Streetsblog San Francisco

The SFMTA created a temporary separated bike lane on the Embarcadero this weekend. Photo: SFBC/Flickr

This weekend’s massive convergence of events saw possibly one of SF’s largest influxes of travelers ever. And by many accounts, the city’s efforts to get visitors to come by transit, foot, and bike were largely a success.

No doubt, transit riders were packed: BART saw 319,484 riders on Saturday, blowing its previous weekend ridership record of 278,586 out of the water. SFMTA officials estimated Muni took on an extra 100,000 to 135,000 extra riders each day, according to the Chronicle.

The bike counter on Fell Street counted a record 4,000 bikes on Saturday. Image via SFMTA's Livable Streets Facebook page

The surge of bicycle traffic “Wiggling” it to the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival also broke the single-day ridership record for the SFMTA’s bicycle counter on Fell Street, which counted 4,000 bikes on Saturday.

Meanwhile, a Mercury News headline read, ”traffic woes [went] mostly unrealized” throughout the Bay Area.

Around the Embarcadero, the SFMTA tested out some of the strategies in the People Plan, which is aimed at facilitating car-free travel to the America’s Cup yacht races. The agency set aside a widened, physically separated area for pedestrians and bicyclists on the Embarcadero in the northbound direction. That allowed planners to test out the impacts of removing a traffic lane to inform plans for improvements during the main races next year, as well as any possible permanent changes further down the road.

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Mayor Lee on the Embarcadero yesterday with Board of Supes President David Chiu, SFMTA CEO Nat Ford, and Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi. Photo: Aaron Bialick

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee has unveiled the People Plan [pdf], a document laying out strategies to meet the quickly approaching challenges of bringing hundreds of thousands of visitors to the city’s waterfront for the 2013 America’s Cup yacht race.

Transit advocates see it as an opportunity to boost sustainable transportation and build out some long-term improvements that will benefit transit and bike riders and pedestrians on the Embarcadero.

“Whatever we do, whatever we build, whatever we improve, has got to be an improvement that benefits all San Franciscans for future generations to come,” said Mayor Lee. “We’re looking at transportation and the infrastructure that we invest in with a future that will not only handle the 200,000 people a day, the millions of people that come here, but will benefit our city in the long run.”

A new sense of urgency should compel city agencies to implement changes prioritizing transit, bicycle, and pedestrian trips to the Embarcadero if the city is to avoid inundating the streets with gridlocked private automobiles during the series of events. The initial draft of the People Plan outlines how that could be done.

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