Advocates Organize to Stop Roll Back of Ocean Avenue Transit Lanes
There will be a rider-led meeting Wednesday/tomorrow, July 15, from 6-7:30 p.m. at the Ingleside Branch Library, 1298 Ocean Avenue.
Transit advocates on the Ocean Avenue corridor in San Francisco are organizing to counter merchants who are fighting to stop a transit and safety improvement plan. SFMTA’s Ocean Avenue Transit Lanes and the K Ingleside Rapid Project, which would have included “red carpet” transit-only lanes between Junipero Serra Boulevard and the Balboa Park BART Station, was paused after protests from merchant groups.
“There’s a constant focus on the merchants on Ocean Avenue and the people that oppose the red lanes,” said the San Francisco Transit Riders’ Jaime Viloria. “We want to push back by showing there are plenty of community members that want the red lanes for faster/reliable transit and a safer Ocean Avenue.”
“The goal of these meetings is to better organize pro-transit people in the neighborhood and to clarify what the project does and how it can benefit the community,” said James Wen, a local organizer and supporter of better transit. “We hope that the city will complete the project given the need for more efficient transportation in the area and, more importantly, the fact that Ocean Ave is part of the high injury corridor. Cars killed two seniors on the street in the last year alone. Red lanes are a great way to improve transit efficiency and pedestrian safety.”
Indeed, the disinformation—see the picture above of a sign in a merchant’s window making demonstrably false claims about transit-only lanes—follows a familiar theme when cities try to install transit-only lanes or bike lanes.
From Mission Local coverage of SFMTA’s earlier outreach meetings:
Facing merchants’ concerns, Michael Rhodes, a transit priority manager at the MTA, used sales-tax data to showcase the economic effects on the business corridors that have implemented the red transit-only lanes. In recent years, these have included Mission Street, Van Ness Avenue, Geary Boulevard and Taraval Street.
“Sales tax did perform better than the city, or better than it had before,” Rhodes said. “I don’t really want our projects taking credit for that. I just think the point is more that it didn’t cause them to go down in those corridors.”
SFMTA documentation points out that “average speeds on the K Ingleside are as slow as 5 m.p.h. in the project area. This delays its nearly 13,000 daily riders. This project aims to improve travel time by 10-20 percent.”
In response to the merchants, SFMTA is planning a phased-in approach to the transit lanes, now scheduled to start installation in early 2027. They will paint subsets of the larger project, using a dashed pattern instead of solid red on the transit space. The purpose of the dashed pattern “…is to let drivers know that it’s okay to temporarily use the red lane to pass around double-parked vehicles or make left turns at certain intersections,” explained Viloria.
“The merchants are still angry, particularly the Chinese merchants who are now trying to organize with some people in Chinatown,” said Wen.
From Streetsblog’s view, using red dashes instead of solid red in the transit lanes so drivers can overtake double-parked cars or turn left across the tracks is a terrible idea that’s going to confuse drivers who will continue to interfere with transit reliability. Moreover, I actually witnessed a driver hit a pedestrian on Ocean Avenue in 2017. That crash wouldn’t have happened if drivers were banned from using the transit lanes. Ocean Avenue is dangerous and needs fixed.
It should also be noted that there aren’t four lanes on Ocean, as Mission Local writes in its coverage. There are also two lanes dedicated to street parking; that’s six lanes of asphalt for drivers. The street will be much more efficient and safe if the two center lanes are reserved for transit and emergency vehicles, while still providing two lanes for parking and two for private cars.
Understandably, some transit riders, as seen on this Reddit thread, are just fed up with the car-brained nonsense coming from the merchants:
Another Reddit user published a list of merchants who are opposed to the lanes.
“We are happy that SFMTA has not walked back the plan of transit lanes altogether,” wrote Viloria. “There are misconceptions, misinformation, and some fear-mongering being pushed out there and we need to put out honest and data-driven information to the community.”
As to Wednesday’s meeting, “The plan is to make this a recurring monthly meeting inviting community members to discuss how to ensure the project is completed and not watered down further, but we’re also open to hearing from people that oppose the project as long as they are willing to have an open and respectful discussion,” he added.
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