'We screwed this one up': SFMTA director Jeffrey Tumlin weighs in on Octavia Boulevard

This residential block designed by Stanley Saitowitz stands at the beginning of Octavia Boulevard. This residential block designed by Stanley Saitowitz stands at the beginning of Octavia Boulevard. Photo: Google Maps Screen Grab Photo: Google Maps Screen Grab Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close 'We screwed this one up': SFMTA director Jeffrey Tumlin weighs in on Octavia Boulevard 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake famously led to the destruction of the Embarcadero Freeway, but it also paved the way for Octavia Boulevard, the wide thoroughfare in Hayes Valley. Planners attempted to design Octavia in the style of a Paris boulevard: space in the center for cars to pass through with narrower, bicycle-friendly streets on both sides of the central lanes separated by islands.

"No one gets everything, but everyone gets a lot," Elizabeth McDonald, a planner who consulted on the design of the boulevard, explained in Hoodline in 2015.

Jeffrey Tumlin, the new director of the San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency, wasn't as friendly toward Octavia Boulevard in a recent profile in Wired Magazine.

"We screwed this one up," Tumlin told Wired. "The island is too narrow, so the outside lanes are too wide."

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A few sentences later, a motorist proves Tumlin's point. As Tumlin traverses the narrow exterior street on a bicycle, a sedan starts tailgating the SFMTA director, then eventually speeds past. (Tumlin flips him off and yells a profanity.)

Other than commentary on prominent San Francisco thoroughfares, the Wired profile dove into a number of subjects, including Tumlin's trenchant theory on why San Francisco gravitates toward anti-development politics.

"Most of us came from somewhere else and had an amazing arrival experience that was transformative," Tumlin told Wired. "We became our best, truest selves, and it was magical and beautiful. But we cling to the San Francisco that was here when we arrived. I escaped a place that was oppressive and conformist and had this astonishing coming-out experience, but one that was extraordinarily self-involved. There is an upside to conformist societies: They tend to be communitarian, especially if you are in the in-group."

To read the entire Wired story, click here.

Michael Rosen is an SFGATE digital editor. Email: michael.rosen@sfgate.com.