San Francisco Bike Blog

I’ve been promising to attend this meeting for forever, now, but tonight might finally be the night!

Market St. Organizing Meeting

Tue., Dec. 9 | 6:30 pm, SFBC HQ, 995 Market St., Ste. 1550 (bring your bike upstairs)

Join us at the SFBC Office to strategize how we can make Market Street a premier street for bicycling, walking, and public transit. All interested members are invited as we carry out a multipronged campaign for a safer, saner Market Street.

SFGate ran an article earlier in the summer.

I’m not sure why people keep talking about that State Street closure in Chicago - I thought the notion that the pedestrian mall State Street failed due to cars leaving the area was already sufficiently discredited that we didn’t have to worry about it anymore. Apparently not. Well, how about some extremely brief background?

A New York Times article from 1996 provides it - telling us, correctly, that State Street was already on the decline when the pedestrian mall was created. In fact, the pedestrian mall was an attempt to rescue State Street from ultimate doom:

But State Street, in the heart of downtown’s Loop, has been struggling for decades, as theater-goers and shoppers have moved to the suburbs and the stores and cinemas have followed. City planners, trying to replicate the success of suburban shopping malls, in 1979 turned a mile-long stretch of State into its own kind of mall, closing the street to traffic, except for buses. But rather than make the street snazzy again, the mall worsened the slump by giving State a quiet, deserted, even dangerous feel.

…

Still, it is unclear how much the mall can be blamed for State Street’s woes, since the economic troubles had started as early as the 1960’s.

The stores on State have traditionally catered to middle-income people. And it is that middle-class base that has long been eroding in Chicago, as in many American cities. In the last 40 years, Chicago’s population has dropped to 2.7 million, from 3.6 million, while the suburbs continue to grow, reaching deeper into farmland every year.

But check this out - what happened to State Street immediately after the cars went away? The cafes opened, as expected, but the smoggy buses choked everyone out of the area:

In Chicago, mall promoters had envisioned a lively alfresco carnival of shoppers and gawkers, with Paris-style curbside cafes. Indeed, outdoor cafes did open. But the street remained open to bus traffic, and the cafe experience did not quite match the ambience of the Left Bank.

“The buses would line up, one after another, like a herd, with their diesel fumes,” said Adrian Smith, a partner in the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which is designing the new State Street, a $24.5 million project that will include special lighting, trees and other improvements.

I’m no bus fan, and buses can be very smoggy, but I’m sure our buses are a lot cleaner, generally-speaking, than the State Street buses of 20 years ago. (We know from our BRT studies that buses die every 15 years or so.)

This short video on State Street is interesting. The narrator talks about the non-obvious ‘larger forces’ at work - and mentions, in particular, the importance of colleges coming into the area. The presence of students, he says, sets up the right atmosphere - even if they don’t have a lot of money for shopping.

A 1997 Chronicle article about attempts to make Market Street car-free talks about how Chicago’s State Street was dying before the city took the emergency step of getting rid of cars - anything, they thought, to try and save the failing State Street:

About 30 years ago, something started to go terribly wrong with State Street. Chicago is big and tough, but it is just like other cities: Suburban malls started drawing away middle-class shoppers, and in 1976, Water Tower Place, the country’s first vertical mall, opened on North Michigan Avenue, just across the river. North Michigan drained off the upscale shoppers, too. It became “The Magnificent Mile,” and the mile-long heart of State Street started to die. Many of the big stores on State closed; in their places came fast-food joints and discount stores.

‘30 years ago,’ from a 1997 article, means that the demise of State Street started around 1967. Finally, in 1979, after suffering more than a decade of decline, and probably a recent acceleration of that decline with competition from the new/improved ‘Magnificent Mile’ in 1976, State Street went car-free. It was a last ditch effort.

Competition from the suburbs and superior city shopping districts, and smoggy buses, are what killed State Street. Going car-free could have helped speed the demise along a bit quicker, but that’s about it - and we know that State Street and Market Street - for all their similarities - are still very different in at least one respect - we have bikes - lots of them:

State has more cars, but Market has more bicycles, not the vehicle of choice in Chicago’s severe climate.

Market Street is problematic - we have to do something about it. Something has to give. We can have attrition of the city by cars, or attrition of cars by the city, but not both — it’s up to us whether we want more cars, or more vitality.

I’m curious to know more of the background on car-free Market Street - I’m guessing that seems like the best way to increase the livability of the street, as physically separated bike paths might be difficult to achieve — that’s just a guess. It’s clear when you ride your bike on Market what an incredible adventure biking in San Francisco can be. Market Street has tons of bikers, and we’re always dodging cars and trucks and taxis and buses and pedestrians - something’s got to give. Us bikers have no room, it’s not safe, and it doesn’t feel safe. Cars have plenty of streets they can take - let them go around - give bikers the most direct route.

In the Google Map image below, notice the possible path for a biker — from what I can tell, it may be to the left of the line of cars - alongside the driver side, but we’ll have to wait for the taxi to clear the way - he’s jumping around the front of the raised Muni rail station pad. Most commonly, bikers have to try to slide up the right side of the cars, where there is little to no room - we often have to put our right foot down on the sidewalk to make sure we don’t fall. We sometimes wait behind traffic, but that can be unpleasant because it’s uncomfortable being surrounded by and tailed by humongous chunks of glass and steel, and there’s always an outlaw driver willing to terrorize you with his honking. Brave bikers will jump the rail tracks and wait behind a bus or railcar - or maybe even slide up the left side of the bus, occasionally zagging over the double-yellow line that warns of imminent death from oncoming auto traffic. In short, Market Street is a total disaster for bikers, and often for pedestrians. We have to get our priorities straight.

The SFBC has more details here.

Not that Market Street is actualy trying to become a pedestrian mall - it will still have lots of motorized traffic - but many pedestrian malls are spectacularly successful. Here’s a pic of the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica:

Of course, many pedestrians were victims of an outlaw driver here in 2003 - 10 dead, 63 injured. According to the sentencing judge, the outlaw driver “showed enormous indifference” and “unbelievable callousness.”

…I wanted to add that the 1993 reconfiguration/creation of the Chicago Red Line - which runs under State Street - could have affected business. I don’t know the answer to this part.

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