Planning Department Releases Tentative Street Redesigns for Broadway
The Planning Department, working with the Chinatown Community Development Center (CCDC), the SFMTA and SFDPW, recently released three options for dramatically improving the pedestrian environment on a two-and-a-half block stretch of Broadway, a high-volume two-way arterial that cuts through North Beach and Chinatown, a neighborhood that is “the most densely populated urban area west of Manhattan.”
Chinatown has the city’s lowest car ownership rate, and yet its residents — mostly low-income, elderly and monolingual immigrants who primarily walk and take Muni — have to deal with some of city’s worst automobile traffic. Broadway between Columbus Avenue and the Broadway Tunnel is lined with bustling grocery stores and restaurants, including some that have been fixtures in the neighborhood for decades, along with community-based organizations and Jean Parker School.
CCDC, the Planning Department’s outreach partner on the Chinatown Broadway Street Design project, stressed that Chinatown’s 15,000 residents have been historically underrepresented in transportation planning. As an environmental and social justice issue, CCDC has undertaken a collaborative process with the city to bring about a street redesign with strong community input. The effort is part of a Caltrans environmental justice grant.
“There’s some institutional biases going on in terms of planning processes in general, and that’s part of our goal, is to balance a little bit,” said Deland Chan, the senior planner at CCDC. Working with Planning, she said, another objective has been to make the process engaging for Chinatown’s residents, and the materials easy for the non-planner to understand.











