholders, the city has developed a design that will support Vision Zero safety goals, improve transit and transform Market Street for our next generation,” the mayor wrote. She asked the agency to start building the infrastructure as soon as possible, using new “quick-build” policies to cut through the bureaucratic morass that often slows projects down.
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Advocates call it a new vision of urbanism that could be replicated in other parts of the city. Even as the plans await approval, staff at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency are studying what other roadways and intersections could be made car-free, and advocates have plenty of suggestions. City Hall politicians support the concept, too: Supervisor Matt Haney has called on the agency to look at the Tenderloin neighborhood — a treacherous maze of asphalt in a neighborhood of residential hotels —as a possible candidate for its next makeover.
“When we have a city that’s grown this much, the streets are being pushed to the brink,” said Marta Lindsey, spokeswoman for the pedestrian safety group Walk San Francisco. “It gets to the point where everyone sees this is not working. We can’t have all these vehicles and humans co-exist, anymore.”
If approved, Better Market would widen the sidewalks from 35 to 37 feet, replace the bricks with concrete pavers, add a 12-foot-wide sidewalk-level bike path and a protective curb. The city would also build a streetcar loop east of United Nations Plaza, allowing the F line to shuttle from Embarcadero to Fisherman’s Wharf.
Besides transforming the landscape aesthetically, this new infrastructure would bring dramatic social changes to the street. Bicyclists would no longer be unceremoniously dumped into traffic east of 8th Street, and Muni buses would no longer get stuck behind a person being chaffuered to work in an Uber.
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The $604 million project would start with improvements between Fifth and Eighth streets, the first phase of what proponents see as an urban renaissance. Market Street has always symbolized the disorienting social inequalities of San Francisco, a tech hub where homeless people sleep on the sidewalks and high-rise office buildings are packed against boarded-up storefronts.
Politicians, developers and urban planners have tried to revamp and revitalize Market Street many times over the years, but their efforts always seemed to fall short. The arrival of Twitter, ressurection of the Strand Theater and even the new canopies over BART stations did little to reverse blight that had built up for decades.
But none of the previous developments was as ambitious as the proposal going before SFMTA Tuesday. Excluding private automobiles is “a bold statement” that would completely change the nature of the street, said Brian Wiedenmeier, executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. It would be the most significant makeover of Market since BART began tunneling in the 1960s.
“Market Street is by design our central boulevard, and it could be .... a street that reflects the best of our values: community justice, sustainability, elevating people and their daily experience above cars getting someplace quickly,” Wiedenmeier said.
He added: “We have an opportunity to send a message nationally and globally that Market Street represents where San Francisco’s priorities are.”
Earlier this year SFMTA Board Chair Malcolm Heinicke directed staff to study other city streets and recommend which ones could go car-free. The board applied the idea to a block of Octavia Boulevard in July, prohibiting cars on a road that bordered Patricia’s Green.
Heinicke’s call for proposals spurred an animated conversation on social media. Twitter users came up with their own list, which crossed wide swaths of the city. It included the Tenderloin, Valencia Street, John F. Kennedy Drive in Golden Gate Park, and the northbound side of Embarcadero. Some of these roads are known for brutal crashes, like the 2016 hit-and-run killing of 41-year-old Heather Miller, who was pedaling down John F. Kennedy Drive when a driver veered into the wrong lane and struck her.
“There are some strees that are just so obvious,” said bicycle activist Matt Brezina. He founded People Protected, a demonstration in which participants form a human chain along bike lanes that lack barriers to separate them from cars.
Brezina said the conditions on Market Street inspired him to start attending SFMTA board meetings, back when the project was starting to gestate.
“I rode (my bicycle) on Market every day to get to the office,” he said. “And I would think, ‘Why is this street so broken?’”
Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan
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