San Francisco’s Bike Lane Battles: Valencia, JFK, and the Great Highway

San Francisco likes to market itself as a climate leader and a bike city. In practice, its streets are a test lab for every kind of street redesign—and every kind of backlash.

Over the past few years the city has:

• Turned John F. Kennedy Drive in Golden Gate Park into a permanent car-free promenade, and then asked voters to ratify that choice.¹²³⁴
• Fought a bitter war over the “most controversial bike lane in San Francisco” on Valencia Street, only to redesign it again a year later.⁵⁶⁷⁸
• Closed a two-mile stretch of the Great Highway to cars to create a waterfront park, triggering lawsuits and a successful recall of the district supervisor.^9101112
• Built out a Slow Streets network with zero traffic fatalities so far, even as citywide deaths hit their highest level in a decade.^13141516

San Francisco isn’t debating whether to reallocate space away from cars. It’s debating how far and for whom—and what to do when the politics collide with the data.

Valencia Street: Safety Data vs. Street-Level Backlash

Valencia is one of the city’s key north-south bike routes and part of the High Injury Network—the 12% of streets where roughly two-thirds of severe and fatal traffic injuries happen.⁵ Decades of door-zone bike lanes left people on bikes constantly swerving around double-parked cars and delivery trucks, or getting doored in front of fast-moving traffic.

In 2023, SFMTA rolled out the Mid-Valencia Pilot between 15th and 23rd Streets: a center-running, two-way protected bike lane flanked by car lanes, plus a new curb management plan meant to clear loading activity out of the bike lane.⁵ The idea was to keep:

• A continuous protected bikeway
• Clear space for fire access
• Room at the curb for loading and parklets

What the numbers say

After three months, the city’s evaluation found the design was actually working on its own stated goals:⁵

Crucially, the evaluation found that the pilot reduced the factors behind the old crash patterns: mid-block collisions, surprise doorings, and bikes forced into mixed traffic by double-parked cars. Conflicts didn’t disappear, but they became more predictable and concentrated at intersections where design tweaks and enforcement can address them.⁵

”You killed my business” vs. economic data

Merchants on Valencia argued that the bike lane was killing the corridor. Bars and restaurants put up signs blaming the bikeway for closures; business groups hired PR firms; and the “Valencia bike lane” became shorthand for everything wrong with City Hall.⁷

But when the City Controller analyzed taxable sales before and after the project, they found no statistical evidence that the bike lane itself hurt corridor-wide sales.⁸ The report concluded that Valencia businesses were indeed struggling—but their underperformance started before the bikeway and reflected broader post-pandemic headwinds, not the street redesign.⁷⁸

In other words: individual businesses may have suffered, but across the whole corridor, the ups and downs more or less canceled out.

Why it still blew up

On the ground, the design felt bad for a lot of riders:

• You had to cross car traffic to enter or exit the bikeway.
• At busy intersections, people on bikes got stuck in tight center islands.
• The visual language—two-way bikes in the middle of the street—was unfamiliar in North America.⁵

So even as the data showed fewer mid-block conflicts and less double-parking, the user experience and crash patterns at intersections kept the controversy alive.

In early 2024, SFMTA presented its evaluation and the Board directed staff to develop a conventional side-running protected bike lane as quickly as possible while patching short-term safety issues in the existing design.⁶ The city has since moved ahead with a redesign that brings protected bike lanes back to the edges of the street, more like the successful segments north of 15th and south of 19th, though merchants continue to fight over parking and loading changes.⁶⁷

The Valencia story is messy, but it illustrates a key pattern: when the politics get loud enough, even a data-positive safety project can be ripped out and redone.

Car-Free Wins: JFK Promenade and the Great Highway

On the western side of the city, the politics look very different.

JFK Promenade: Voters codify a car-free park

JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park had long been car-free on Sundays and some Saturdays. During the pandemic, the city closed a longer stretch seven days a week, and it quickly became one of San Francisco’s most popular places to bike, walk, and roll without traffic.¹

In 2022 the city made the closure permanent, then put the question directly to voters:

• Proposition J (2022) asked voters to uphold the ordinance making JFK car-free as open recreational space.²
• Proposition I (2022), backed by some disability advocates and car-access groups, would have reopened JFK and blocked future weekend closures on the Great Highway, effectively undoing much of the car-free network.³

Voters answered clearly:

• Prop J passed, preserving JFK as a 24/7 promenade.²⁴
• Prop I was defeated, so cars stayed out of JFK and the city retained flexibility on the Great Highway.³⁴

Parks advocates celebrated it as a definitive vote for parks and public spaces, and a signal that residents want streets that prioritize people, not just throughput for cars.⁴

Here, the pattern flips: instead of a small business corridor pushing City Hall around, a citywide electorate used the ballot box to lock in a car-free success.

