Eyes on the Street: Holloway Bike Lane Connects SFSU, City College

The SFMTA has installed bike lanes and speed bumps on Holloway Avenue between Beverly Street and Ashton Avenue, a stretch that serves as the main bicycling route connecting SF State University to City College's Ocean Campus and Balboa Park Station.

The configuration has a bike lane on one side of the street and a parking lane on the other, switching sides at Vernon Street. The side without a bike lane has sharrows. Traffic lanes have also been narrowed.

Henry Pan, an SFSU student who bike commutes on Holloway, said "traffic is noticeably calmer now," and the project is "long overdue."

The project is the second iteration of a 2010 traffic calming experiment that narrowed traffic lanes on Holloway and the parallel Garfield Avenue, from Junipero Serra Boulevard to Ashton Avenue. The original configuration was removed after residents complained it was ineffective and too confusing (for instance, the design included shoulders that weren't marked as bike lanes, but had a similar width).

The new Holloway improvements link a few other ongoing traffic calming and bike lane projects along the corridor through Ingleside. On the west end, buffered bike lanes were installed in 2012 on Holloway between Junipero Serra and 19th Avenue as part of a road diet. On the east end, the SFMTA installed a partial bike lane and sharrows on the block of Lee Avenue that connects to Ocean Avenue, a heavily-trafficked street which lacks bike lanes. The Planning Department recently launched an initiative to redesign Ocean.

Between Ashton and Lee, the SF Public Utilities Commission also plans to install a "green street" traffic-calming plan with bulb-outs and rain gardens starting in mid-2015.