SFMTA Installs Bike Lanes With Road Diet on Section of Outer Sloat

The SFMTA installed bike lanes on outer Sloat Boulevard last week, re-purposing two of the street’s six traffic lanes between the Great Highway and Skyline Boulevard next to the San Francisco Zoo.

This one-mile redesign was one of the latter projects to be installed as part of the SF Bike Plan. There’s still a gap between these bike lanes and the buffered bike lanes that run on Sloat between Everglade Drive and 19th Avenue, which were installed in January 2012 by Caltrans. Between Skyline and 19th Avenue, Caltrans has jurisdiction over Sloat because it’s part of Highway 35. Word from SFMTA staffers, however, is that they’re working on a plan with Caltrans to close the gap.

With plenty of room for protected bike lanes, there seems to be a major missed opportunity on this stretch. But the Bike Plan was finished in 2005, when the SFMTA wasn’t generally as ambitious as it might be today (though the agency has upgraded a number of other Bike Plan projects since it was approved).