Chinatown leaders say bike-lane idea ‘blindsided’ them

San Francisco Chinatown leaders say they are frustrated by a city project that could install the neighborhood’s first-ever bike lane.

The new lane is being considered as part of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s Biking and Rolling Plan , an initiative to revamp and bolster The City’s bicycling infrastructure, which hasn’t been updated citywide since 2009. The agency’s main goal is to create a biking network that’s accessible within a quarter-mile of every San Franciscan.

But many Chinatown advocates said they feel like they’ve been left in the dark about the process — including Jon Hee, co-chair of the Chinatown Transportation Research and Improvement Project.

“Their outreach on this one really sucked,” Hee said. “As a major advocate for Chinatown and North Beach transportation and pedestrian safety, they didn’t send us an email straight. Usually, when they’ve had big projects, they’ve kept us up to date — I don’t know what happened this time.”

Because of the neighborhood’s narrow streets and hilly terrain, along with the density of pedestrians walking around and buses driving through it, Chinatown advocates are also adamant that any bike lane or shared road installed there would be both underutilized and the source of a raft of safety and traffic issues.

The project, launched in partnership with the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, aims to support the transportation needs of the residents who are expected to move into the 82,000 new housing units the The City must build by 2031.

The SFMTA hosted an open house in North Beach last week — the first of 11 such events to be held in each San Francisco supervisorial district over the next two months — to receive feedback about the potential scenarios from residents in District 3, which also includes Chinatown.

At the town hall, the transit agency debuted three potential maps — each with different tradeoffs — of what the new bike network could look like. The SFMTA developed the scenarios based on more than 100 community discussions across The City in the last 18 months. When the plan is fully implemented, the agency expects 6% to 10% of The City’s streets to have bike lanes. Only 3% of San Francisco roads currently feature separated bike lanes.

Two of the plans include elements that would add a bike lane or routes to Chinatown — one of which would add a protected bike lane through Broadway, while another would make both Pacific Avenue and Jackson Street shared roadways between cars and bikes. Chinatown — an area roughly bound by Broadway, Sacramento, Kearney and Powell streets — has never had a bike lane run through it.

“I just think having a bike lane run through a neighborhood like that just doesn’t make sense,” Rosa Chen, planning director with the Chinatown Community Development Center, told The Examiner.

Hee said that the new scenarios threaten to hurt “commerce and business” in the area because it could eliminate parking spaces, which are already at a premium, and might endanger pedestrians.

Chinatown United Merchants Association president Ed Siu said that bike riders “won’t stop in Chinatown for shopping, so how can they help business?”

Christine Osorio, the SFMTA project manager for the Biking and Rolling Plan, stressed that nothing is set in stone and no decisions have been made. The agency could adopt one of these plans or a modified version, or it could scrap them all in favor of something else.

“This is a public-engagement process to get feedback,” she said. “We are very committed to continuing the conversation, both with the whole city and specific communities.”

Hee, who attended the North Beach open house , said he felt “blindsided” when he learned about the scenarios.

“They didn’t reach out to any of the major organizations,” he said.

Chen said that when she first heard about the bike-network project late last year, an agency representative assured her that there wouldn’t be any added bike lanes that run through Chinatown. It wasn’t until last week she realized that the opposite might be true, she said.

“For me, it’s a matter of, they already have not done that outreach, and they’re already outreaching to other neighborhoods about a bike lane that’s already going into our own neighborhood,” she said. “I just don’t think it makes sense — you’re not showing the neighborhood you’re going to run a bike lane through the plans first.”

In addition, Chen, Hee and Siu all said they were frustrated that the SFMTA never contacted their organizations about last week’s open house. They said they only heard about it late via an aide for Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who represents Chinatown.

Osorio said that SFMTA has always aimed to include as much of the community as possible in the planning process and will continue to do so moving forward. She emphasized that she and the agency are very receptive to the feedback from Chinatown leaders because one of their “key goals is to make sure that we’re hearing all of the concerns.”

She also encouraged residents from across The City to attend the other town halls, even if they don’t live in the district that is hosting a particular gathering.

Following the open house, Hee contacted the SFMTA about arranging a time to meet so his organization can speak to the agency about the Biking and Rolling Plan. The two sides will meet Aug. 15. Osorio said she will give a presentation comprehensively detailing the scenarios.

“This is very much going to be driven by the public input that we get around these scenarios, and I hope that in conversations with communities who are really concerned, they see that we are listening,” Osorio said.

The SFMTA launched the Biking and Rolling Plan in December 2022 — when it was called the Active Communities Plan — and the agency has said it hopes to adopt a finalized bike-network plan early next year.

Editor’s note: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that one of the scenarios includes adding center bike lanes on Pacific Avenue and Jackson Street. Instead, under that scenario, the two streets will become shared roadways between cars and bikes, which would not include a dedicated and separate bike lane. The story has been corrected.