I think whoever the bike lobby is (SFBC?), they've succeeded in making things much more bicycle friendly than they used to be. Valencia, and even the new Folsom bike lanes are pretty cool. The Howard lanes are not so great but the fact that they exist is fantastic. The fact that the bike infrastructure is better in places where people didn't live (Treasure Island, the newer Mission Bay areas) points to the primary constraint here, I think, which is that most San Franciscans would prefer to keep things as they are. A city's ability to adapt to these things is mostly a function of its population age distribution and SF is mostly older people and few children and optimizes for that population primarily.

I remember I found an old video I took on a Sony action cam (useless device, it fogs up) and while all these places are still pretty bad, nearby Alemany does have green paint which is better than nothing. https://youtu.be/cYoJ4S7G5tc?t=98

I've been doing Doordash on an e-bike in the city over the last year and a half. The toothpaste is locked up because groups of people were just going into stores with garbage bags, filling them, and walking out. I saw three in one day once. It was really chronic for a little while. Prop 36 passed and criminalized that kind of group theft, and then it all but stopped early this year, but retail hasn't caught up to this fact yet, and probably wont ever.

I think pretty much everyone agrees though that peoples habits have just changed with work from home. The cost of having to wait on an employee has been externalized to people shopping for a living in batch orders, and those people don't mind waiting given that we're only paid for minutes that we're actively on an order (Prop 22).

So yeah, retails not completely dead, just serves a different audience now.

That matches my impressions. Narratives on crime seem to lag reality pretty severely. I first visited SF back in the 1990s, when I don't think its reputation was much different from other big cities, and saw neighborhoods that looked really grim. The Tenderloin then lived up to its reputation now. Even I, as a naive adventurous guy in my twenties, had the sense to be scared in some places. I went back twenty-five years later expecting it to be much worse, having heard so many things about it going to shit, and instead found it much better.

As for basic toiletries being locked up, I've encountered that in other big cities, too. I had to find a Target employee to liberate dandruff shampoo for me in Brooklyn, and while I was wandering the aisles looking for someone, it did occur to me that Amazon could deliver to my hotel.

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I'm sure that bus drivers are safer, but it absolutely does not feel safe to bike on Market if you end up between two buses. Recently a woman died because her scooter (?) tire got stuck in the streetcar tracks and she got run over by a truck. It does not feel safe to walk or bike next to vehicles that heavy, and the street should be redesigned for better separation.

Is this responsible for the lack of pedestrians? Probably not - that's because of the lack of businesses and the homelessness problem, but the street being physically the same as when it carried cars is a big deal.

As a cyclist, I couldn't agree more. Cars are crazy murder machines, pedestrians will jump out at you just for fun, and the worst of the bunch is other cyclists!

But a bus- with a bus you know where you stand. They're slow, they're predictable, you can see the coming a mile away- I've never felt unsafe around SF Muni.

No citation for your nonsense either so I actually went and looked. It turns out busses get into accidents more often per mile travelled [1]: "the number of bus accidents per million passenger miles (3.04) is comparable to the number of car accidents per million driven miles (3.21)" considering that a bus has more than 1 passenger on average it means their accident rate per mile travelled is way higher than a car.

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00224...

Per government data, San Francisco Muni bus pedestrian fatalities are roughly 2 per 100 million miles, while general motor vehicle pedestrian fatalities are a fraction of that, about 0.4 per 100 million miles.

Even if you limit strictly to surface streets, Muni buses remain 2-3x more likely to be involved in a pedestrian fatality per mile driven than general vehicles

I have a near total opposite view as a cyclist in France. Buses are extremely dangerous in cities, and are way louder than cars.

> bus drivers are great. They have higher licensing standards, their income is tied to maintaining a license, they're well trained and professional

Also speaking as a cyclist: do you even expect them to be responsive to your presence? I've learned to think of them like they're trains. Their path and timing isn't influenced by my presence in the slightest.

If a car driver changes lanes right at me, I think, that careless asshole! But if a bus comes over into a lane I'm riding in, or if it pulls away from a stop and forces me to hit my brakes or enter another lane, I don't even register it as a mistake anymore. It's just the way buses work and something I have to be ready to react to. Thankfully their lateral movements are slow and smooth.

I don’t disagree.

As a pedestrian, cyclists are a huge danger because cycling culture is built on aggression, ignoring traffic laws like stop signs and cross walks, and treating humans as street furniture.

There’s evidence for the original comment likely being incorrect.

NYC turned a major street into a “busway”. So cars can enter, but they have to make the first right, so they don’t use it as a thruway.

Pedestrian traffic in that area has exploded.