The Great Highway: From emergency closure to permanent park

The Upper Great Highway along Ocean Beach was also closed to cars during the pandemic, then kept car-free on weekends and holidays. In 2024, Proposition K asked voters whether to permanently convert a two-mile stretch into a linear coastal park (now branded Sunset Dunes), citing sea-level rise and safety along a notoriously dangerous roadway.⁹

Prop K passed citywide, but it was deeply unpopular in much of the Sunset District, where many residents relied on the highway for daily driving. The fallout has been intense:

• A lawsuit argues that closing the road by ballot initiative violated state law and environmental review requirements.¹⁰¹¹
• In 2025, District 4 Supervisor Joel Engardio was recalled, with opponents explicitly targeting his support for Prop K and the permanent closure.¹²
• At the same time, the city is pressing ahead with the park build-out and intersection changes, even as opponents warn of longer commutes and diverted traffic on parallel streets.⁹

The Great Highway fight shows what can happen when a citywide climate and safety agenda collides with neighborhood car dependency. Voters may back big car-free moves in the abstract—but the hyper-local politics can still punish the people who implement them.

Slow Streets and Traffic Calming: Quiet Success, Troubling Context

Not all of San Francisco’s street experiments have been so explosive.

The city’s Slow Streets—low-traffic neighborhood streets marked with diverters and “local traffic only” treatments—started as a pandemic response and have quietly grown into a significant safety network. By 2023, San Francisco had:

• About 32 miles of designated Slow Streets
• No reported traffic fatalities on those streets
• Evidence that injury collisions fell significantly where Slow Streets were implemented¹³

Subsequent analyses highlighted injury reductions on Slow Streets on the order of roughly 60%, making them one of the city’s most cost-effective Vision Zero tools.¹³

At the same time, the broader context is grim:

• 2024 was San Francisco’s deadliest year for pedestrians in at least a decade, with roughly 40 traffic deaths, including 24 people on foot—the worst performance since the city adopted a Vision Zero goal in 2014.¹⁴
• In mid-2025, facing a large budget deficit, SFMTA suspended its Residential Traffic Calming Program, which let residents request speed humps and similar measures, even as advocates noted that deaths were rising and police traffic enforcement had plummeted.¹⁵
• The agency is still installing speed humps, raised crosswalks, and other safety treatments at 141 pre-approved locations to work through a backlog, but is not accepting new requests for now.¹⁶

So San Francisco has:

• A proven tool (Slow Streets) that dramatically reduces injuries and hasn’t seen a fatal crash yet.¹³
• A backlog of modest safety projects that the city is slowly building out.¹⁶
• A citywide network that remains lethal, particularly for pedestrians, while the main reactive program that residents can use to fix their own blocks is on pause.¹⁴¹⁵

It’s a textbook case of a city doing the right things in some corridors—but not at the scale or speed that matches its rhetoric.

Takeaways: What San Francisco’s Fights Reveal

Looking across these battles, a few themes stand out.

1. Data doesn’t automatically win.
   On Valencia, the safety metrics and economic analysis both pointed in the same direction: the center-running bikeway improved safety and didn’t cause a corridor-wide business collapse.⁵⁷⁸ That still wasn’t enough to overcome a hostile narrative and design flaws that made people feel unsafe or inconvenienced.

2. Citywide votes can unlock big wins—but are fragile.
   Car-free JFK and the Great Highway park both needed the ballot box to survive; once they did, they became anchors of a more people-first waterfront and park network.¹²³⁴⁹ Yet the Great Highway fight shows those wins can trigger lasting neighborhood resentment and legal challenges.¹⁰¹¹¹²

3. Quiet successes rarely get the political oxygen they deserve.
   Slow Streets and targeted traffic calming are quietly saving lives with relatively cheap interventions.¹³¹⁶ But because they don’t create dramatic winners and losers, they don’t dominate the conversation the way a single controversial bike lane or coastal road closure does.

4. Vision Zero requires choosing sides.
   As long as the city allows fast, high-volume car routes to slice through neighborhoods, the death toll will stay high—even if parks and promenades are thriving elsewhere.¹⁴¹⁵ The question isn’t whether San Francisco has beautiful car-free spaces; it does. The question is whether it’s willing to systematically redesign deadly arterials the way it has JFK and the Great Highway.¹²³⁴⁹

San Francisco’s bike and street fights are not just local drama. They’re a preview of the trade-offs every city faces when it finally admits that you can’t have climate goals, safe streets, and unlimited car throughput all at once.

Footnotes