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.

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.

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.

> 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 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.

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

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 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.

But maybe it's pedestrians and bicycles.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00224...

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 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.

So are car owners. Most jobs don't allow for remote work.

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.

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.

>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.

You shouldn't watch so much Fox news, it's warping your view.