The City is wasting money to make common-sense safety improvements look special. How very San Franciscan of us!
San Francisco is planning to overhaul the 2.2 miles of Market Street between the Embarcadero and Octavia Boulevard, in a plan dubbed Better Market Street. Planned since 2010, designed by world-famous architect Jan Gehl, the project would turn the street into a complete street—that is, a street offering ample space for safe travel by any non-auto mode of transportation.
Pedestrians would get better crosswalks, without the restrictions imposed by the north side's angled intersections. Cyclists would get an 8'-wide protected lane in each direction, without today's conflicts with cars and buses. Cars would be restricted in the 1.8-mile segment between Spear Street and 10th Street. And the sidewalks would be replaced—today they are made of brick, but the city plans to replace them with concrete. Is this a good idea? Yes—but not all proposed changes are worth the cost.
Replacing Market Street's iconic brick sidewalks with concrete may make it look less classy, but it would make it more accessible. There are gendered implications to paving the street with a material that is hostile to what many women wear. Brick pavement is not friendly to high heels, especially pointed stilettos, which get stuck in the gaps between the bricks. Brick is also inaccessible to people in wheelchairs, and in Boston, disability advocates got the city to promise concrete paths in otherwise brick-paved sidewalks. The development of the Better Market plan specifically looked for universal design, which the current brick sidewalks do not meet.
However, other elements of the plan raise questions. Better Market means more space for pedestrians and cyclists and less space for cars, but there is still space for taxis. Whether cities should allow taxis into bus lanes is an international controversy. In European cities, medallion cabs are usually allowed into bus lanes. In American cities, they usually aren't. San Francisco is planning to follow the European model.
The problem is that taxis are a small minority of for-hire vehicle service in the city: TNCs, including Uber and Lyft, have 12 times as much traffic, and comprise 20-26% of car trips downtown. There is no real reason to allow medallion taxis but not TNCs, especially since so many Uber and Lyft cars in the city display clear visual markings identifying them as such. If the city's goal is to restrain car traffic, it should not make special exemptions for medallion cabs, but perhaps for high-occupancy vehicles, even private vehicles. Streetsblog has called for not letting taxis in at all.
But the bigger issue than TNC access is construction cost. Street reconfiguration does not need to be expensive. Repaving the sidewalks is a routine operation, and restricting car traffic is just a rule. Cycle tracks are not expensive to install, either: in New York, the world capital of high construction costs for public transportation, bike lanes are $600,000 per mile. The order of magnitude of the entire project should be a single-digit number of millions of dollars.
The actual cost of Better Market Street: $600 million. About half of this cost goes to public transit—the city is using the opportunity afforded by a major project to spend money on redoing the F-Market tracks and adding a new electrical power substation. These items, especially the $100 million substation, have nothing to do with complete streets, but Better Market looks transformative enough that the city is bundling them into the plan.
But even the street-level improvements themselves are extremely expensive, totaling $127 million. $75 million go to streetscape; the bike lane and repaving are $26 million each, making this bike lane cost $5 million per mile per direction, about eight times the average cost in New York. Finding figures for street repaving is harder, but by the standards of constructing a new sidewalk from scratch, they seem about an order of magnitude too high as well.
Turning an arterial road into a complete street should not be a difficult endeavor. New York has installed bike lanes on so many streets that such lanes are almost ordinary. Paris has done the same, and used concrete bollards to narrow streets that were too wide to be pedestrian-friendly.
San Francisco instead is making complete streets look special, and cost accordingly. Market Street needs better bike infrastructure and accessible sidewalks, but $600 million could install these on perhaps 500 miles of city streets, rather than just a 2 miles of Market. The other 498 miles deserve complete streets, too.
Alon Levy is a mathematician with a strong interest in urbanism and mass transit, and currently works as a freelance writer. He contributes to the Bay City Beacon as a weekly transit columnist for Pedestrian Observations. You can find more of his writing supporting walkability and good transit at https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com.
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