A fundamental dilemma in San Francisco politics today is solving the city’s Urbanist Generation Gap — the sharp divide between different generations of residents over city planning issues like housing and transportation. Amid this, city supervisors want voters to go once more into the breach over the fate of car traffic on the Great Highway, which could have implications for this November’s vote for mayor and District 1 Supervisor. Another issue recalled by the city’s history is whether the argument will ever end.
Sunset Supervisor Joel Engardio has requested a hearing for a ballot measure to amend the city’s Park Code to permanently bar vehicles from the Great Highway between Lincoln Way and Sloat Boulevard. The road is on a three-year pilot, approved at the end of 2022, which keeps it vehicle free on weekends.
The Supervisors’ Rules Committee will hear the proposal in the coming weeks, and approval to go on the November ballot is a foregone conclusion, given that Engardio also has the support of Supervisors Matt Dorsey, Rafael Mandelman, Myrna Melgar, and Dean Preston — pretty much running the whole ideological gamut of the board. Mayor London Breed also supports the idea.
Candidates for November’s District 1 Supervisor race, however, aren’t exactly on board with the idea. Mission Local recently quizzed them, and only Jenn Nossokoff, a health care executive with no political base, supports it. Frontrunners Marjan Philhour and incumbent Connie Chan both oppose it.
So, why now?
“Because there’s not another scheduled election until June of 2026, and the writing is on the wall that the Great Highway is going to close,” Engardio told The Voice in an interview. “And the biggest writing on the wall was when the Coastal Commission denied the appeal. They published a report explaining their reasons went point by point, debunking every point that [appellants] brought up. That signals to me that a lot of people are going to be O.K. with a permanent closure. It’s a huge opportunity, a unique place, and we can still ensure people can get where they need to go in their cars.”
It wasn’t so long ago that many local drivers could take the scenic [depending on weather] roadway for granted as a direct route between the Westside and the Peninsula, whether it be for a more pleasant commute to or from work in the city, catching the sales at Westlake or Serramonte malls, or vets taking their appointments at the VA hospital at the end of Clement Street. On one of the beach’s rare clear days, it’s said you can see all the way out to the Farallons — though it’s probably not a good idea to look for them while driving.
But by the 2010s, a better understanding of the effects of climate change and sea level rise on the city’s western shoreline meant that that writing was indeed on the wall for the Great Highway, built on landfill, to fade away eventually. Complicating the matter is that the shoreline is under the purview of multiple federal, state, and local agencies. Meanwhile, the future of the highway has numerous cohorts of stakeholders — Outer Richmond and Peninsula residents who depend on the road, Sunset residents wary of traffic impacts caused by changes, and more recently, users of the open space the road now provides on weekends.
The San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) led the process to create the Ocean Beach Master Plan, which called for the closure of the highway south of Sloat Boulevard and making adjacent streets, intersections, and parking facilities more efficient — work now already set in motion. The plan also called for an incremental narrowing of the highway to “provide amenities and facilitate managed retreat.” Whatever would be implemented, the presumption was there would be an iterative process to minimize direct impacts on stakeholders.
Then Covid happened.
Capacity restrictions were imposed on Muni buses, and some services were suspended. The Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) designated many neighborhood arteries as “Slow Streets,” restricting car traffic to provide safe corridors for people to walk, bike, or skate between transit connections now further apart. The car-free streets also provided neighborhoods with open space for residents cooped up in their homes during lockdowns. As part of this movement, the Great Highway was closed to vehicular traffic in April 2020, providing a life-changing space for many people.
Then came the 2022 election season, where the closure of the Great Highway got rolled in with similar moves for JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park to make car-free “Healthy Saturdays” full-time. A ballot fight that November, backed mainly by Fine Arts Museum board members who felt that the move threatened museum patronage, allied with supporters of restoring vehicular access to the Great Highway, resulted in victory for supporters of car-free spaces.
The effects of climate change and sea-level rise have taken a toll on the Great Highway, which is built on landfill.
Fast-forward to today, and “Slow Streets” have acquired a foothold in the post-Covid traffic pattern. But some people who live near the Great Highway are concerned about the traffic flow issues that could come with speeding up closure, and more than a few Outer Richmond dwellers don’t want to give up their favorite drive. And supporters of the last ballot fight, like Outer Parkside residents Vin Budhai and Alyse Ceirante, are girding up again for another one.
Budhai, a tech executive who’s lived in the Outer Parkside for six years, formed the Open the Great Highway online social group. He and Ceirante, a former tenant advocate who’s lived three blocks away from the highway for 38 years, are concerned about what happens when traffic from the highway backflows into their neighborhoods.
“It was an absolute nightmare. People couldn’t back out of their driveways. People were afraid to have their kids out front,” Ceirante told The Voice in an interview. “It was an eye-opening experience. We’re a sleepy little neighborhood, and we’re not used to all that kind of traffic, and we have a lot of pedestrians, especially elderly Chinese.”
Engardio counters that the eventual completion of planned improvements to 19th Avenue and Sunset Boulevard, along with a “green wave” of new traffic lights on Lincoln Way, will make significant strides in solving those problems.
“You can then clip along Lincoln and get to Sunset [which will have] three lanes of traffic in each direction. With timed lights there, you’re going to have a decent experience. Plus, we’re moving the bus stops on Sunset so the cars can flow. They can turn right when they need to turn right; they’re not stuck behind the bus,” he added. “It’ll work out, and we get a park as a bonus.”
However, with SFMTA facing debilitating budget shortfalls and the agency’s other street improvement plans attracting routine resistance from residents complaining of a “war on cars,” others are less optimistic.
“To me, it’s a classic San Francisco decision that doesn’t think about the utility of a policy versus the downside,” says Rich Correia, a longtime Richmond resident and former police captain of Richmond Station who was also involved in 2022’s ballot fight. “When you think about all the traffic that gets to move on the Great Highway and pushing it into high injury corridors like Lincoln and then all the excess pollution and by elongating these trips […] I don’t know why they’re not considering that. Where are those cars going to go?”
San Francisco’s political X-verse continues to register conflicting opinions on a permanent Great Highway Park.
Local merchants and even surfers have also voiced qualms about Engardio’s plan.
Given that the 2022 measure to end the car-free experiment at the Great Highway failed with only 40 percent of the vote, one could assume that this year’s election, with a likely even higher turnout, could allow Engardio’s proposition to settle the argument, at least for the next two years. But San Francisco has seen at least one epic multiyear back and forth over voter-backed traffic plans, with multiple ballot and legal fights over the Central Freeway through the 1990s. In the end, the freeway ramp that blocked out much of Hayes Valley came down, allowing the rise of a new neighborhood along Octavia Boulevard.
Engardio remains sanguine about the proposal.
“If voters decide they want to turn this into a park, then all the good and fun stuff can begin, where everyone can come to the table and imagine what they want this to be […] It’s a big issue. It’s a transformational issue. So, the voters should have a direct say in something this big. If they want to organize against it now, they have a chance.”
Updated: July 8, 2024, 10:23 a.m. to clarify the formation and nature of Open the Great Highway.
