Market Street plan ends in a shortcut
Redesign 10 years in the making stripped down in 3 weeks
San Francisco is a city that has elevated public debate to a choreographed art form. Civic initiatives large and small are expected to be scrutinized and studied from every conceivable angle until, theoretically, all factions bless the outcome.
The newly scaledback vision for Market Street shows the perils of endless process.
Nearly a decade in the making, the $ 604 million plan to transform our bestknown boulevard from Van Ness Avenue to the Embarcadero has now been stripped down so that the first phase can be built for “only” $ 121 million — $ 63 million less than what sailed through multiple commissions with unanimous votes of support in the fall of 2019. The official reason — no surprise — is the economic impact of the coronavirus on the city budget. But it’s hard not to see deeper factors at work.
“Simply taking everybody’s wishes and stapling them together is not a valid plan,” said Jeffrey Tumlin, director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. “We need to be more realistic.”
In this case, realism means ditching — at least for now — the idea of widening the sidewalks on either side of the 120foot wide boulevard from an average of 35 to 37 feet. Installing new, gray concrete pavers to replace the aged brickwork is on hold. Most controversially, there won’t be 8footwide separated bicycle lanes on the sidewalk, away from vehicle traffic.
Instead, we’ll see a more orderly version of what now exists.
Along each sidewalk will be an 11footwide traffic lane reserved for bicycles and taxis, paratransit vans and delivery trucks. Beyond them will be a handful of extralong boarding islands serving the
pair of red center lanes, which will be shared by Muni buses and the lovable but lumbering historic streetcars.
It’s not an ideal solution, as a progression of bicyclists complained in an online open house hosted by two city agencies last Wednesday. Some were upset that years of revisions and meetings were set aside. Others said that shared lanes would keep Market Street from being used by cycling novices or families who wouldn’t feel safe.
“We’ve worked so long and hard, and now it has changed in three weeks with little input,” said one virtual attendee, Ben Temple.
Even the project manager for the effort, Cristina Calderón Olea from Public Works, readily acknowledges her disappointment.
“It’s hard, really difficult, to make these changes,” Calderón Olea said after the online session, which was extended 45 minutes so that everyone who wanted to sound off could speak. “We really wanted this first segment to be a showcase.” Understood. There’s an inherent danger in blending bicyclists and bigcity drivers who want to get from point A to point B — even if the revised design includes several wide speed bumps to make the remaining vehicles slow down. The combination of buses and historic streetcars in the same lanes feels like a recipe for gridlock.
But when you go into the details of how Market between Fifth and Eighth streets would be changed, the modest makeover has strong points.
For bicyclists, the separated 8foot lanes in the 2019 plan would have narrowed to 5 feet at least twice each block to make way for BART station entrances and curbside bus stops. The revised plan with its speed bumps and vivid green “sharrows” tells the drivers that, in Tumlin’s words, “you’re allowed to be here if you need to be, but you’re a guest.”
As for the blended transit lanes for buses as well as streetcars, Tumlin makes the case that on this stretch of Market, the overlap won’t be so bad. From Fifth Street west on Market, there are only two bus lines — and with only four boarding platforms scattered along the threeblock stretch, rather than the six that now exist. This also means no boarding of buses from the sidewalk, which now impedes bicycle traffic.
“We’ve done a lot of study to ensure there isn’t risk,” Tumlin said in a phone interview Thursday. “Design is really important. It doesn’t take that much to make streets feel safe for bikes and scooters and pedestrians.”
Another point being made by city officials is blunt. The pandemic’s economic repercussions, with include the nearextinction of our tourism industry, makes for a bleak financial picture. And don’t count on a robust stimulus package of the sort delivered in 2009 from a unified Washington, D. C.
“We were having some funding gaps even before the coronavirus, and now everything is worse,” acting Public Works Director Alaric Degrafinried said on Wednesday after the session. “That’s the reality the Bay Area is facing.”
This is where the danger with San Francisco’s
love of process comes in.
The first tests to remove private automobiles from Market Street east of Van Ness Avenue date to 2009. The first public draft of the Better Market Street plan was released in 2012. The repaving and remake of the street was to commence in 2016.
Now, if everything stays on schedule, we’re looking at 2022 — for three blocks.
Nor is Market Street some aberration. Tumlin, who was a transportation planning consultant before joining SFMTA last year, recalls his firm being hired in the late ’ 90s to work on three multifaceted neighborhood plans billed as Better Neighborhoods 2002. They finally were approved in 2008 and 2009.
“There’s a lot that is wrong with the San Francisco process — we have a tough time making hard calls,” Tumlin suggested. “It’s easier to keep extending things.”
Who knows? If Better Market Street had been pushed forward by the city more emphatically, perhaps construction could have begun in 2017. Separated bike lanes would be a reality, not cause for bitterness.
It might also be that separated lanes didn’t make sense on Market Street, given the high numbers of bicyclists and all the other spatial demands on the boulevard. That’s the case made by Tumlin and Calderón Olea, who both entered the scene after the basic framework was agreed on.
They and Degrafinried also say that future phases — to be built as funding is available — can more closely align with the 2019 plan. In the words of Calderón Olea, “This is not the end.”
Perhaps, though, it’s the end of the insistence that perfecting a plan is more important than making it happen.