SFMTA to explore moving Valencia Street center bike lane to the curb

San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency leaders unanimously endorsed a reconfiguration of the much-maligned Valencia Street center bike lane, with an eye on a new side-running design, by the end of the year.

The agency’s Board of Directors voted Tuesday to convert the center bike lane — which began running down the corridor last summer as part of a one-year pilot program — into a more conventional design. Agency officials said that Valencia Street was initially chosen for the project due to the area being flatter than other neighboring streets. The corridor connects downtown with the Mission and the Outer Mission.

Paul Stanis, an agency project manager, said during Tuesday’s board meeting that side-running bike lanes would reduce roughly 41% of the available curb space for parking and loading. He noted that exact numbers depended on the characteristics of each block, such as the number of parklets and the distance between driveways.

“Our job through the summer is to try to squeeze everything out of every inch along the corridor, and we do have an eye on the total number of parking and loading spaces,” Stanis said.

SFMTA project managers said a six-month evaluation of the center-running bike lane found that average monthly bike-collision rates have decreased, while crashes with pedestrians have mostly stayed the same. The average monthly collision rate for scooters rose, which Stanis said could be a result of such vehicles becoming increasingly common.

The SFMTA, which banned left and U-turns at intersections on Valencia Street upon implementing the bike lane, said up to four vehicles an hour make the now-illegal maneuvers.

SFMTA director of transportation Jeffrey Tumlin said during the board meeting that the pilot project has shown that “our neighborhood commercial districts are a central part of San Francisco .”

“Our staff are ready to experiment and to try new things and to adjust, but we also need to reflect on who bears the burden of those experiments,” he said.

Project managers said that a side-running bike lane would require the green-painted bikeway to either navigate around curbside parklets or run between the sidewalk and parklets placed away from the curb. The concept has already been a source of contention from Valencia Street merchants .

VAMANOS San Francisco, a group that represents some businesses on the street, argued that side-running bike lanes would fail to restore Valencia Street’s pre-pandemic sense of vibrancy.

In a statement, the group said a side-running bike lane would “cause the loss of more parking spots and cause even greater damage to Valencia merchants.”

“Moreover, the side bike lane will force Valencia business patrons using parklets to walk across the side bike lane path, which puts patrons and bicyclists at significant risk of injury and exposes merchants to legal claims,” the group said. “It is a terrible idea.”

Ted Egan, The City’s chief economist , delivered a presentation during Tuesday’s board meeting showing that the bike lane has not had much of an effect on the commercial corridor’s post-pandemic recovery. Egan said that the area’s weak economic recovery could be attributed to matters such as young people who previously dined at Valencia Street establishments moving out of The City during the pandemic.

Christopher White, the executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition , said his organization supported a conceptual design that removed floating parklets entirely.

“Having the lane sometimes run between the curb and a parklet introduces potentially dangerous conflicts between people biking and staff and customers who use the parklets,” he said.

White also called for additional improvements such as increasing roadway users’ visibility of intersections and giving pedestrians more time to enter crosswalks before vehicles are allowed.

SFMTA board chair Amanda Eaken said she hopes a finalized design will maintain some of the pedestrian-safety improvements that were put in place, such as restrictions on turns.

“I’m in favor, I believe, of continuing to look at how we make this not just a bicycle-safety project, but also a pedestrian-safety project,” she said.

Eaken said the agency would continue reaching out to community members to ensure the final design balances their needs with those of Valencia Street customers and visitors.