The city’s transportation agency is making big changes to Oak Street, adding a new bike lane and safety upgrades.
San Francisco transit officials are moving forward with improvements to an eight-block stretch of Oak Street along the Panhandle, aiming to improve safety for pedestrians and cyclists.
The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) Board of Directors voted unanimously in approving the $1.3 million Oak Street Quick-Build Project that will reduce the traffic lane on Oak Street from four to three between Strader and Baker streets so that crews can install a new parking-protected bike lane, which transit planners said will hopefully draw faster bike riders off the Panhandle path.
“The principal goal here is to reduce pressure on the Panhandle path, Mark Dreger said, who is the Oak Street Quick-Build project manager. “We want to give a nicer facility on Oak and on Fell streets, to kind of give people that incentive to not be in the park.”
Similar traffic changes were made on Fell Street in 2020, just on the opposite side of the Panhandle. Dreger said that after the installation of the traffic changes on Fell Street, the SFMTA saw a 38 percent decrease in traffic crashes over the last five years.
“At Oak Street, during the same period where we’ve made no substantial changes, we’ve seen a slight increase in traffic collisions,” Dreger said.
According to the SFMTA, from January 2019 to December 2023, there were a total of 74 crashes on Oak Street.
The project itself will require the removal of 23 parking spaces, 18 of which will be removed on the block between Ashbury Street and Masonic Avenue so that the SFMTA can add a new short, left turn pocket for vehicles turning onto Masonic. There were safety concerns from the public about adding another left turn lane, but Dreger said the project includes not having pedestrians cross as vehicles make the left turn.
At the same intersection on Masonic Avenue, the SFMTA will install a short, off-street bikeway to accommodate the new left turn pocket.
The Oak Street Quick-Build Project will require removing 23 parking spaces, in addition to the 26 required by the new daylighting law.
Another 26 sparking spaces will be removed throughout the project area as part of the state daylighting law, the SFMTA said. A staff report from the agency indicated concerns about the loss of parking from nearby merchants and schools following a public hearing last November.
Urban School, an independent high located in the Haight/Ashbury neighborhood, was one of the schools where the SFMTA conducted more outreach ahead of the project’s final design. Michael Patrick Crehan, a parent whose daughter attends Urban School and supports the project, said her daughter and classmates asked the school’s head to withdraw the opposition to the project.
“My daughter crosses Oak Street several times a day, Crehan said. “ I thank god she’s a college-recruited high jumper, because several times she’s had a leap out of the way of speeding in reckless vehicles.”
Critics of the project have also said that the removal of the traffic lane will cause more congestion on the busy thoroughfare, though Dreger said traffic modeling software showed that the corridor will “perform very similar to today.”
The SFMTA plans to implement the project in two phases, with the first phase starting later this year, which includes separating the left turns from the pedestrians crossing on Masonic Avenue, daylighting, and working on the off-street bike path in the Panhandle Park, Dreger said.
Following the repavement of Oak Street next year by Public Works, the SFMTA plans to install the rest of the project, such as concrete islands and striping the new bike lane.
