Many of S.F.’s Slow Streets to remain
City proposes lifting some that weren’t ‘well-utilized’
San Francisco is primed to permanently keep roughly half of the Slow Streets that were implemented early in the pandemic by the city’s Municipal Transportation Agency.
The proposed network of Slow Streets, meant to deter car traffic on residential streets, would remove all but one of the Slow Street segments in the Sunset District, as well as all the Slow Streets in South of Market.
The SFMTA proposal, unveiled Monday, does not give a recommendation on Slow Lake Street — among the first four Slow Streets the agency’s board voted to keep permanent in August 2021. The fate of that particular Slow Street has divided its residents, and the Board of Directors will make a final call on whether to include it in the Slow Streets network.
The city installed 31 Slow Streets early in the pandemic as a way to give residents more space to recreate while social distancing. Some of the most popular Slow Streets have given pedestrians and cyclists more freedom to exercise and travel on their roadways with minimal worry about facing oncoming car traffic. Others have been utilized
more sparingly, one of the reasons the transportation agency cited for the Slow Streets that failed to make the final cut.
“Slow Streets were a citywide experiment, and not all of these experiments were successful,” the SFMTA wrote in an explanatory document. “Some Slow Streets weren’t well-utilized or developed conflicts with neighborhood access. Some Slow Streets didn’t connect to the overall citywide active transportation network. Others did not meet the needs of the community.”
The SFMTA is proposing making these street segments permanent Slow Streets:
• 12th Avenue between Lawton Street and Lincoln Way in the Inner Sunset.
• Cabrillo Street between 25th and 45th avenues in the Richmond, as well as 23rd Avenue between Cabrillo and Lake streets.
• Clay Street between Arguello Boulevard and Steiner Street.
• Golden Gate Avenue and Lyon Street in North of the Panhandle, the latter segment of which extends south to Haight Street.
• Noe Street from Duboce Avenue to Beaver Street.
• Sanchez Street between 23rd and 30th streets in Noe Valley.
• 22nd Street between Chattanooga Street and Bryant Street.
• Shotwell Street in the Mission District.
• Minnesota Street between Mariposa and 22nd streets in the Dogpatch neighborhood.
• Somerset Street south of Silver Avenue in Portola.
• Arlington Street east of BART’s Glen Park Station.
• Hearst Avenue three blocks north of the City College of San Francisco main campus.
• The entire segment of Cayuga Avenue that runs parallel to Alemany Boulevard from Mission Terrace to the Outer Mission.
The popular Slow Page Street segment from Stanyan to Gough streets is being rebranded as a Neighborway, which will keep “existing restrictions on non-local traffic,” according to the agency.
The proposed Cayuga Avenue and 22nd Street Slow Streets are the only ones that weren’t included in the initial network. Almost 70% of surveyed residents on Cayuga Avenue said they wanted a Slow Street, according to the transportation agency, and the Slow 22nd Street replaces the Slow Street on 20th Street that “is not meeting vehicle volume standards.”
The city’s dense northeast neighborhoods in District Three do not host any proposed Slow Streets.
“It’s far from a ‘network,’ ” Luke Bornheimer, one of the organizers behind the “bike buses” that utilize Slow Streets, said. “Voters and, more broadly, city residents have shown their overwhelming support for car-free and carlight streets, like Slow Streets, and the SFMTA and city leaders need to create more of these spaces as soon as possible.”
People can provide their input on the proposed network at the Dec. 6 board meeting.