What it's actually like to live on San Francisco's Lombard St

Tourists take pictures while driving down Lombard Street n San Francisco. Tourists take pictures while driving down Lombard Street n San Francisco. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Image 1 of / 17 Caption Close What it's actually like to live on San Francisco's Lombard St 1 / 17 Back to Gallery

Tina Hinckley-Bartlett has one of the most coveted views in San Francisco.

Over the past 30 years, she’s lived in a number of highly sought-after neighborhoods in the city – among them West Portal, Forest Hill, Presidio Heights and Cow Hollow. But her red-bricked, elevated home in Russian Hill is the one she describes as “a fulfillment of a fantasy.” It’s located just above the iconic zig-zags of Lombard Street.

The twists and turns of the tourist attraction feel like a familiar old friend to Hinckley-Bartlett. She traipses through them at least once a week, and drives through if she can. But the flourishing mobs of tourists hoping to do the same have become the subject of many a resident’s griping.

She wants me to see it for myself, so we walk into the thick of it together – a short-lived trek. Her Lombard Street home is just a one-minute jaunt from the top of the crooked street, instantly providing a panoramic view of the bustling action.

It’s around noon on a Thursday. At once, I can count at least 30 people taking photos. Some train their lenses toward the street, but the majority are pointing their cameras at themselves. Two separate drones hum above our heads. Three young men zip by on scooters, screaming as they dip down the hill below. A woman taps my shoulder. “Excuse me, but we’re trying to take a photo.” I step aside, and her idle selfie stick jabs my shoulder.

Clang-clang, clang-clang. A cable car slows to a stop behind us, and a dozen more individuals file out, joining the throng of people surrounding us. It feels claustrophobic, to say the least. But as we fix our gazes toward the candy-colored cityscape on the horizon, it’s easy to understand why Lombard Street consistently ranks in the top 10 tourist attractions of San Francisco, drawing approximately two million visitors per year.

For Hinckley-Bartlett, the people surprisingly aren’t the problem.

“If I have my garage door open, or am out in front of my house, I love to talk to them,” she said. When tourists walk by and peer in, she welcomes them to take a photo. On a few separate occasions, she’s allowed kids to come in and use her bathroom, or encouraged luggage-toting families to park their car in her driveway to avoid an inevitable break-in.

Others aren’t so lucky.

“Sometimes I have to sweep broken glass out of their cars after all of their belongings were stolen in a smash and grab burglary,” she said.

While there are several signs on nearby roads encouraging tourists to “Park Smart,” Hinckley-Bartlett said the message doesn’t always come across when there’s a language barrier.

“People visit from all over the world, and they’re happy to be here,” she said. “They come in with the greatest expectations, but come back to find shattered glass on the ground. If we want to maintain this area for both residents and tourists, we have to protect it.”

She and other neighbors have worked to create their own signs to warn tourists of the growing crime rate. Some feature cartoonish drawings of a hand reaching into a broken window and snatching a wad of cash from the back of the car, while others tell sightseers to avoid leaving bags in their car in different languages.

Hinckley-Bartlett said she wants to make it clear that she and others care about their community, in spite of the hordes of pedestrians. She doesn’t want them to leave – nor does she necessarily believe they should be charged. All she asks for is a little respect in exchange.

“Some people just drop their scooters and bikes in the middle of the street. This isn’t Disneyland,” she said. “Social media has created chaos.”

The uptick in tourism on the city’s “crookedest street” has long been a topic of debate, but was most recently brought to the public’s attention when California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would have required tourists to pay to drive down the renowned road.

The San Francisco County Transportation Authority considered charging $5 to $10 per trip down the landmark stretch of steep pavement. However, Newsom thought AB 1605, proposed by Assemblyman Phil Ting (D-San Francisco), created “social equity issues.”

“Access to this iconic attraction should be available to all, regardless of their ability to pay,” he wrote in his veto message.

James Ludwig agrees.

The former director of the San Francisco Ballet and Zoological Society has lived in his Montclair Terrace home since 1959, enduring decades of growing tourism. Yet, he’s against the proposed paid reservation system.

“I don’t believe in charging people. I think the city is well run, but I just want them to stay out of trying to control the crooked street. Leave it alone,” he said.

Over the years, Ludwig has been able to avoid the nuisance of traffic by simply veering off Lombard just before approaching the crooked street.

“It means an extra minute of time, that’s all,” he said.

And the tourists? They don’t bother him one bit.

“If you look at the people walking down the street, they all look so happy,” he said. “We need more of that.”

Contrary to popular belief, Hinckley-Bartlett added, the street isn’t always blocked with lines of cars. And Carol Ann Rogers, president of the Russian Hill Neighbors community organization, said people only tend to congregate during “peak tourist season” – from early spring into late October, when the weather is most pleasant. Three-day weekends bring packed crowds, too.

That’s when things get difficult for residents.

“It can be a safety issue. All of these people who aren’t paying attention get in the way, and some of us can’t get into our driveways because there’s a line of traffic not moving,” Rogers said.

Traffic stretches all the way down from Lombard to Van Ness, blocking intersections and causing a general mess. But most days – weekday afternoons, namely – the residential blocks are quiet.

“It’s a tricky issue because the traffic is acute at certain times,” Rogers said.

But Hinckley-Bartlett thinks it was the publicity of that chaos during peak periods of time that provided the justification of the proposed paid reservation system.

And she found some serious flaws within it.

“What really frosted me was that they would think of taking away our parking and making three lanes of traffic for a couple of hours,” she said. “That’s not going to make the problem go away.”

Hinckley-Bartlett expressed the system also did not address the inundation of pedestrians on the crooked block – even though such foot traffic was what constituted most complaints from residents living on or near Lombard Street. She thinks that limiting cars would result in even more pedestrian traffic, while encouraging other tourists to park their cars and walk down the crooked block – thus leading to more break-ins.

Instead, what she hopes to see are more traffic control officers on the crooked block on days that have historically exhibited high traffic, like Saturday afternoons. The proposed reservation system initially anticipated staffing from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. every day of the week. Most of that time, though, she said traffic is light, and would therefore lead to a shortfall of revenue based on a projection of staffing during that time.

“We’ve been told the paid reservation system was the only viable solution to fund traffic control,” she said. “If Lombard Street is a tourist attraction and those tourists are an economic benefit to the city, the cost of traffic control should come from another line item in the city’s budget.”

And while Rogers believes the idea of a paid reservation system was one worth trying out, she hopes Russian Hill Neighbors can collaborate with city stakeholders to find a solution that better addresses the tourist attraction’s multifaceted issues. She thinks more staffing is a good start.

“If one thing doesn’t work, we have to try another,” she said. “We’re the ones at the front line. We know what’s going on. We just hope people listen.”

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Amanda Bartlett is an SFGATE digital reporter. Email: amanda.bartlett@sfchronicle.com | Twitter: @byabartlett