The death of San Francisco's Market Street

One of the primary reasons for removing cars from Market Street was keeping buses and street cars moving. There was a huge citywide program to make buses faster, and many routes converge on Market St and travel some portion of it. The routing, including overhead lines, makes use of all four lanes. Cars slowed things down tremendously.

Advertising the move as an anti-car policy was just convenient politics. To a lesser extent that was true of promoting it as pro-bike. Market St was built for trolleys and is still the most important artery for trolleys, and that's simply not gonna change. Any serious pro-bike policy would dedicate entire streets to biking (Mission St would be perfect for this), but for some reason nobody advocates for this. I think the pro-bike lobby is more interested in making the city hostile to cars (and now buses) than it is in making the city convenient for biking. (There may also be some esoteric legal and budgeting problems with dedicating entire streets to bikes, but you'd think those would be surmountable if addressed with the same kind of zeal the bike lobby has for poking everybody else in the eye.)

The pedestrian criticism makes no sense. Market St feels infinitely safer to cross without cars zooming up and down with confused and erratic drivers. The emptiness is entirely a product of the office exodus.

The primary driver appears to be economics (vis a vis the pandemic and slow recovery afterwards), which has very little to do with the author’s primary target (cyclists and buses).

A more sensible null hypothesis would be that cyclist and bus traffic follow the same rough pattern as car and pedestrian traffic, i.e. economics is always the leader for whether people show up in a given public space. That would explain why NYC and most European cities haven’t seen any real negative consequences to aggressively pedestrianizing and re-allocating their streets away from single-occupant car traffic.

In the US, I think twenty years after implementation is about the minimum passage of time to evaluate a significant CBD urban plan.

In part because it averages out economic cycles like the one’s mentioned in TFA.

In part because cities change slowly and twenty years is nothing in urban planning (or the life of street trees).

Mostly because urban planning is planning not a collection of hot fixes. It is steering a tanker not a jetski.

I do miss that mall.

When I first moved to SF I'd go for dinner and then watch movies there with friends. Became a bit of a ritual.

After those options disappeared, I'd still go regularly to peruse the Bloomingdales and Nordstrom, among other small stores.

When those disappeared I'd still visit regularly, to get some exercise (I lived nearby) or visit the food court.

Seems it's simply too large for anyone to want to take another chance on it. And yet it feels insane that a mall in the center of a major city is sitting there, abandoned while politicians discuss turning it into a soccer stadium.

I could dream up so many ways to use that space

I had a contract with a company in the SF Bay Area back in 2011-2012. I spent 50% of my time in the Bay Area, despite living in Florida. I often stayed in a San Francisco hotel and walked to a commuter bus that would take me to corporate headquarters.

I visited SF on other occasions in 2015 and 2022. The contrast between 2011 and these dates was staggering. In 2011, I did not have to step around human feces in the street. There was and is always a significant presence of homeless people -- who don't bother me -- but at least back then, I felt pretty confident walking at night through any part of the city, even the Tenderloin. In 2015? It was pretty bleak. Crime was up, and folks were much more aggressive. In 2022, I had my head on a swivel. I'm used to significantly more, uhh, vigorous urban areas, and SF started pinging my situational awareness in 2022 like it didn't eleven years earlier.

Don't get me wrong: SF is a kitten compared to Chicago, Detroit, or Baltimore. But, it's sad that it has descended so far. It is still a charming city that I'd love to visit again, but some of that charm has been lost.

So many things wrong with this, but let's call out one of the most obvious:

> But a bus will kill a pedestrian just as easily as a car will, which is why Market Street remains empty of pedestrian traffic

No citation, just pure nonsense. As a pedestrian and cyclist: bus drivers are great. They have higher licensing standards, their income is tied to maintaining a license, they're well trained and professional.

Meanwhile the average SUV driver is a homicidal maniac. I'll walk or bike a bus-only corridor any day.

US cities already are far too car-centric. Giving up what tiny progress we've made isn't the answer.

I was there in the late 1990's and it was all vibrant. Sketchy in obvious places but vibrant. People didn't like tech workers then. Now it's mostly tech.

I used to spend some time on Market St in the late 90s and it's not that different than it is now. I'm pretty sure they allowed cars back then. Union Square is radically changed but Market was always a street that lacked what the GenZers refer to as aura. You have all these 5 or more story buildings that feel pretty empty. Wide sidewalks with people speed walking to work. OP would like it to be more like the Mission. But those streets have the requisite low rent needed for small artisan stores to flourish.

My dream is that the San Francisco Centre mall would be transformed into a huge place dedicated to having fun: restaurants, bars, gaming centers, roller skating, play spaces, live music and so on.

>A lot of that is the Doom Loop — there are simply fewer stores for cyclists to visit on Market Street, so there’s less reason for them to go there. But much of downtown hasn’t collapsed the way Market Street has, and presumably cyclists could use the street as a way to get to places like the Embarcadero, Chinatown, etc. They’re not doing it. Cyclists are a relatively rare sight on Market these days.

I originally thought this post was from 2022, but this guy is just lying. There are plenty of cyclists on market street, so much so that you can probably see a cyclist at any time of the day on that street, even late night (if you count delivery drivers on those "ebikes)). Is it paris level? No, but a rare sight to see is just misleading; especially rush hour, where it's just an army of bikes.

I would have to agree though, Market Street's closure was done half-hearted, no protections were made to make the street nicer, though the real real reason market street is "dead" is there's very few things on that street compared to pre-pandemic, why would pedestrians walk somewhere where most stores are vacant?

I sure wish this quiet street was filled with lively motor traffic :)

In the decade I spent traveling to the Bay area to do consulting work I never visited San Francisco. I did go to a conference in the 90s that had me Downtown and I recall it being pretty dead other than us conference goers.

I was there this morning and it was poppin'

I wish they'd turn it into a long thin park. Keep just enough space for buses and maybe cut into the sidewalks a bit for greenery.

Also like 3rd street promenade in LA. Is there a list of downtown or vibrant walkable areas that died during pandemic?

I am French. When working for a large US company, I visited SF several times between 1998 and 2008. It was usually great, especially in the earlier years.

Then I went to visit with my kids in 2019. Oh man, what a change. The city felt really, really different. Even the guy who was giving us a tour had some nostalgia in his voice.

I won't be back soon.

Democrat Heaven! Way to go, Democrats! You are doing a great job creating a thriving city!

Unmentioned elephant: Work. From. Home.

Downtown SF has not had lively nightlife in most living memory, but the commuter crowd filled it up and gave it some bustle. That era ended with 2019 and all the activity has shifted to the neighborhoods, which always had the better activity destinations.