Fifth Street Bike Lane Plans on Hold for Central Subway Construction

Plans for bike lanes on Fifth Street, which would connect Market Street to the Fourth and King Caltrain Station, are on hold at least until the Central Subway is completed in 2019.

Originally, the 2009 SF Bike Plan called for conventional bike lanes on Fifth, painted between parked cars and moving cars. But during subway construction, Muni buses on the 30-Stockton and 45-Union have been detoured on to Fifth, meaning buses would have to jostle in and out of the bike lanes to make stops, a less-than-ideal situation. Instead, the SFMTA plans to revisit the plans "to determine what innovative approaches are feasible on Fifth Street," said Ben Jose, spokesperson for the agency's Livable Streets division.

Fifth is badly in need of protected bike lanes. Currently, people biking on the street must mix it up with motor vehicles, with only sharrows painted on the broken asphalt. Fifth is a key connector for commuters headed to and from Caltrain and other destinations in SoMa. Neighboring Fourth and Sixth Streets carry even heavier, faster freeway-bound motor traffic (Fourth is a five-lane, one-way street).

In the SFMTA's Bicycle Strategy, planners ranked Fifth Street as having the ninth-highest demand for bicycle safety upgrades among streets within the existing official bicycle network. The SFMTA said that ranking was based on bike counts, focus groups, and bicycle crash data.

Years down the line, other streets in this area of SoMa are poised to get protected bike lanes. The Central SoMa plan (formerly the Central Corridor Plan), expected to be adopted later this year, calls for protected bike lanes on Third and upper Fourth Streets, as well as one-way and two-way bikeway options on Folsom, Howard, and Brannan Streets. There's no timeline set for those projects yet.