By Astrid Kane : sfstandard – excerpt
Kevin Ortiz, co-president of the San Francisco Latinx Democratic Club, spoke during a protest this week criticizing Valencia Street’s center-striped bicycle lanes.
Two of the most heavily used bike lanes in San Francisco intersect in the city’s Mission District, at Valencia and 17th streets, where there’s a taqueria, a police station, an upscale furniture store and a famous sex shop.
One set of lanes cuts east-west, from the giant rainbow flag in the nearby Castro across the Mission into Potrero Hill. As with most bike lanes, these flank the parking lane, are generally unprotected from cars and, for the most part, don’t offend anyone. The other, running north-south through the ever-trendy neighborhood, has lately become a cultural flashpoint, a fight on par with the conflict over tech shuttle buses.
Four months ago, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency relocated the north-south bike lanes along Valencia between 15th to 23rd streets from the sides of the street to the center, zipping them together for the span of eight blocks before unzipping them again. In the process, several dozen parking spaces were eliminated, too…
Grumbling about this eight-block stretch has been building since summer. But the anger erupted Tuesday when several dozen small business owners occupied the street, chanting and holding signs calling on the city to remove the lanes, as Streetsblog first reported.
The protest came just a few days after the bar and live-music venue Amado’s closed, with its owner claiming that sales dropped 80% after the bike lane was installed and created a hassle for musicians due to a lack of parking.
Opponents have seized on the bike lane as more evidence that the city runs roughshod over the small businesses that fill its coffers with tax revenue and give it character. But how does moving a bike lane by a few feet destroy a business?…
More than Just a Bike Lane…
“Everybody’s focused on the bike lane, but it’s really about a bureaucracy,” said Bill Dickenson, who sits on a steering committee of the San Francisco Small Business Coalition, which organized Tuesday’s protest on Valencia. “The SFMTA is a government agency that has gone rogue in many ways.”…
An April 2023 planning document appears to put the cost at $590,000, funded by several previous ballot measures, but SFMTA confirmed to The Standard that $1.5 million had been spent so far, with the total amount yet to be determined…(more)