One of the primary reasons for removing cars from Market Street was keeping buses and street cars moving. There was a huge citywide program to make buses faster, and many routes converge on Market St and travel some portion of it. The routing, including overhead lines, makes use of all four lanes. Cars slowed things down tremendously.
Advertising the move as an anti-car policy was just convenient politics. To a lesser extent that was true of promoting it as pro-bike. Market St was built for trolleys and is still the most important artery for trolleys, and that's simply not gonna change. Any serious pro-bike policy would dedicate entire streets to biking (Mission St would be perfect for this), but for some reason nobody advocates for this. I think the pro-bike lobby is more interested in making the city hostile to cars (and now buses) than it is in making the city convenient for biking. (There may also be some esoteric legal and budgeting problems with dedicating entire streets to bikes, but you'd think those would be surmountable if addressed with the same kind of zeal the bike lobby has for poking everybody else in the eye.)
The pedestrian criticism makes no sense. Market St feels infinitely safer to cross without cars zooming up and down with confused and erratic drivers. The emptiness is entirely a product of the office exodus.
I think whoever the bike lobby is (SFBC?), they've succeeded in making things much more bicycle friendly than they used to be. Valencia, and even the new Folsom bike lanes are pretty cool. The Howard lanes are not so great but the fact that they exist is fantastic. The fact that the bike infrastructure is better in places where people didn't live (Treasure Island, the newer Mission Bay areas) points to the primary constraint here, I think, which is that most San Franciscans would prefer to keep things as they are. A city's ability to adapt to these things is mostly a function of its population age distribution and SF is mostly older people and few children and optimizes for that population primarily.
I remember I found an old video I took on a Sony action cam (useless device, it fogs up) and while all these places are still pretty bad, nearby Alemany does have green paint which is better than nothing. https://youtu.be/cYoJ4S7G5tc?t=98
The primary driver appears to be economics (vis a vis the pandemic and slow recovery afterwards), which has very little to do with the author’s primary target (cyclists and buses).
A more sensible null hypothesis would be that cyclist and bus traffic follow the same rough pattern as car and pedestrian traffic, i.e. economics is always the leader for whether people show up in a given public space. That would explain why NYC and most European cities haven’t seen any real negative consequences to aggressively pedestrianizing and re-allocating their streets away from single-occupant car traffic.
The article really wants to blame reducing automobile traffic, but I really think you could make Market St. a combined speedway / parking lot (whatever it is that car drivers think is ideal) and it wouldn't bring business back. Remote work dominates what happened to our cities. Same-day online shopping delivery is what most people do instead of physically going to stores. So I don't think anyone is surprised that downtowns are mostly empty office buildings, that's the only thing the space can be used for economically, and even that doesn't work anymore.
I spend a decent amount of time in SF and don't find it particularly unsafe (for a 40-ish woman). Definitely a little subjectively more sketchy than most places I frequent in NYC, but there just isn't any reason to be there, so nobody is there. That is kind of how that stuff goes.
People always seem to make things about crime, but I think overreaction is what killed retail. I went to Safeway to buy some toothpast and I had to have an employee pick out the toothpaste and escort me to the front of the store to buy it. I wanted to buy more stuff, but the employee didn't seem that interested in obliging that, so I just got everything else on Amazon and made a note to not visit again. That's why retail is dead. It's not bike lanes. It's not crime. It's that it sucks.
I've been doing Doordash on an e-bike in the city over the last year and a half. The toothpaste is locked up because groups of people were just going into stores with garbage bags, filling them, and walking out. I saw three in one day once. It was really chronic for a little while. Prop 36 passed and criminalized that kind of group theft, and then it all but stopped early this year, but retail hasn't caught up to this fact yet, and probably wont ever.
I think pretty much everyone agrees though that peoples habits have just changed with work from home. The cost of having to wait on an employee has been externalized to people shopping for a living in batch orders, and those people don't mind waiting given that we're only paid for minutes that we're actively on an order (Prop 22).
So yeah, retails not completely dead, just serves a different audience now.
That matches my impressions. Narratives on crime seem to lag reality pretty severely. I first visited SF back in the 1990s, when I don't think its reputation was much different from other big cities, and saw neighborhoods that looked really grim. The Tenderloin then lived up to its reputation now. Even I, as a naive adventurous guy in my twenties, had the sense to be scared in some places. I went back twenty-five years later expecting it to be much worse, having heard so many things about it going to shit, and instead found it much better.
As for basic toiletries being locked up, I've encountered that in other big cities, too. I had to find a Target employee to liberate dandruff shampoo for me in Brooklyn, and while I was wandering the aisles looking for someone, it did occur to me that Amazon could deliver to my hotel.
So many things wrong with this, but let's call out one of the most obvious:
> But a bus will kill a pedestrian just as easily as a car will, which is why Market Street remains empty of pedestrian traffic
No citation, just pure nonsense. As a pedestrian and cyclist: bus drivers are great. They have higher licensing standards, their income is tied to maintaining a license, they're well trained and professional.
Meanwhile the average SUV driver is a homicidal maniac. I'll walk or bike a bus-only corridor any day.
US cities already are far too car-centric. Giving up what tiny progress we've made isn't the answer.
I'm sure that bus drivers are safer, but it absolutely does not feel safe to bike on Market if you end up between two buses. Recently a woman died because her scooter (?) tire got stuck in the streetcar tracks and she got run over by a truck. It does not feel safe to walk or bike next to vehicles that heavy, and the street should be redesigned for better separation.
Is this responsible for the lack of pedestrians? Probably not - that's because of the lack of businesses and the homelessness problem, but the street being physically the same as when it carried cars is a big deal.
