Streetsblog San Francisco

Clement Street will finally be opened up to people instead of cars. Photo: musicsack/Flickr

Later this year, for the first time, the Richmond District will be graced with Sunday Streets. The event in late October will run from inner Clement Street all the way out to Ocean Beach, D1 Supervisor Eric Mar announced at a Board of Supervisors meeting this week.

Organizers haven’t established the details of the route or the exact date, but an aide from Mar’s office said it will likely include inner Clement’s commercial strip and a major section of Balboa Street, running out to the Great Highway and including connections into Golden Gate Park, where eastern John F. Kennedy Drive is already car-free every Sunday.

Sunday Streets events in the western neighborhoods thus far have been limited to extensions of Golden Gate Park’s regular car-free route out to the Great Highway, and the Richmond event would be the first time it comes to the area’s neighborhood and commercial streets. Inner Sunset residents have made strides in establishing regular street openings, but the city’s sky-high fees have forced organizers to commercialize the event and limit it to one block.

Noting how much he enjoyed the Sunday Streets 2013 kick-off on the Embarcadero last Sunday, Mar said he hopes “people take the chance to explore other neighborhoods like the Richmond.”

While three other dates have been announced for this year, Sunday Streets organizers say they’re still finalizing the rest of the schedule before it’s released.

Photos: Aaron Bialick

A new traffic circle has cropped up at 23rd and Anza Street in the Richmond District as part of traffic calming measures being implemented by the SF Municipal Transportation Agency.

As KRON 4′s Stanley Roberts showed in his “People Behaving Badly” segment yesterday, some drivers are still getting used to the circle, since the treatment is fairly new in the western neighborhoods. But by changing the way motorists navigate the formerly wide-open intersection, the circle discourages speeding, and it’s added some greenery to a very grey neighborhood. With 23rd being the flattest north-south bike route in the area, and the intersection being in a 15 MPH school zone, the location was ripe for traffic calming.

D1 Supervisor Eric Mar, who visited the circle on a bike ride with staff from the SFMTA and the SF Bicycle Coalition while it was under construction, said he “enthusiastically supports traffic circles and other traffic calming improvements in the Richmond District and citywide. As an advocate for stronger pedestrian safety measures, I am pleased to see the first traffic circle implemented in the Richmond.”

“Research shows that traffic circles like this actually move traffic more efficiently through intersections than stop signs, yet have less high-impact collisions,” he added. The intersection has stop signs for traffic traveling along 23rd, but not Anza. That’s one reason this is a “traffic circle” and not a “roundabout,” where all entering drivers would simply yield to cars in the intersection.

On the bike ride, Mar said the SFMTA “needs to create better signage and street striping that will help residents become more educated about traffic flow in the intersection,” and that neighbors could have been notified that the circle was coming. “But overall, this is a great design that will also create a new green space in an area that had been pavement and concrete,” he said.

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Photo: Octoferret/Flickr

The Great Highway, the motorway that divides Ocean Beach from the Outer Sunset and Richmond, is set to get some bike lane and pedestrian improvements north of Lincoln Way as part of a nine-month re-paving project started this week by the Department of Public Works.

The 6-foot painted bike lanes planned between Lincoln and Cabrillo Street would be an addition to the original SF Bike Plan [PDF], which only called for bike lanes north of Cabrillo and along the length of Point Lobos Avenue. Last Friday, the SF Municipal Transportation Agency gave preliminary approval at a public hearing to extend the lanes south to Lincoln past Golden Gate Park, and the project is expected to receive final approval from the agency’s board of directors at an upcoming meeting.

While much more remains to be done to create a safer, less car-dominated Great Highway (see SPUR’s long-term vision, which includes fewer traffic lanes and a two-way, protected beach-side bikeway), the bike lanes and pedestrian refuge islands will provide some improvements in the meantime.

SF Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Leah Shahum praised the SFMTA’s adjustments to the Bike Plan, calling it “a great example of city staff working together to layer bicycling, walking, and traffic calming improvements into a repaving project, so that the benefits are tripled.”

“If this project is approved by the SFMTA Board of Directors, we will have a much more ‘complete street’ along this section of the now-intimidating Great Highway, and all road users will benefit,” she said.

The road space for the bike lanes will be created by narrowing the Great Highway’s four traffic lanes. Point Lobos Avenue, which runs by the Cliff House, will go on a road diet under the Bike Plan, with two of its four traffic lanes replaced with median space and a buffered bike lane in the northbound direction. The southbound, downhill traffic lane is only slated to receive sharrows.

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Supervisor Eric Mar, right, sought to ease concerns and set straight untrue rumors about the Geary BRT project. Photos: Michael Rhodes

At a community meeting in the Richmond last night, planners from the San Francisco County Transportation Authority and Supervisor Eric Mar sought public input on the Geary Boulevard Bus Rapid Transit project - and sought to dispel some false rumors about it.

In a presentation that preceded open discussion, the project's lead planner at the San Francisco County Transportation Authority (TA), Zabe Bent, went over the major aspects of the project, including its benefits and plans for mitigating any potential negative impact on the neighborhood. Most of the information was the same as that presented at last December's scoping meetings, but planners and Mar sought to use the meetings to assure the public that BRT would not cause major traffic problems, and would bring worthwhile improvements.