Market Street

The idea of getting more private automobiles off Market Street is gaining serious traction at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA). Following the success of measures diverting cars off Market at 6th and 10th Streets, the SFMTA Board of Directors today showed a broad consensus favoring potential pilot projects that could further reduce the impacts of cars on and around Market.

San Franciscans are dreaming big as Market Street's transformation approaches in 2015, when the city's most important street is scheduled to be redesigned and repaved. City planners are engaging with citizens to answer a century-old question: How can we make Market Street the glorious thoroughfare that it needs to be?

SFMTA crews continue laying out the green carpet on Market Street in time to welcome the thousands of bike commuters expected on the 17th annual Bike to Work Day May 12. The improvements will help invite first-time riders to embrace the bicycle as their regular choice for commuting to work.

Preparations for improvements [pdf] to the Upper Market Street bike lanes are underway and when completed will mark a step towards safer passage for travelers by bike at three intersections along the city's busiest bike corridor, where a vision for a protected bikeway was dropped nearly forty years ago.

SFMTA crews were spotted installing more green coloring on the Market Street bike lanes today, and say they expect to complete the entire section between Octavia Boulevard and 8th Street in time for Bike to Work Day May 12.

Crews were out on Market Street today laying down the first bike boxes on both sides of the Ninth Street intersection. They come as the first of five promised by the SFMTA earlier this month.

A trial project diverting private automobile traffic off Market Street will become permanent following a unanimous vote by the SFMTA Board of Directors today. The changes have made the the city's main thoroughfare more inviting for people who walk, take transit and bike by requiring eastbound drivers on Market to turn right at 10th and 6th Streets.

After four years of an agonizing bicycle injunction that prevented the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) from adding any significant improvements to the city's bike network, a judge earlier this year finally freed the SFMTA to begin building out the city's long-promised Bicycle Plan.

Most of our readers have probably already watched the amazing historic film of Market Street in the early 1900s, but you probably didn't realize the video was shot in April, 1906, merely a week before the 1906 earthquake and fires destroyed most of the buildings that lined the street in the film. 60 Minutes aired an excellent story about the video on Sunday, which you can watch above. One point worth noting: Some of those cars driving in and out of the picture were staged by the filmmakers, likely as an example of the technological innovation represented by those earlier vehicles. How times change.