SF’s Controversial Valencia Street Center Bike Lane Will Be Removed

Updated at 4 a.m. Nov. 20

The center-running bike lane pilot on San Francisco’s Valencia Street reached the end of the road, as the city’s Municipal Transportation Agency board voted unanimously to replace it with a side-running protected bike lane.

The Tuesday evening vote sets in motion another round of dramatic changes for one of San Francisco’s most popular corridors — a major bicycle route and a hub for nightlife dense with independent restaurants and businesses.

While the center bike lane, which rolled out last year, drew criticism from merchants as well as some cyclists, many of the dozens of San Franciscans who showed up for public comment at Tuesday’s meeting tried to persuade the board to keep it.

“I noticed that the moment I turned onto the Valencia Street center bike lane, the intensity of biking through city traffic subsided and I was able to ride with peace and safety, even calmly bringing my friends and loved ones along without worry,” Dylan Harris said.

Others commenters implored the SFMTA Board to make the change.

“The center lane brings cyclists through the neighborhood past small businesses, whereas protected side lanes mean it’s easy to see a small business and stop,” said Zach Lipton, a volunteer with the neighborhood group Friends of Valencia.

The side-running design calls for a bike lane that mostly runs alongside the sidewalk, with parking spots for cars placed farther out towards the street. This is what’s known as a “protected” bike lane, because parked cars separate people moving down the bike lane from traffic.

When the bike lane encounters one of the 21 curbside parklets located on the 8-block section between 15th and 23rd streets, it will curve around those parklets, something SFMTA staff describe as “slaloming.” Three additional parklets will be “floated” away from the sidewalk, allowing the bike lane to continue in a straight line, but forcing people entering and exiting those parklets to cross the bike lane.

Left turns will continue to be banned on the section of Valencia under this plan, which also proposes a new prohibition on making a right turn at a red light, and adding posts and speed bumps around the edges of intersections to help protect pedestrians.

Despite the decision to scrap it, SFMTA maintains that the award-winning pilot achieved its goals. A newly released 12-month evaluation of the pilot shows a reduction in vehicles double parking in the bike lane and a downward trend in traffic collisions, although the agency said collisions “are not drastically lower than pre-implementation conditions.” However, daily vehicle volume is down 14% from before the pilot, and pedestrian volume is down 8%.

Steve Heminger, an SFMTA board member, asked SFMTA’s Paul Stanis why staff was recommending the change when data indicated that the project was achieving its goals.

“Data tells one side of the story. There’s this whole non-data component, and that’s how people experience the street,” said Stanis, who gave examples of how the current design can cause backups when cars double park, or be startling to cyclists when cars illegally enter the center-running lane. “That doesn’t necessarily show up in any of our evaluation data.”

Last week, the Valencia Corridor Merchants Association said in a press release that it believes that the side-running bike lane could be an improvement, but the group found the new design equally problematic and said it could not endorse it.

“Our concerns are that all left-hand turns are still eliminated, nearly half of parking/loading spaces will be lost making it difficult and frustrating for customers to park, and pedestrians, deliveries, and cyclists will collide with each other in the lane,” reads the press release. “Inconsistency in how the SFMTA has treated Parklets and Shared Spaces not only reduces customer parking, but makes the experience unpredictable and confusing.”

SFMTA says the side-running design will remove 37% of the parking spaces in the current road design. That’s on top of 71 metered parking spots that were lost when the center-running design was installed.

The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition supported the SFMTA’s move to begin designing a side-running protected bike lane in June, but wrote in a blog post last week that it has “serious concerns” about SFMTA’s plans to have three floating parklets in the new design.

“Floating parklets introduce potentially dangerous conflicts between people biking and staff and customers who use the parklets. The mix of curbside and floating parklets is unpredictable and confusing, making the design less safe for everyone,” said SF Bicycle Coalition advocacy director Claire Amable at the meeting.

Floating parklets exist on a section of Telegraph Avenue in Oakland’s Temescal neighborhood, something SFMTA staff say they have studied and point to as an example of success with floating parklets.

In August 2023, SFMTA began the Mid-Valencia pilot, which moved the traditional bike lane that ran alongside parked cars on either side of the street and placed it in the center of the road. The pilot also prohibited vehicles from making left and U-turns.

At the time, SFMTA leaders said the changes were meant to improve traffic safety on the corridor, improve access for businesses and promote the free movement of people and goods.

The bike lane split both the road and the community in two. Almost immediately, merchant groups on the street blamed the lane for a drop in sales, and some cyclists said the design was unsafe and unintuitive.

Unlike the center-running bike lane pilot, the side-running lane will be a permanent installation, with estimated costs of just over $1.2 million for design and construction. That doesn’t include an additional $900,000 that a staff report says is necessary to fund repaving of the center of the roadway, planters, landscaping and parklet reimbursement assistance for merchants, for which funding has not been identified.

Construction could begin as soon as January.

SFMTA Board Vice Chair Stephanie Cajina framed the center-running bike lane as an “experiment” and “learning moment” for the agency.

“We have to be very careful about experimenting in commercial corridors, specifically, and that requires a certain level of care that perhaps we did not perceive when we initially approved this particular item,” Cajina said.

Citing positive SFMTA data about the impacts of the project, and the positive public comment at the meeting, Cajina told SFMTA staff she hoped they would feel a “sense of agency” to implement another center-running bike lane on another corridor in the city in the future.