Next year, the car traffic that has made San Francisco's Market Street so clogged for decades—and also hazardous—should be gone
Legend has it that the young civil engineer who laid down the route for San Francisco’s Market Street in the 1800s so enraged people with the street’s unusual width that a mob chased him out of town. More than a century later, Market Street is one of the city’s key arteries, a wide boulevard on which the city’s historic streetcars jostle with buses, taxicabs, private passenger cars, Uber and Lyft rides, delivery vehicles and thousands of people biking every day.
But Market Street is also the center of something traffic officials somewhat ominously refer to as the “High-Injury Network,” a collection of about 13 percent of the city’s streets that accounts for three-quarters of the serious and fatal traffic injuries.“Market street is the spine of San Francisco,” Brian Wiedenmeier, the executive director San Francisco Bicycle Coalition said. “There’s a lot going on already. The last thing we need is more vehicles.
Better Market Street, a project organized by six San Francisco city agencies, will transform 2.2 miles of the famous corridor, between Steuart Street and Octavia Boulevard, into a pedestrian oasis. The renovations will feature sidewalk level bikeways, wider public transportation boarding islands and improved sidewalks.By POLITICO StaffCities have been wrestling with what to do about traffic since the moment cars first careened onto the scene.
Better Market Street is scheduled to break ground in the summer of 2020. The project still has some final administrative hurdles to overcome, making some supporters impatient. Earlier this month, nearly 100 protesters showed up on Market Street to support the initiative. Wearing bright-yellow T-shirts with bicycles , they demanded speeding up the project’s approval process.
“There is a desire from, I think, everyone to start construction as soon as possible,” Cristina Olea, project manager for Better Market Street, said. “We want a safer street. We want to reduce crashes. We also want people to feel comfortable walking or biking along Market Street.”
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