As a cyclist, I couldn't agree more. Cars are crazy murder machines, pedestrians will jump out at you just for fun, and the worst of the bunch is other cyclists!
But a bus- with a bus you know where you stand. They're slow, they're predictable, you can see the coming a mile away- I've never felt unsafe around SF Muni.
I'll give you that buses tend to be more predictable - they run fixed routes, you can guess where the stops are - but my biggest problem is whether they can see me or not. They are large so if they don't see me and start moving while I'm trying to pass it could end badly. Usually I try to only pass if they just stopped and I clearly have plenty of room and time.
Cars tend to scare me more as there are way too many impatient drivers who are all to happy to speed around me without much clearance and then cut me off. And they could easily misinterpret me weaving a little to avoid a bump as me scooting over it pulling over for them or starting a turn. And don't get me started on how many cars have tried to right turn on red arrows across bike lanes which have a green signal.
Other bicyclists and pedestrians often suck too, but worst case if I run into them is pain, not death.
I biked 3x weekly to work for a decade from NoPa. Muni busses repeatedly “tried” to kill me - so much so that going up McAllister, I’d hug the double yellows to keep buses from precariously passing me and then cutting me off every other block. The ass end of accordions in particular would rest half way into the other lane, leaving absolutely no where for me to go, and no ability to start from a stop in the middle of the road going up hill in the wrong gear (with other cars and buses soon to be wizzing by). I’d classify the overall behavior as between casual indifference to my safety (let alone me as a person) and outright contempt for my existence.
Per government data, San Francisco Muni bus pedestrian fatalities are roughly 2 per 100 million miles, while general motor vehicle pedestrian fatalities are a fraction of that, about 0.4 per 100 million miles.
Even if you limit strictly to surface streets, Muni buses remain 2-3x more likely to be involved in a pedestrian fatality per mile driven than general vehicles
Can you cite a source for that one? Of the 25 fatalities in sf in 2025 all but two were someone driving a car, truck, or van.
Of the two others, one was a scooter operator striking and elderly person, and then the other was an elderly person on a mobility device swerving out of the way of pedestrians crossing against the light. Zero bus accidents involving pedestrian fatalities.
I believe that their was one bus fatality this year, but of 12 total, I haven't looked up the causes of those accidents yet but I'd guess that the majority of them are going to be caused by drivers as well.
That makes sense, given that the median car mile probably isn’t in a dense urban core. The more accurate comparison would require us to know pedestrian fatalities per mile in urban areas.
Buses are also more massive so more likely to cause serious injury in an accident. They can't stop as fast as a car/bike /etc. But that's also why they seem to move more slowly, takes them longer to accelerate, which one would think might give others an advantage to avoiding them.
They also tend to be carrying 5-25x more people than cars, so there are far fewer of them. They also tend to be driving in the city on the busiest streets, whereas arbitrary cars are more often driving on vacant streets and highways.
so try the comparison using (miles x flow) instead of miles if you're measuring safety, and if you're measuring worthwhile risk, multiply that by passenger-miles. If you're talking about pedestrian safety, you'll probably have to square the (miles x flow) because pedestrians are also less safe the busier a street is.
I was directly responding to a comment arguing that bus drivers were more adept at avoiding pedestrian killings than SUV drivers. Unfortunately extra training cannot change the physics of a 40,000 pound hunk of metal.
If you look at passenger-miles (pax in the bus) or some other metric the rate might be lower for buses but that’s not relevant to what I responding.
No citation for your nonsense either so I actually went and looked. It turns out busses get into accidents more often per mile travelled [1]: "the number of bus accidents per million passenger miles (3.04) is comparable to the number of car accidents per million driven miles (3.21)" considering that a bus has more than 1 passenger on average it means their accident rate per mile travelled is way higher than a car.
> bus drivers are great. They have higher licensing standards, their income is tied to maintaining a license, they're well trained and professional
Also speaking as a cyclist: do you even expect them to be responsive to your presence? I've learned to think of them like they're trains. Their path and timing isn't influenced by my presence in the slightest.
If a car driver changes lanes right at me, I think, that careless asshole! But if a bus comes over into a lane I'm riding in, or if it pulls away from a stop and forces me to hit my brakes or enter another lane, I don't even register it as a mistake anymore. It's just the way buses work and something I have to be ready to react to. Thankfully their lateral movements are slow and smooth.
Some muni busses definitely dngaf, I've gotten cut off by them, the bus driver just deciding it was going to switch lanes into me before making its stop. I had to slam the brakes and ended up pressing my hands behind the bus because I couldn't slow down in time.
As a pedestrian, cyclists are a huge danger because cycling culture is built on aggression, ignoring traffic laws like stop signs and cross walks, and treating humans as street furniture.
Similarly, I’ve seen more than one accident caused by a pedestrian stepping into traffic without looking, taking out a cyclist in the process (from between vehicles, eyes on a phone). Nothing too serious, but only by luck. No one is overtly concerned by traffic laws in SF regardless of the mode of transit.
There’s evidence for the original comment likely being incorrect.
NYC turned a major street into a “busway”. So cars can enter, but they have to make the first right, so they don’t use it as a thruway.
Pedestrian traffic in that area has exploded.
Injuries and deaths have plummeted. As a pedestrian crossing the street is incredibly safer if there’s a massive bus driving at a steady speed (bus drivers won’t speed to catch a light, or jump a red), is significantly safer.
I agree overall. That said, there isn't really a difference between 14th Street and the other nearby numbered streets in Manhattan. Market Street connects 2 different grids and doesn't have a clean alternative.
