Rendering courtesy of San Francisco Public Works

For a while, the process of redesigning San Francisco’s grand boulevard, Market Street, was languishing with no end in sight. Planning began eight years ago with a date for repaving delayed and delayed.

But now there seems to be a breakthrough, an agreement on the one thing that proved to be the biggest challenge for city agencies: how to configure the bike lanes with the bustling transit lanes and wide sidewalks on Market.

Some details emerged last Tuesday at a meeting of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority (SFCTA) Board, at the request of Supervisor Jane Kim. Like some of her colleagues, Kim was alarmed to see a $604 million price tag for the Market Street redesign that planners admit they didn’t do a good job explaining.

But sometime this summer, according to Public Works officials, the four city agencies working on the Better Market Street project agreed on this street configuration (below) that includes a protected bike lane at the sidewalk level, similar to European designs that keep people space elevated from transit and automobiles.

Rendering courtesy of SF Public Works

“After a lot of years of going back and forth, and stops and starts, we believe this scheme is very doable,” San Francisco Planning Director John Rahaim told the SFCTA Board. “It also creates the street we think it should be, in terms of the grandest street in the city.”

The agencies got stuck on how to solve the dangerous mix of transit lanes with intense bus traffic and people on bikes. An idea to move the bike lanes to Mission Street, a block to the south, was nixed. A raised bike lane pilot on Market Street, which the agencies tested as a possible solution, didn’t work out.

“It didn’t make bicyclists feel safer,” said Simon Bertrang, the Department of Public Works project manager for the Better Market Street project.

Three original design concepts were presented in the summer of 2013, “none of which perfectly fulfilled all the objectives of the project,” Bertrang told Human Streets. “We were having trouble fitting everything we wanted to fit on Market Street.”

So, the planners went back to square one. And this is what they came up with:

Instead of trimming the curbs where Market Street’s wide sidewalks end, to make room for bicycles, the curbs will be extended to 37 feet, for eight-foot-wide protected bike lanes level with the sidewalks. This configuration will run along 2.2 miles of Market, all the way from Octavia Boulevard to the Embarcadero.

“A protected bike lane the length of Market…has been a dream of everyone who bikes in San Francisco, and we are as close as we’ve ever been to seeing it achieved,” said Brian Wiedenmeier, executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition.

Bertrang said a buffer between the space for pedestrians and cyclists would be clearly delineated by planters, fire hydrants, and other features to be determined. The Muni and BART station entrances will likely have rails separating the sidewalk from the lane.

“The last thing we want to do is create a design that allowed or encouraged bicyclists to whip onto the sidewalk and endanger pedestrians, and we also don’t want to have pedestrians wandering out into the bike lane,” said Bertrang.

The bike lanes will be flexible, so the space can be opened to pedestrians during special events, such as parades and protests. While they’ll be designed to function during commute hours, and move people along, cyclists will pedal at a slower speed.

Bertrang said they wanted to harken back to the vision of Market Street as a beautiful, ceremonial boulevard, not just a street that moved people. “It needs to be designed for kids,” he said. “Right now, we wouldn’t recommend that my grandma ride on Market Street. This is a different vision for how to bring people on bikes to get engaged on Market Street.”

That leaves room for two transit lanes in both directions for express buses and the F-line, and two lanes for other Muni buses, taxis and commercial vehicles. Some of the center boarding islands will be extended. At peak hours, Muni runs more than 100 buses an hour. The hope is to eventually get the number up to 125 buses a hour.

Some aging transit infrastructure will be replaced on Market, including the rail tracks, overhead wires and a power station, at a cost of $342 million, taking up the bulk of the $604 million price tag. The streetscape and repaving would cost $127 million, and the protected bike lane $26 million.

Graphic: SF Public Works

The overall Market Street design is still in the concept phase, but the four city agencies hope to now go onto completing a final design and figuring out more detail. They plan to take it to the public for input in the next few months. It’s also currently going through the environmental review process.

The first phase of the project could start construction in late 2018. A City Hall source told Human Streets the first segment would likely be focused on the west end between Octavia Boulevard and Van Ness Avenue.

After getting a breakdown of the costs, at last week’s SFCTA hearing, Kim and other supervisors seemed to be satisfied that the project could now move forward, with approval of a $16 million grant to continue the design.

Bertrang said $100 million is available to begin the first phase of construction, from Proposition A funds, a measure approved in 2014, but where the remaining funds will come from is uncertain.

“On funding, we have a long, steep hill to climb but we have to start somewhere,” Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru told supervisors.

But at least the planners now have a configuration for Market Street, which remains not only the city’s busiest street for people walking, taking transit and biking, but one of its most dangerous.