A neighborhood meeting held last Monday to gather feedback on changes to a 14-block area in the Inner Sunset neighborhood attracted well over 100 people. The surprising turnout accompanies a growing backlash in San Francisco’s westside against new traffic planning initiatives, such as the recent passage of a ballot measure to close the Great Highway to motor vehicles and other transportation policies to reduce or penalize car use.
The San Francisco County Transportation Authority (SFCTA) held the meeting. Not to be confused with the San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Agency (SFMTA), SFCTA oversees transportation planning and funding in San Francisco, and their governing board comprises members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. District 7 Supervisor Myrna Melgar was present with her staff at the meeting.
“Two years ago, we started working with the Inner Sunset merchants and neighbors to look at all the issues we are having in this area. (SFMTA) has made some fixes, but we need a more comprehensive way to look at how cars, pedestrians, and bicycles move through the area,” Melgar told attendees. “We know not everyone agrees, but please, be kind.”
While everyone remained cordial during the meeting, drivers made their concerns known firmly and early.
As one SFCTA staffer outlined the agenda for the Monday evening meeting, which included breaking up the crowd into small workshop groups, an older resident asked, “Well, what about us Luddites who don’t favor any changes?” The question elicited belly laughs and a round of applause from almost all attending.
Many attendees wanted to voice their opinions on the recent passage of Proposition K, which directs the closure of the upper Great Highway to motor vehicles in favor of expanding the existing part-time promenade into a full-time park. Although the measure passed citywide, support was starkly divided along neighborhood lines, with the westside uniformly opposed.
The study will cover a 14-block area from Lincoln Way to Judah Street between Fifth and 12th Avenues. Draft goals for the survey include prioritizing safety for pedestrians and cyclists, improving transit reliability, and enhancing accessibility to the neighborhood’s key destinations and service and delivery access to area businesses.
Lincoln Way is a corridor of particular concern as it’s one of a small number of streets in the city that garner almost 70 percent of the city’s traffic injuries and fatalities — what city agencies call the High Injury Network. According to WalkSF, a traffic safety advocacy group, well over 200 people have been injured and two killed in accidents on Lincoln Way. Additionally, six people were injured, including five pedestrians waiting for transit, on Irving Street between Ninth and Eighth avenues in a single accident in 2022.
Neighborhood resident Karen Duderstadt told The Voice how congestion at Ninth Avenue and Irving Street slows down the Muni Metro light rail and increases the risk of injuries as pedestrians get impatient and dart across the street.
“I understand why, and I get impatient too, but this is not a good traffic pattern we’re seeing,” explained Duderstadt, a professor at UCSF School of Nursing whose spouse is on the board of Inner Sunset Park Neighbors.
Cyrus Hall, a neighborhood resident and transit advocate who recently ran the campaign for Proposition L, which would have created a new tax on rideshare and robotaxi businesses to fund transit, was also at the meeting.
“It was really a listening session designed for residents who live here and use the Ninth and Irving area,” Hall told the Voice in an interview after the meeting. “We identified at least some of the hazards … we didn’t necessarily have all the same viewpoint on solutions, but it was clear to everyone that there were problems .… There is some good news: many problems come from a traffic flow design that can be solved fairly simply.”
That said, to implement those solutions, it looks increasingly likely that agencies will have to win back the confidence of constituents who increasingly see recent policies such as “slow streets,” which are closed to cars, and Proposition K, which won almost entirely on the backs of voters from the east side of town, and was uniformly opposed by westside voters, as evidence of a “war on cars.”
Last week, stakeholder pressure forced the SFMTA Board of Directors to change the design of protected bike lanes on Valencia Street, despite a pilot program yielding results the agency considered favorable. Merchants argued that the original design impinged on parking and loading zones. Earlier this month, the city began enforcing the new state “daylighting” law, intended to increase pedestrian visibility at intersections and remove thousands of parking spaces.
Some residents also allege institutional bias at SFMTA manifests itself in other policies, including the agency’s “Biking and Rolling Plan,” which aims to shift toward using what planners call “micromobility”: bicycles and other human-powered vehicles. At a Board of Directors meeting in May, some directors expressed concern over a $1.5 million contract awarded to the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Education Fund, a spinoff organization of the bicyclists’ advocacy group, for free “bicycle and scooter education classes.”
Stephen Martin-Pinto, a firefighter and former Veterans Affairs Commissioner who ran against Melgar in the most recent election, attended the survey meeting and wasn’t impressed.
“I get the sense that many people think that the plans are already made,” Martin-Pinto told the Voice in an interview. “They try to get their opinions on the record, but many people think that the plan’s already been made, it’s already been approved, but they hold these community outreach meetings as a formality.”
As a working firefighter, Martin-Pinto also sees other flaws in the transit agencies’ approaches, such as relying more on engineering than enforcement for traffic safety, narrowing streets, which makes emergency service response harder, and generally, “being in a bubble.”
Another issue related to public confidence is a major showstopper for SFMTA: The agency is broke. The nosedive in transit use caused by the pandemic, the loss of parking revenue, not only from Covid but from the increasing use of rideshares and robotaxis, and the exhaustion of pandemic-related aid has the agency falling down the “fiscal cliff” that its director Jeffrey Tumlin has been warning of for the last two years.
Tumlin and his agency have had terrible luck in their attempts to pull out of the fiscal hole. A 2020 study by SFCTA to enact congestion pricing to reduce traffic issues and help fund transit was put on hold partly due to stakeholders’ poor reception. A $400 million bond measure to pay for street safety infrastructure narrowly lost in the June 2022 election. A planned regional transit funding measure was postponed to make way for a regional affordable housing measure, which was then pulled from the November 2024 ballot due to bureaucratic stumbles. Finally, Proposition L, the local transit tax measure, also failed.
Last week’s meeting was part of the Inner Sunset study’s initial community outreach phase. SFCTA staff say that the input will help form initial concepts, and then a second round of outreach will take place in the spring, likely in March.
While many residents still need to be convinced about the process, Cyrus Hall hopes stakeholders can remember the basics.
“At the end of the day, we are all pedestrians at some point,” he told The Voice. “Whether you drive to the Inner Sunset, whether you take transit, whether you walk, or whether you bike, however you get there, you’re very likely to be a pedestrian while you are in the area, and there’s going to be a need to make sure that pedestrians are safe and that car traffic is controlled. I think that’s something everyone should be able to agree on.”