Noah Smith is like Gell-Mann amnesia personified. He's good at writing columns such that he sounds like he knows what he's talking about, until he opines on something you happen to be familiar with, and you realize he's completely full of shit and that his main talent is the ability to rapidly pump out a Wikipedia-skim-tier opinion on whatever happened to draw his attention that day. Would strongly recommend putting him on your mental ignore list.
The Noah Smith/Nate Silver axis of opinion-politics writers are — literally — Stephen J Smith and Skip Bayless for people who think politics is sports. They're in the entertainment business.
I dunno man. Look at the chart, look at the graph, look at the progress, but I live on Market, and it sucks now. Cop cars parked at night with lights flashing since there’s such little traffic. Plus a lady had her head popped open a few weeks back by a pro driver.
I’d be more comfortable making it a Waymo superartery. I trust those things more than the furniture mart box trucks because one slip and you’re gone.
What are you talking about. He's not talking about the skill of the driver vs a bus driver, he's talking about the fact that a car and a bus are both massive chunks of metal that can both kill a human easily.
So the argument is simply that even if most cars were removed, buses still run and still can contribute to the feeling of pedestrian unsafe-ness.
I had a contract with a company in the SF Bay Area back in 2011-2012. I spent 50% of my time in the Bay Area, despite living in Florida. I often stayed in a San Francisco hotel and walked to a commuter bus that would take me to corporate headquarters.
I visited SF on other occasions in 2015 and 2022. The contrast between 2011 and these dates was staggering. In 2011, I did not have to step around human feces in the street. There was and is always a significant presence of homeless people -- who don't bother me -- but at least back then, I felt pretty confident walking at night through any part of the city, even the Tenderloin. In 2015? It was pretty bleak. Crime was up, and folks were much more aggressive. In 2022, I had my head on a swivel. I'm used to significantly more, uhh, vigorous urban areas, and SF started pinging my situational awareness in 2022 like it didn't eleven years earlier.
Don't get me wrong: SF is a kitten compared to Chicago, Detroit, or Baltimore. But, it's sad that it has descended so far. It is still a charming city that I'd love to visit again, but some of that charm has been lost.
Duelling opinions! (Not really -- downtown SF has had a lot of trouble in the last few years, though as Noah notes, it's been feeling a bit better lately).
However, the trajectory isn't quite that clear, at least over a longer timeline and across the whole city. Back in the 1990s, a lot of downtown was very dodgy feeling, though mostly a block or so away from Market. Market itself varied across its length -- by the time you got to Van Ness it was becoming sketchier. Its status dipped and weaved as the city's fortunes shifted -- not necessarily corresponding exactly to economic success, but by 2011 downtown I think it was fairly "back'.
Other neighborhoods did not do so well during that time, to my memory. The strange thing about 2011 was that San Francisco survived the 2008 crash fairly well economically, so on the surface it was doing well, especially by comparison, but underlying it was a big upswell in the problems that would overtake it in 2015-2022. I'm not sure they were visible everywhere in the city.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that San Francisco is a heavily boom and bust city, with lots of neighborhood variation in fortunes -- I think plenty of people would argue that Market's upturn has come at the expense of pushing problems out to the periphery. But I wouldn't disagree that it's still digging itself out of the COVID hole, five years on, and despite a lot of potential tax income from the current boom.
I have no doubt that SF has its ups and downs. My comment was based on my subjective experience. I'm sure we've all seen the Hollywood accounts of SF in the Dirty Harry movies. It was once bad enough to get such an impression.
I was just sad to see SF in a bust, because I genuinely enjoyed it in 2011. I can only hope that this slump resolves and that the folks who are down and out on the streets get the help they need.
2022 and 2026 SF are radically different. Just read all the raves about the current mayor. Maybe about 5% of SF has crime issues. Unfortunately that 5% is near all the convention centers and big hotels so travelers impressions tend towards the negative.
>A note to my fellow San Franciscians: I’m sorry. I know. There’s always some story in the East Coast press about how our city is dying. San Franciscians hate—HATE—these pieces. You’re a stooge and a traitor for writing one. When I set out reporting, I wanted to write a debunking-the-doom piece myself. Yet to live in San Francisco right now, to watch its streets, is to realize that no one will catch you if you fall. In the first three months of 2023, 200 San Franciscans OD’d, up 41 percent from last year.“It’s like a wasteland,” the guard said when I asked how San Francisco looked to him. “It’s like the only way to describe it. It’s like a video game — like made-up shit. Have you ever played Fallout?”
>I shook my head.
>“There’s this thing in the game called feral ghouls, and they’re like rotted. They’re like zombies.” There’s only so much pain a person can take before you disintegrate, grow paranoid, or turn numb. “I go home and play with my wife, and we’re like, ‘Ah, hahahaha, this is SF.’”
When I first moved to SF I'd go for dinner and then watch movies there with friends. Became a bit of a ritual.
After those options disappeared, I'd still go regularly to peruse the Bloomingdales and Nordstrom, among other small stores.
When those disappeared I'd still visit regularly, to get some exercise (I lived nearby) or visit the food court.
Seems it's simply too large for anyone to want to take another chance on it. And yet it feels insane that a mall in the center of a major city is sitting there, abandoned while politicians discuss turning it into a soccer stadium.
A bit south of SF, the city of San Mateo has kept downtown B street, their main downtown road, closed to all traffic (https://cityofsanmateo.org/4448/B-St-Pedestrian-Mall-Improve...). That area seems just as popular as before. You still park in the same garages.
Note that San Mateo closed off the street to all traffic and turned it into a pedestrian walking/eating area. So it's used for events. Market Street still allows traffic so people can't wander around in it.
