The Future of San Francisco's Valencia Street — and What Oakland's Telegraph Avenue Tells Us About It

An eight-block stretch of San Francisco’s Valencia Street, one of the city’s busiest roads and part of its high-injury network, is headed for another redesign — this time, drawing inspiration from Telegraph Avenue, one of Oakland’s main thoroughfares.

The plan, drafted by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, is focused on big changes to the bike lane on Valencia. Since August 2023, its current set-up, a two-way bike lane down the middle of the road, has led to sustained controversy from many cyclists and business owners. They’ve argued the current design is unsafe and has led to reduced sales — partly due to a significant drop in metered parking and a ban on left turns.

On Sept. 23 and 25, SFMTA will hold open houses to present the redesign to the public. In November, the agency is expected to vote to scrap the center-running bike lane for one that hugs the sidewalks. If approved, construction could begin in January. According to SFMTA, the estimated price tag is $1 million and would be a permanent installation.

The redesign would move the location of some businesses’ parklets and modify the bike lane to move around and, in some cases, between those parklets and the sidewalk.

“There’s been a lot of back and forth with parklet owners this year,” said Paul Stanis, the SFMTA Valencia Bikeway project manager.

This is a big question because if the agency moves the bike lane directly next to the sidewalk, that means those parklets will be in the way of the new bike lane.

In discussions with business owners over the summer, SFMTA offered three choices — leave their parklets curbside, which means the bike lane will need to go around them. Move their parklets slightly away from the sidewalk, something SFMTA calls “floating,” which allows the bike lane to continue in a straight path or get rid of their parklets altogether.

Stanis said of the 26 merchants with parklets on this section of Valencia, 21 have decided to keep theirs curbside, three have decided to float theirs, and two decided to get rid of theirs altogether.

Alexandra Gerteis, the owner of Etcetera Wine Bar, is among the few who chose to move her parklet slightly away from the sidewalk. She said when merchants leave their parklets curbside, the space the bike lane needs to move around will eat up valuable parking and loading zones.

“We wish that SFMTA or the city would have made things differently, but now they’re trying to fix it, and they’ve been really trying to help and listening to what we had to say,” Gerteis said.

Now, with the decision to float her parklet, Gerteis, and her employees anticipate a new challenge — having to walk across the bike lane in order to serve clients at their popular parklet. William Lucas, the chef at Etcetera, is worried about potential collisions with cyclists and people on scooters.

“We’re going to have to worry about getting food and drink to our folks in the parklet there, dodging everybody else,” he said. “It’s like Frogger. It’s not going to be good,”

In response to these concerns, SFMTA has been studying other streets that use floating parklets, like Oakland’s Telegraph Avenue — to understand the risks associated with the design.

“I think what you see in Oakland is a good example and a good start, but we’re taking it even further and building on some of the things that they’ve implemented on Telegraph,” Stanis said.

Telegraph Avenue, which runs through Oakland’s Temescal neighborhood, resembles Valencia Street in San Francisco’s Mission District. Both are bustling residential and commercial districts, both are close to BART stations, and both have well-traveled bike routes.

In the summer of 2021, the City of Oakland converted the 0.8-mile section of the street from 52nd Street to MacArthur Boulevard from a traditional four-lane road with a bike lane to a three-lane road with a side-running protected bike lane, where the bike lane runs alongside the sidewalk and parked cars and parklets are placed further out, next to moving traffic.

Josh Rowan, director of the Oakland Department of Transportation, said the agency chose this design primarily to increase traffic safety. Telegraph is on the city’s high-injury network.

“So it really started with how to protect the bike lanes and how to protect the sidewalks, and the best protection is actually a row of parked cars,” he said.

Rowan said this design has helped insulate pedestrians and cyclists from vehicle collisions partly because if cyclists are “doored” by someone opening their car door, they are pushed towards the sidewalk instead of moving traffic.

“The data that’s really most meaningful in this is to see the reduction in the crash rate within the corridor, which is pretty typical when you take a four-lane section, reduce it down to three,” he added. “There’s no such a thing as a fast, safe street.”

This design has some trade-offs. In interviews with KQED, several people who live and work near the street said this design can bring an increased risk of pedestrian-cyclist collisions.

Through a public records request, KQED found there have been four reports of fatal traffic collisions on this section of Telegraph Avenue over the past ten years — all of which predate these changes to the road.

Jules Starkey has been a brewer at Roses’ Taproom on Telegraph for five years. He bikes and skates to get to work and said the new design took some getting used to. Three years later, he calls the design “pretty functional, pretty OK” but admits there’s still room for improvement.

“I, a lot of times, end up in the road anyways, just because it feels safer because people pulling out of driveways stick out in the bike lane and people getting out of their cars just kind of hang out in the bike lane,” Starkey said.

Starkey said Roses’ Taproom’s parklet regularly fills up with patrons on warm summer evenings. He said he recently saw a crash between an electric scooter rider and a pedestrian who was walking in the bike lane, while Roses’ parklet has been spared from any crashes.

Others see a street design that includes floating parklets and parking spaces as flat-out dangerous.

“It creates a whole new set of circumstances where bikes and cars and people have to interact,” said Ron Kriss, a cyclist who lives in the Rockridge neighborhood. “When you first get there, it’s not intuitive that you need to be really careful that there are people in places they don’t normally go.”

Kriss said he avoids cycling and driving on Telegraph Avenue altogether.

Still, the planned facelift for Valencia will be an improvement over the current set-up, the center-running bike, according to Marcel Moran, a faculty fellow who studies bike lane design at the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University.

“I don’t foresee problems on the Valencia corridor if there’s a variety of floated and non-floated parklets,” he said.

He agrees that SFMTA can draw from examples set by other cities, such as New York City and Paris, which employ different kinds of preventative designs, like ramps and signage, to reduce the risk of conflict around floating parklets.

As for the 21 parklets that will remain curbside on the street, Moran pointed out an example of this kind of street design in another part of Valencia, where the bike lane goes around a curbside parklet outside a coffee shop.

“It’s not an unreasonable type of maneuver for a cyclist. It’s very visible, and it doesn’t create an undue burden,” Moran said.