How San Francisco's Market Street died—and why it's not coming back
The death of San Francisco's Market Street
Noah Smith recounts the decline of San Francisco's Market Street from a bustling commercial heart to a desolate stretch of asphalt. He attributes its death to a combination of the pandemic, remote work, a crime wave, and a poorly executed car ban that removed cars without adding pedestrian spaces. Despite signs of recovery elsewhere in downtown, Market Street remains a dead zone, with foot traffic still half of 2019 levels. Smith argues that the city's transit-focused approach, unlike Paris's pedestrian-first policies, failed to create a destination, leaving the street empty.
Cars were subtracted, but pedestrians weren’t added.
- wahern
One of the primary reasons for removing cars from Market Street was keeping buses and street cars moving. There was a huge citywide program to make buses faster, and many routes converge on Market St and travel some portion of it. The routing, including overhead lines, makes use of all four lanes. Cars slowed things down tremendously.
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.
- woodruffw
The primary driver appears to be economics (vis a vis the pandemic and slow recovery afterwards), which has very little to do with the author’s primary target (cyclists and buses).
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.
- jrockway
The article really wants to blame reducing automobile traffic, but I really think you could make Market St. a combined speedway / parking lot (whatever it is that car drivers think is ideal) and it wouldn't bring business back. Remote work dominates what happened to our cities. Same-day online shopping delivery is what most people do instead of physically going to stores. So I don't think anyone is surprised that downtowns are mostly empty office buildings, that's the only thing the space can be used for economically, and even that doesn't work anymore.
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.
- Arainach
So many things wrong with this, but let's call out one of the most obvious:
> 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.
- petra303
Same thing happened in downtown Denver’s 16th street mall. But they didn’t reduce parking or restrict car travel like in the article. But the same result occurred. Stores have set empty for years and more are closing every week.