I used to spend some time on Market St in the late 90s and it's not that different than it is now. I'm pretty sure they allowed cars back then. Union Square is radically changed but Market was always a street that lacked what the GenZers refer to as aura. You have all these 5 or more story buildings that feel pretty empty. Wide sidewalks with people speed walking to work. OP would like it to be more like the Mission. But those streets have the requisite low rent needed for small artisan stores to flourish.
My dream is that the San Francisco Centre mall would be transformed into a huge place dedicated to having fun: restaurants, bars, gaming centers, roller skating, play spaces, live music and so on.
Seems tough. The Ikea Saluhall is not far and since we live nearby we walk by[0] and it makes sense that that location lost many of its food places. There just isn't enough foot traffic. Alternative locations are much more popular. Stonestown is a much more popular mall for non-adults just because it's generally safer. For the SF Centre to become something like that it would require enforcement actions that I suspect would be unpopular in the city.
Same thing happened in downtown Denver’s 16th street mall. But they didn’t reduce parking or restrict car travel like in the article. But the same result occurred. Stores have set empty for years and more are closing every week.
I was there in the late 1990's and it was all vibrant. Sketchy in obvious places but vibrant. People didn't like tech workers then. Now it's mostly tech.
Something similar happened to Broadway in New York City.
It used to be a main thoroughfare, packed with cars in bumper-to-bumper traffic. But after the city decided to pedestrianize it, by banning cars, adding bike lanes, and converting much of the street into outdoor cafes, it's not the same place.
There's no more chaos and now it's a quiet and pleasant street. It's quieter, safer, and more peaceful than before. But it's lost that chaotic and vibrant energy that made it so famous.
I don't get this take. I feel like this area is feeling much of what we're seeing in many major cities (SF being the most expensive in the country); locals priced out of starting store front businesses due to high commercial rents and large corporations having more capital at their disposal.
>A lot of that is the Doom Loop — there are simply fewer stores for cyclists to visit on Market Street, so there’s less reason for them to go there. But much of downtown hasn’t collapsed the way Market Street has, and presumably cyclists could use the street as a way to get to places like the Embarcadero, Chinatown, etc. They’re not doing it. Cyclists are a relatively rare sight on Market these days.
I originally thought this post was from 2022, but this guy is just lying. There are plenty of cyclists on market street, so much so that you can probably see a cyclist at any time of the day on that street, even late night (if you count delivery drivers on those "ebikes)). Is it paris level? No, but a rare sight to see is just misleading; especially rush hour, where it's just an army of bikes.
I would have to agree though, Market Street's closure was done half-hearted, no protections were made to make the street nicer, though the real real reason market street is "dead" is there's very few things on that street compared to pre-pandemic, why would pedestrians walk somewhere where most stores are vacant?
The street conditions on Market St. are awful for bicycles though. I've biked that route very often and it was always a jangle machine. Now I have a trail bike with big tires and suspension and that's much nicer on it with the added bonus that I won't fit in the rails like that poor girl who died a couple of weeks ago on the scooter.
In the decade I spent traveling to the Bay area to do consulting work I never visited San Francisco. I did go to a conference in the 90s that had me Downtown and I recall it being pretty dead other than us conference goers.
I am French. When working for a large US company, I visited SF several times between 1998 and 2008. It was usually great, especially in the earlier years.
Then I went to visit with my kids in 2019. Oh man, what a change. The city felt really, really different. Even the guy who was giving us a tour had some nostalgia in his voice.
Downtown SF has not had lively nightlife in most living memory, but the commuter crowd filled it up and gave it some bustle. That era ended with 2019 and all the activity has shifted to the neighborhoods, which always had the better activity destinations.
One of the primary reasons for removing cars from Market Street was keeping buses and street cars moving. There was a huge citywide program to make buses faster, and many routes converge on Market St and travel some portion of it. The routing, including overhead lines, makes use of all four lanes. Cars slowed things down tremendously.
Advertising the move as an anti-car policy was just convenient politics. To a lesser extent that was true of promoting it as pro-bike. Market St was built for trolleys and is still the most important artery for trolleys, and that's simply not gonna change. Any serious pro-bike policy would dedicate entire streets to biking (Mission St would be perfect for this), but for some reason nobody advocates for this. I think the pro-bike lobby is more interested in making the city hostile to cars (and now buses) than it is in making the city convenient for biking. (There may also be some esoteric legal and budgeting problems with dedicating entire streets to bikes, but you'd think those would be surmountable if addressed with the same kind of zeal the bike lobby has for poking everybody else in the eye.)
The pedestrian criticism makes no sense. Market St feels infinitely safer to cross without cars zooming up and down with confused and erratic drivers. The emptiness is entirely a product of the office exodus.
I think whoever the bike lobby is (SFBC?), they've succeeded in making things much more bicycle friendly than they used to be. Valencia, and even the new Folsom bike lanes are pretty cool. The Howard lanes are not so great but the fact that they exist is fantastic. The fact that the bike infrastructure is better in places where people didn't live (Treasure Island, the newer Mission Bay areas) points to the primary constraint here, I think, which is that most San Franciscans would prefer to keep things as they are. A city's ability to adapt to these things is mostly a function of its population age distribution and SF is mostly older people and few children and optimizes for that population primarily.
I remember I found an old video I took on a Sony action cam (useless device, it fogs up) and while all these places are still pretty bad, nearby Alemany does have green paint which is better than nothing. https://youtu.be/cYoJ4S7G5tc?t=98
The primary driver appears to be economics (vis a vis the pandemic and slow recovery afterwards), which has very little to do with the author’s primary target (cyclists and buses).
