San Francisco Neighborhoods

San Francisco bicycle advocates are celebrating a major milestone after the city's first parking-protected bike lane cleared its final hurdle yesterday. The San Francisco Recreation and Parks Commission approved the John F. Kennedy Drive bikeway, which will be installed in Golden Gate Park this December.

SFMTA hearing officers today approved a plan to replace car parking on Eastern Cesar Chavez Street with buffered bicycle lanes. A previous iteration of the plan was dropped in June after industrial businesses in the area pressured City Hall because they objected to losing traffic lanes for trucks.

Anticipation is building for the arrival of San Francisco's first parking-buffered cycle track along the eastern stretch of John F. Kennedy Drive in Golden Gate Park this December. The project received approval from the Golden Gate Park Concourse Authority on Wednesday, and the final step in its approval will come at a Recreation and Parks Commission hearing on October 20.

San Francisco's Grant Avenue, the city's oldest street, was opened to pedestrians only yesterday in a milestone Sunday Streets event that drew thousands of people to the historic neighborhoods of Chinatown and North Beach on a sunny, 74-degree day. The city's first walking Sunday Streets on a thoroughfare that seems like one of the most ideal streets to pedestrianize was clearly a hit.

The Planning Department, working with the Chinatown Community Development Center (CCDC), the SFMTA and SFDPW, recently released three options for dramatically improving the pedestrian environment on a two-and-a-half block stretch of Broadway, a high-volume two-way arterial that cuts through North Beach and Chinatown, a neighborhood that is "the most densely populated urban area west of Manhattan."

The San Francisco Planning Department, the SFMTA and other city officials will present the new designs for Eastern Cesar Chavez Street to the community tonight, and a strong attendance is key. You're encouraged to show up tonight and speak out in support of improvements that will transform the street environment for pedestrians and bicyclists.

New designs have been drawn up for eastern Cesar Chavez Street and will be presented to the community next week, nearly two months after a contentious meeting in which attendees were told, just days before the striping of new bike lanes, that plans for a road diet were being scrapped by the Mayor's Office and Port of San Francisco because of concerns from industrial businesses about reducing road capacity for trucks hauling goods.

Mary San George was sitting outside her neighborhood flower store yesterday, facing the historic residential high-rise building on O'Farrell Street where she has lived for 27 years, and marveling at something she very rarely gets to experience in her Tenderloin neighborhood: a street full of people instead of cars.

SFMTA crews have installed new continental crosswalks at the intersection of Harrison and Main streets, seven years after pedestrian advocates in Rincon Hill began lobbying the agency for changes following the death of retired SF State journalism professor Beverly Kees. In addition, the pedestrian countdown signals have been timed to give pedestrians a four-second head start.