Injuries and deaths have plummeted. As a pedestrian crossing the street is incredibly safer if there’s a massive bus driving at a steady speed (bus drivers won’t speed to catch a light, or jump a red), is significantly safer.

Yeah I came here to post that, such a nonsensical statement

> Giving up what tiny progress

I dunno man. Look at the chart, look at the graph, look at the progress, but I live on Market, and it sucks now. Cop cars parked at night with lights flashing since there’s such little traffic. Plus a lady had her head popped open a few weeks back by a pro driver.

I’d be more comfortable making it a Waymo superartery. I trust those things more than the furniture mart box trucks because one slip and you’re gone.

>their income is tied to maintaining a license

So are car owners. Most jobs don't allow for remote work.

What are you talking about. He's not talking about the skill of the driver vs a bus driver, he's talking about the fact that a car and a bus are both massive chunks of metal that can both kill a human easily.

So the argument is simply that even if most cars were removed, buses still run and still can contribute to the feeling of pedestrian unsafe-ness.

Duelling opinions! (Not really -- downtown SF has had a lot of trouble in the last few years, though as Noah notes, it's been feeling a bit better lately).

However, the trajectory isn't quite that clear, at least over a longer timeline and across the whole city. Back in the 1990s, a lot of downtown was very dodgy feeling, though mostly a block or so away from Market. Market itself varied across its length -- by the time you got to Van Ness it was becoming sketchier. Its status dipped and weaved as the city's fortunes shifted -- not necessarily corresponding exactly to economic success, but by 2011 downtown I think it was fairly "back'.

Other neighborhoods did not do so well during that time, to my memory. The strange thing about 2011 was that San Francisco survived the 2008 crash fairly well economically, so on the surface it was doing well, especially by comparison, but underlying it was a big upswell in the problems that would overtake it in 2015-2022. I'm not sure they were visible everywhere in the city.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is that San Francisco is a heavily boom and bust city, with lots of neighborhood variation in fortunes -- I think plenty of people would argue that Market's upturn has come at the expense of pushing problems out to the periphery. But I wouldn't disagree that it's still digging itself out of the COVID hole, five years on, and despite a lot of potential tax income from the current boom.

2022 and 2026 SF are radically different. Just read all the raves about the current mayor. Maybe about 5% of SF has crime issues. Unfortunately that 5% is near all the convention centers and big hotels so travelers impressions tend towards the negative.

From a May 2023 article on the decline of the city <http://web.archive.org/web/20230510153958/https://www.curbed...>:

>A note to my fellow San Franciscians: I’m sorry. I know. There’s always some story in the East Coast press about how our city is dying. San Franciscians hate—HATE—these pieces. You’re a stooge and a traitor for writing one. When I set out reporting, I wanted to write a debunking-the-doom piece myself. Yet to live in San Francisco right now, to watch its streets, is to realize that no one will catch you if you fall. In the first three months of 2023, 200 San Franciscans OD’d, up 41 percent from last year.“It’s like a wasteland,” the guard said when I asked how San Francisco looked to him. “It’s like the only way to describe it. It’s like a video game — like made-up shit. Have you ever played Fallout?”

>I shook my head.

>“There’s this thing in the game called feral ghouls, and they’re like rotted. They’re like zombies.” There’s only so much pain a person can take before you disintegrate, grow paranoid, or turn numb. “I go home and play with my wife, and we’re like, ‘Ah, hahahaha, this is SF.’”

I found it notable that no one in the Reddit discussion <https://np.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/13dvrjs/san_francis...> mentioned the Fallout comparison despite the fact that, well, this is Reddit. I think it hit too hard.

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"Don't get me wrong: SF is a kitten compared to Chicago..."

You shouldn't watch so much Fox news, it's warping your view.

Note that San Mateo closed off the street to all traffic and turned it into a pedestrian walking/eating area. So it's used for events. Market Street still allows traffic so people can't wander around in it.

Seems tough. The Ikea Saluhall is not far and since we live nearby we walk by[0] and it makes sense that that location lost many of its food places. There just isn't enough foot traffic. Alternative locations are much more popular. Stonestown is a much more popular mall for non-adults just because it's generally safer. For the SF Centre to become something like that it would require enforcement actions that I suspect would be unpopular in the city.

0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/images/4/46/Julie%2C_Astra%2...

Add in shops, and I think you've just described a mall.

The street conditions on Market St. are awful for bicycles though. I've biked that route very often and it was always a jangle machine. Now I have a trail bike with big tires and suspension and that's much nicer on it with the added bonus that I won't fit in the rails like that poor girl who died a couple of weeks ago on the scooter.

Key work relatively.

If that chart is to believed, a 50% drop in bike usage since before the pandemic does seem to make bikes relatively rare currently.

The article mentions remote work multiple times, as part of the Doom Loop