A more sensible null hypothesis would be that cyclist and bus traffic follow the same rough pattern as car and pedestrian traffic, i.e. economics is always the leader for whether people show up in a given public space. That would explain why NYC and most European cities haven’t seen any real negative consequences to aggressively pedestrianizing and re-allocating their streets away from single-occupant car traffic.
The article really wants to blame reducing automobile traffic, but I really think you could make Market St. a combined speedway / parking lot (whatever it is that car drivers think is ideal) and it wouldn't bring business back. Remote work dominates what happened to our cities. Same-day online shopping delivery is what most people do instead of physically going to stores. So I don't think anyone is surprised that downtowns are mostly empty office buildings, that's the only thing the space can be used for economically, and even that doesn't work anymore.
I spend a decent amount of time in SF and don't find it particularly unsafe (for a 40-ish woman). Definitely a little subjectively more sketchy than most places I frequent in NYC, but there just isn't any reason to be there, so nobody is there. That is kind of how that stuff goes.
People always seem to make things about crime, but I think overreaction is what killed retail. I went to Safeway to buy some toothpast and I had to have an employee pick out the toothpaste and escort me to the front of the store to buy it. I wanted to buy more stuff, but the employee didn't seem that interested in obliging that, so I just got everything else on Amazon and made a note to not visit again. That's why retail is dead. It's not bike lanes. It's not crime. It's that it sucks.
I've been doing Doordash on an e-bike in the city over the last year and a half. The toothpaste is locked up because groups of people were just going into stores with garbage bags, filling them, and walking out. I saw three in one day once. It was really chronic for a little while. Prop 36 passed and criminalized that kind of group theft, and then it all but stopped early this year, but retail hasn't caught up to this fact yet, and probably wont ever.
I think pretty much everyone agrees though that peoples habits have just changed with work from home. The cost of having to wait on an employee has been externalized to people shopping for a living in batch orders, and those people don't mind waiting given that we're only paid for minutes that we're actively on an order (Prop 22).
So yeah, retails not completely dead, just serves a different audience now.
That matches my impressions. Narratives on crime seem to lag reality pretty severely. I first visited SF back in the 1990s, when I don't think its reputation was much different from other big cities, and saw neighborhoods that looked really grim. The Tenderloin then lived up to its reputation now. Even I, as a naive adventurous guy in my twenties, had the sense to be scared in some places. I went back twenty-five years later expecting it to be much worse, having heard so many things about it going to shit, and instead found it much better.
As for basic toiletries being locked up, I've encountered that in other big cities, too. I had to find a Target employee to liberate dandruff shampoo for me in Brooklyn, and while I was wandering the aisles looking for someone, it did occur to me that Amazon could deliver to my hotel.
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So many things wrong with this, but let's call out one of the most obvious:
> But a bus will kill a pedestrian just as easily as a car will, which is why Market Street remains empty of pedestrian traffic
No citation, just pure nonsense. As a pedestrian and cyclist: bus drivers are great. They have higher licensing standards, their income is tied to maintaining a license, they're well trained and professional.
Meanwhile the average SUV driver is a homicidal maniac. I'll walk or bike a bus-only corridor any day.
US cities already are far too car-centric. Giving up what tiny progress we've made isn't the answer.
I'm sure that bus drivers are safer, but it absolutely does not feel safe to bike on Market if you end up between two buses. Recently a woman died because her scooter (?) tire got stuck in the streetcar tracks and she got run over by a truck. It does not feel safe to walk or bike next to vehicles that heavy, and the street should be redesigned for better separation.
Is this responsible for the lack of pedestrians? Probably not - that's because of the lack of businesses and the homelessness problem, but the street being physically the same as when it carried cars is a big deal.
too bad they scrapped the original Better Market plans for protected bike lanes
As a cyclist, I couldn't agree more. Cars are crazy murder machines, pedestrians will jump out at you just for fun, and the worst of the bunch is other cyclists!
But a bus- with a bus you know where you stand. They're slow, they're predictable, you can see the coming a mile away- I've never felt unsafe around SF Muni.
I'll give you that buses tend to be more predictable - they run fixed routes, you can guess where the stops are - but my biggest problem is whether they can see me or not. They are large so if they don't see me and start moving while I'm trying to pass it could end badly. Usually I try to only pass if they just stopped and I clearly have plenty of room and time.
Cars tend to scare me more as there are way too many impatient drivers who are all to happy to speed around me without much clearance and then cut me off. And they could easily misinterpret me weaving a little to avoid a bump as me scooting over it pulling over for them or starting a turn. And don't get me started on how many cars have tried to right turn on red arrows across bike lanes which have a green signal.
Other bicyclists and pedestrians often suck too, but worst case if I run into them is pain, not death.
I biked 3x weekly to work for a decade from NoPa. Muni busses repeatedly “tried” to kill me - so much so that going up McAllister, I’d hug the double yellows to keep buses from precariously passing me and then cutting me off every other block. The ass end of accordions in particular would rest half way into the other lane, leaving absolutely no where for me to go, and no ability to start from a stop in the middle of the road going up hill in the wrong gear (with other cars and buses soon to be wizzing by). I’d classify the overall behavior as between casual indifference to my safety (let alone me as a person) and outright contempt for my existence.
Mmm accordion buses definitely sound like extra danger
Per government data, San Francisco Muni bus pedestrian fatalities are roughly 2 per 100 million miles, while general motor vehicle pedestrian fatalities are a fraction of that, about 0.4 per 100 million miles.
