SFMTA and Mayor London Breed's office will hold a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a block of post-and-plastic protection for the bike lane on Polk Street in front of city hall on Tuesday morning. The section of new but still inadequately 'protected' bike lane, which was also repainted along the curb, stretches less than 600 feet. Parts of the block now features parking protection. The remainder is just plastic posts, lacking any solid barrier.
Previously, the lanes on this block of Polk (as with nearly all blocks of Polk) ran along the door zone next to parked cars.
Mayor London Breed boasted about the improved lanes earlier this month on social media:
But as cyclists pointed out on social media—and indeed, as they've been pointing out ever since a project to build protected bike lanes on Polk was watered down in 2013—the vast majority of Polk Street remains dangerous and intimidating for cyclists (see image below). The bike lanes that were ultimately built in 2015 are nearly all paint-only, door-zone bike lanes. Most of them remain nothing more than a glorified double-parking zone.
And that, apparently, is how they'll remain into the foreseeable future. "There’s not any immediate plans for more protected lanes on Polk beyond what is already there," confirmed SFMTA's Michael Roccaforte.
The unprotected section by city hall was a particular embarrassment for the current mayoral administration, which has courted the support of the safe-streets community in the upcoming election. In 2021, a reckless driver used the unprotected bike lane on Polk one block south from city hall to go around a line of cars stopped at a red light, striking and killing Lovisa Svallingson, who was crossing Polk at Hayes. Emails obtained by Streetsblog at the time showed that the decision of SFMTA to prioritize parking on Polk over safety directly contributed to the fatal crash.
Shortly after that crash, SFMTA added another block of parking-protected bike lane south of city hall, but, remarkably, still didn't add protection to the block directly in front of it. The city, meanwhile, continued to hold "Vision Zero" rallies on the steps of city hall, in plain view of the dangerous, unprotected lane and the drivers who routinely double parked and drove on it (see image above). Streetsblog called out the hypocrisy for years. Then, in May of 2024, Mayor Breed finally promised "protected" bike lanes would be installed on Polk in front of city hall itself during another Vision Zero rally.
From Streetsblog's view, of course this project is better than the prior unsafe facility. Nevertheless, it seems astounding that after so many Vision Zero pledges and promises, this kind of inadequate piecemeal improvement is the best the city can do.
More pictures of the installation below:
