After more than a year of unrest over a controversial bike lane project on a section of Valencia Street in San Francisco’s Mission District, the city’s Municipal Transportation Agency is once again making changes in an attempt to improve safety, boost business and ease travel.
Work to relocate Valencia Street’s bike lane from the center to the curb will begin on Feb. 10 after the city’s Board of Supervisors unanimously rejected a community group’s appeal for a more thorough environmental review. The vote cleared the final obstacle for the MTA to move forward with the Mid-Valencia Curbside Protected Bikeway Project, a reversal planned since last summer.
VAMANOS, a collective of Valencia Street merchants, appealed the project’s approval, arguing that the San Francisco Planning Department wrongly granted it a statutory exemption under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The group demanded a full Environmental Impact Report.