Even if you limit strictly to surface streets, Muni buses remain 2-3x more likely to be involved in a pedestrian fatality per mile driven than general vehicles
Can you cite a source for that one? Of the 25 fatalities in sf in 2025 all but two were someone driving a car, truck, or van.
Of the two others, one was a scooter operator striking and elderly person, and then the other was an elderly person on a mobility device swerving out of the way of pedestrians crossing against the light. Zero bus accidents involving pedestrian fatalities.
I believe that their was one bus fatality this year, but of 12 total, I haven't looked up the causes of those accidents yet but I'd guess that the majority of them are going to be caused by drivers as well.
That makes sense, given that the median car mile probably isn’t in a dense urban core. The more accurate comparison would require us to know pedestrian fatalities per mile in urban areas.
Buses are also more massive so more likely to cause serious injury in an accident. They can't stop as fast as a car/bike /etc. But that's also why they seem to move more slowly, takes them longer to accelerate, which one would think might give others an advantage to avoiding them.
This is for SF, so 100% urban for both bus and vehicle data
That’s fascinating; like others, I’d love to see the source data.
What matters is not the number of miles.
What matters is the number of people killed.
A steady miles per fatality means more people die as more miles are driven.
And more miles driven is the trend.
How about by hour?
Cars are not causing a lot of pedestrian fatalities driving on the freeway between Nowhere and Flyover, but they rack up the miles there.
I provided the surface streets only metric, which eliminates freeways
They also tend to be carrying 5-25x more people than cars, so there are far fewer of them. They also tend to be driving in the city on the busiest streets, whereas arbitrary cars are more often driving on vacant streets and highways.
so try the comparison using (miles x flow) instead of miles if you're measuring safety, and if you're measuring worthwhile risk, multiply that by passenger-miles. If you're talking about pedestrian safety, you'll probably have to square the (miles x flow) because pedestrians are also less safe the busier a street is.
I was directly responding to a comment arguing that bus drivers were more adept at avoiding pedestrian killings than SUV drivers. Unfortunately extra training cannot change the physics of a 40,000 pound hunk of metal.
If you look at passenger-miles (pax in the bus) or some other metric the rate might be lower for buses but that’s not relevant to what I responding.
No citation for your nonsense either so I actually went and looked. It turns out busses get into accidents more often per mile travelled [1]: "the number of bus accidents per million passenger miles (3.04) is comparable to the number of car accidents per million driven miles (3.21)" considering that a bus has more than 1 passenger on average it means their accident rate per mile travelled is way higher than a car.
1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00224...
I have a near total opposite view as a cyclist in France. Buses are extremely dangerous in cities, and are way louder than cars.
> bus drivers are great. They have higher licensing standards, their income is tied to maintaining a license, they're well trained and professional
Also speaking as a cyclist: do you even expect them to be responsive to your presence? I've learned to think of them like they're trains. Their path and timing isn't influenced by my presence in the slightest.
If a car driver changes lanes right at me, I think, that careless asshole! But if a bus comes over into a lane I'm riding in, or if it pulls away from a stop and forces me to hit my brakes or enter another lane, I don't even register it as a mistake anymore. It's just the way buses work and something I have to be ready to react to. Thankfully their lateral movements are slow and smooth.
Some muni busses definitely dngaf, I've gotten cut off by them, the bus driver just deciding it was going to switch lanes into me before making its stop. I had to slam the brakes and ended up pressing my hands behind the bus because I couldn't slow down in time.
I now record my rides.
I don’t disagree.
As a pedestrian, cyclists are a huge danger because cycling culture is built on aggression, ignoring traffic laws like stop signs and cross walks, and treating humans as street furniture.
Similarly, I’ve seen more than one accident caused by a pedestrian stepping into traffic without looking, taking out a cyclist in the process (from between vehicles, eyes on a phone). Nothing too serious, but only by luck. No one is overtly concerned by traffic laws in SF regardless of the mode of transit.
Replacing “cyclist” with “motorist” and then “pedestrian” with “cyclist” would make your sentiment outrageous.
Like I said, cycling culture is aggressive.
There’s evidence for the original comment likely being incorrect.
NYC turned a major street into a “busway”. So cars can enter, but they have to make the first right, so they don’t use it as a thruway.
Pedestrian traffic in that area has exploded.
Injuries and deaths have plummeted. As a pedestrian crossing the street is incredibly safer if there’s a massive bus driving at a steady speed (bus drivers won’t speed to catch a light, or jump a red), is significantly safer.
I agree overall. That said, there isn't really a difference between 14th Street and the other nearby numbered streets in Manhattan. Market Street connects 2 different grids and doesn't have a clean alternative.
Seattle and SF did the same. The streets are now horror shows.
NYC is just an exception, because it has so much pre-concentrated urbanistic misery that adding a bit more is not noticeable.
Yeah I came here to post that, such a nonsensical statement
Noah Smith is like Gell-Mann amnesia personified. He's good at writing columns such that he sounds like he knows what he's talking about, until he opines on something you happen to be familiar with, and you realize he's completely full of shit and that his main talent is the ability to rapidly pump out a Wikipedia-skim-tier opinion on whatever happened to draw his attention that day. Would strongly recommend putting him on your mental ignore list.
The Noah Smith/Nate Silver axis of opinion-politics writers are — literally — Stephen J Smith and Skip Bayless for people who think politics is sports. They're in the entertainment business.
When you operate in the attention economy, you have to keep pumping out slop to keep visibility in the algorithm.
> Giving up what tiny progress
I dunno man. Look at the chart, look at the graph, look at the progress, but I live on Market, and it sucks now. Cop cars parked at night with lights flashing since there’s such little traffic. Plus a lady had her head popped open a few weeks back by a pro driver.
