Mean Street in S.F.'s Tenderloin Will Get a Bicycle-Friendly 'Road Diet'

San Francisco's Tenderloin is a dense working-class neighborhood whose residents -- including the city's largest concentration of families -- mostly don't own cars. Yet its grid of fast one-way streets is among the city's meanest, resulting in a high rate of traffic deaths and injuries.

"I don't even know how many people I've met that have been hit by a vehicle," said Baljeet Heyer, the community organizer at the Central City SRO Collaborative. "My friends that are on bikes, and people that we work with, have been severely injured."

As part of the city's Vision Zero program to end all traffic deaths by 2024, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency has approved a traffic-calming plan on one busy and challenging street: Golden Gate Avenue. It was born out of a neighborhood transportation plan envisioned in 2007.

In the next few months, the agency will begin installing safety improvements, including what will become the Tenderloin's first east-west bike lane, on Golden Gate between Polk and Market streets. The five-block bike lane, which will feature a 3-foot buffer between cars and bikes, was approved Tuesday by the SFMTA board of directors.

Once a lively commercial district, Golden Gate Avenue is home to a number of social service organizations, schools and senior centers. Homelessness, crime and drug use are still a reality on the sidewalks.

Most drivers use the street as a way to cut across the city, and many zoom by at dangerous speeds, sometimes veering unsafely into crosswalks, say those who live and work nearby.

"At times, it seems like a drag strip," said Greg Moore, executive director of St. Francis Living Room, a program serving low-income and homeless seniors. "You add that with general unsafe behaviors of the motorists to a neighborhood where you have a lot of elderly, handicapped and people under the influence of something or another and not aware of their surroundings, and it's a situation just ripe for injury."

The SFMTA says that, on average, a pedestrian or cyclist is hit by a car every 38 days on the six-block stretch of Golden Gate between Van Ness Avenue and Market.

Safe streets advocates say the improvements are long overdue.

"It's a neighborhood that really desperately needs to be unburdened of the traffic violence that it experiences every day," said Chema Hernández Gil, political coordinator of the progressive group San Francisco Rising.

The improvements, say transportation officials and advocates, attempt to take into account the unpredictable: that people walking in the neighborhood sometimes cross the street unexpectedly, preferring to take the most direct path outside of a crosswalk.

The street will be reduced from three to two travel lanes along five blocks -- a "road diet" intended to make the street safer by slowing traffic. The bike lane, along with a buffer between parked cars and traffic on the opposite side of the street, will create some safe distance for pedestrians trying to cross midblock.

In addition, painted safety zones will force drivers turning onto cross streets to face the crosswalks, giving pedestrians more visibility.

"The project will make some key changes that really embrace the concept of Vision Zero, and that is that we must build a transportation system that assumes humans are going to make mistakes, and that it will be easier for humans to avoid serious and deadly crashes," said Nicole Ferrara, executive director of Walk San Francisco.

The bike lane will also help to keep riders off the sidewalk, which Ferrera said is a common complaint among residents.

"It's an overlooked corner of our city by the folks that are supposed to be in charge of delivering safe streets," said Chris Cassidy of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. "And while it's unfortunate that it has taken this long, it's good to see that there are folks realizing that there's work to be done in the Tenderloin, and that the Tenderloin deserves safe streets."

SFMTA officials did consider installing a parking-protected bike lane. However, there was pushback from some residents and people who work in the neighborhood who felt it would attract what they call "unwanted behavior" -- drug dealing and other types of crime. They were also worried about how it would be kept clean and free of debris.

The concern was that the unwanted behavior would be hidden from view by parked cars. A few years ago, city officials removed parking from a notorious block of Turk Street, hoping that the open view would deter crime.

San Francisco Police capt. Teresa Ewins, who oversees the Tenderloin police district, said combined with enforcement, the parking removal on Turk has been a success. She said drug dealing and violence are especially a concern on Golden Gate Avenue around Leavenworth Street, an area listed as one of the "action zones" for improvements under the city's Central Market/Tenderloin Strategy.

"We've really concentrated on making a safe passage for people coming and going on Leavenworth, kids coming from school and people trying to get to the programs there," said Ewins.

A street monitor who is part of the Tenderloin Safe Passage program is regularly stationed at that intersection, which is near the De Marillac Academy and other organizations that serve youth.

Ewins said she hopes the street improvements will "slow people down" and that vehicles will no longer race through the neighborhood.

Parking removal was not considered for this plan on Golden Gate, according to an SFMTA official, partly because the project was meant to be "quick and effective." But a grander plan for Golden Gate is expected to be considered in the future, along with improvements west of Van Ness.

Supervisor Jane Kim, who represents the Tenderloin, told the SFMTA's board that Golden Gate Avenue is experiencing a transformation, with new businesses and nonprofits. On Thursday, 826 Valencia -- the youth organization started by author Dave Eggers -- was set to open a new youth writing center at the former site of what Kim has called "one of the worst liquor stores in the city."

"To be complemented with a bike lane and pedestrian safety improvements will really just help to reactivate this street," said Kim.