I’d be more comfortable making it a Waymo superartery. I trust those things more than the furniture mart box trucks because one slip and you’re gone.
>their income is tied to maintaining a license
So are car owners. Most jobs don't allow for remote work.
If a car owner loses their license, they keep driving without a license. It's also much harder to lose their license.
CDLs are much easier to lose and your employer knows if you have one or not, so it's directly tied to your income.
No they can't.
>A person may not drive a motor vehicle upon a highway, unless the person then holds a valid driver’s license issued under this code
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
Then they get picked up by an ALPR scan and have their car impounded?
Seen it happen many times.
An ALPR doesn't know who's driving.
You don't need a valid drivers' license to renew a car registration in most areas.
In most US cities the cops won't even pull you over if you don't have a license plate, much less track you down and impound a vehicle.
If the registration is to someone without a license, they’ll definitely pull you over. Seen it happen in a couple cities now.
But sure, some cities won’t even do felony warrant service.
What are you talking about. He's not talking about the skill of the driver vs a bus driver, he's talking about the fact that a car and a bus are both massive chunks of metal that can both kill a human easily.
So the argument is simply that even if most cars were removed, buses still run and still can contribute to the feeling of pedestrian unsafe-ness.
I had a contract with a company in the SF Bay Area back in 2011-2012. I spent 50% of my time in the Bay Area, despite living in Florida. I often stayed in a San Francisco hotel and walked to a commuter bus that would take me to corporate headquarters.
I visited SF on other occasions in 2015 and 2022. The contrast between 2011 and these dates was staggering. In 2011, I did not have to step around human feces in the street. There was and is always a significant presence of homeless people -- who don't bother me -- but at least back then, I felt pretty confident walking at night through any part of the city, even the Tenderloin. In 2015? It was pretty bleak. Crime was up, and folks were much more aggressive. In 2022, I had my head on a swivel. I'm used to significantly more, uhh, vigorous urban areas, and SF started pinging my situational awareness in 2022 like it didn't eleven years earlier.
Don't get me wrong: SF is a kitten compared to Chicago, Detroit, or Baltimore. But, it's sad that it has descended so far. It is still a charming city that I'd love to visit again, but some of that charm has been lost.
Duelling opinions! (Not really -- downtown SF has had a lot of trouble in the last few years, though as Noah notes, it's been feeling a bit better lately).
However, the trajectory isn't quite that clear, at least over a longer timeline and across the whole city. Back in the 1990s, a lot of downtown was very dodgy feeling, though mostly a block or so away from Market. Market itself varied across its length -- by the time you got to Van Ness it was becoming sketchier. Its status dipped and weaved as the city's fortunes shifted -- not necessarily corresponding exactly to economic success, but by 2011 downtown I think it was fairly "back'.
Other neighborhoods did not do so well during that time, to my memory. The strange thing about 2011 was that San Francisco survived the 2008 crash fairly well economically, so on the surface it was doing well, especially by comparison, but underlying it was a big upswell in the problems that would overtake it in 2015-2022. I'm not sure they were visible everywhere in the city.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that San Francisco is a heavily boom and bust city, with lots of neighborhood variation in fortunes -- I think plenty of people would argue that Market's upturn has come at the expense of pushing problems out to the periphery. But I wouldn't disagree that it's still digging itself out of the COVID hole, five years on, and despite a lot of potential tax income from the current boom.
I have no doubt that SF has its ups and downs. My comment was based on my subjective experience. I'm sure we've all seen the Hollywood accounts of SF in the Dirty Harry movies. It was once bad enough to get such an impression.
I was just sad to see SF in a bust, because I genuinely enjoyed it in 2011. I can only hope that this slump resolves and that the folks who are down and out on the streets get the help they need.
I actually love SF and would love to visit again.
2022 and 2026 SF are radically different. Just read all the raves about the current mayor. Maybe about 5% of SF has crime issues. Unfortunately that 5% is near all the convention centers and big hotels so travelers impressions tend towards the negative.
From a May 2023 article on the decline of the city <http://web.archive.org/web/20230510153958/https://www.curbed...>:
>A note to my fellow San Franciscians: I’m sorry. I know. There’s always some story in the East Coast press about how our city is dying. San Franciscians hate—HATE—these pieces. You’re a stooge and a traitor for writing one. When I set out reporting, I wanted to write a debunking-the-doom piece myself. Yet to live in San Francisco right now, to watch its streets, is to realize that no one will catch you if you fall. In the first three months of 2023, 200 San Franciscans OD’d, up 41 percent from last year.“It’s like a wasteland,” the guard said when I asked how San Francisco looked to him. “It’s like the only way to describe it. It’s like a video game — like made-up shit. Have you ever played Fallout?”
>I shook my head.
>“There’s this thing in the game called feral ghouls, and they’re like rotted. They’re like zombies.” There’s only so much pain a person can take before you disintegrate, grow paranoid, or turn numb. “I go home and play with my wife, and we’re like, ‘Ah, hahahaha, this is SF.’”
I found it notable that no one in the Reddit discussion <https://np.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/13dvrjs/san_francis...> mentioned the Fallout comparison despite the fact that, well, this is Reddit. I think it hit too hard.
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"Don't get me wrong: SF is a kitten compared to Chicago..."
You shouldn't watch so much Fox news, it's warping your view.
That's based on actually working in these cities and interacting with people. I don't watch Fox News.
I do miss that mall.
When I first moved to SF I'd go for dinner and then watch movies there with friends. Became a bit of a ritual.
After those options disappeared, I'd still go regularly to peruse the Bloomingdales and Nordstrom, among other small stores.
When those disappeared I'd still visit regularly, to get some exercise (I lived nearby) or visit the food court.
Seems it's simply too large for anyone to want to take another chance on it. And yet it feels insane that a mall in the center of a major city is sitting there, abandoned while politicians discuss turning it into a soccer stadium.
I could dream up so many ways to use that space
A bit south of SF, the city of San Mateo has kept downtown B street, their main downtown road, closed to all traffic (https://cityofsanmateo.org/4448/B-St-Pedestrian-Mall-Improve...). That area seems just as popular as before. You still park in the same garages.
Note that San Mateo closed off the street to all traffic and turned it into a pedestrian walking/eating area. So it's used for events. Market Street still allows traffic so people can't wander around in it.
I used to spend some time on Market St in the late 90s and it's not that different than it is now. I'm pretty sure they allowed cars back then. Union Square is radically changed but Market was always a street that lacked what the GenZers refer to as aura. You have all these 5 or more story buildings that feel pretty empty. Wide sidewalks with people speed walking to work. OP would like it to be more like the Mission. But those streets have the requisite low rent needed for small artisan stores to flourish.
My dream is that the San Francisco Centre mall would be transformed into a huge place dedicated to having fun: restaurants, bars, gaming centers, roller skating, play spaces, live music and so on.
Seems tough. The Ikea Saluhall is not far and since we live nearby we walk by[0] and it makes sense that that location lost many of its food places. There just isn't enough foot traffic. Alternative locations are much more popular. Stonestown is a much more popular mall for non-adults just because it's generally safer. For the SF Centre to become something like that it would require enforcement actions that I suspect would be unpopular in the city.
0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/images/4/46/Julie%2C_Astra%2...
Add in shops, and I think you've just described a mall.
Same thing happened in downtown Denver’s 16th street mall. But they didn’t reduce parking or restrict car travel like in the article. But the same result occurred. Stores have set empty for years and more are closing every week.
I was there in the late 1990's and it was all vibrant. Sketchy in obvious places but vibrant. People didn't like tech workers then. Now it's mostly tech.
Something similar happened to Broadway in New York City.
It used to be a main thoroughfare, packed with cars in bumper-to-bumper traffic. But after the city decided to pedestrianize it, by banning cars, adding bike lanes, and converting much of the street into outdoor cafes, it's not the same place.
There's no more chaos and now it's a quiet and pleasant street. It's quieter, safer, and more peaceful than before. But it's lost that chaotic and vibrant energy that made it so famous.
In the US, I think twenty years after implementation is about the minimum passage of time to evaluate a significant CBD urban plan.
In part because it averages out economic cycles like the one’s mentioned in TFA.
In part because cities change slowly and twenty years is nothing in urban planning (or the life of street trees).
Mostly because urban planning is planning not a collection of hot fixes. It is steering a tanker not a jetski.
I don't get this take. I feel like this area is feeling much of what we're seeing in many major cities (SF being the most expensive in the country); locals priced out of starting store front businesses due to high commercial rents and large corporations having more capital at their disposal.
But maybe it's pedestrians and bicycles.
>A lot of that is the Doom Loop — there are simply fewer stores for cyclists to visit on Market Street, so there’s less reason for them to go there. But much of downtown hasn’t collapsed the way Market Street has, and presumably cyclists could use the street as a way to get to places like the Embarcadero, Chinatown, etc. They’re not doing it. Cyclists are a relatively rare sight on Market these days.
I originally thought this post was from 2022, but this guy is just lying. There are plenty of cyclists on market street, so much so that you can probably see a cyclist at any time of the day on that street, even late night (if you count delivery drivers on those "ebikes)). Is it paris level? No, but a rare sight to see is just misleading; especially rush hour, where it's just an army of bikes.
I would have to agree though, Market Street's closure was done half-hearted, no protections were made to make the street nicer, though the real real reason market street is "dead" is there's very few things on that street compared to pre-pandemic, why would pedestrians walk somewhere where most stores are vacant?
The street conditions on Market St. are awful for bicycles though. I've biked that route very often and it was always a jangle machine. Now I have a trail bike with big tires and suspension and that's much nicer on it with the added bonus that I won't fit in the rails like that poor girl who died a couple of weeks ago on the scooter.
Key work relatively.
If that chart is to believed, a 50% drop in bike usage since before the pandemic does seem to make bikes relatively rare currently.
I sure wish this quiet street was filled with lively motor traffic :)
I wish they'd turn it into a long thin park. Keep just enough space for buses and maybe cut into the sidewalks a bit for greenery.
In the decade I spent traveling to the Bay area to do consulting work I never visited San Francisco. I did go to a conference in the 90s that had me Downtown and I recall it being pretty dead other than us conference goers.
I was there this morning and it was poppin'
Also like 3rd street promenade in LA. Is there a list of downtown or vibrant walkable areas that died during pandemic?
I am French. When working for a large US company, I visited SF several times between 1998 and 2008. It was usually great, especially in the earlier years.
Then I went to visit with my kids in 2019. Oh man, what a change. The city felt really, really different. Even the guy who was giving us a tour had some nostalgia in his voice.
I won't be back soon.
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Democrat Heaven! Way to go, Democrats! You are doing a great job creating a thriving city!
Unmentioned elephant: Work. From. Home.
Downtown SF has not had lively nightlife in most living memory, but the commuter crowd filled it up and gave it some bustle. That era ended with 2019 and all the activity has shifted to the neighborhoods, which always had the better activity destinations.
The article mentions remote work multiple times, as part of the Doom Loop