"Remaking one of the city's busiest streets could involve banishing buses from downtown Mission Street and redesigning the thoroughfare to make travel safer and easier for the city's growing number of cyclists," reports John Wildermuth. "The plan being studied by city officials is the newest of three alternatives for a $350 million Better Market Street project, which would remake the city's main boulevard into a designated transit corridor and transform the adjoining downtown sidewalks and plazas into inviting places for the hordes of workers, tourists and other visitors who jam into the area every day."
"This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rethink and improve San Francisco's premier street," said Mindy Linetzky, a spokeswoman for the city's Department of Public Works, the lead agency for the project. "Market Street is San Francisco's main street. It should look and work like one."
Comments
A better Market Street? Bullsh*t!
A better Market Street? Bullsh*t. Planners want to put in a pedestrian mall and ban cars---and more recently, even bicycles (!)---for a two-mile stretch. In this day and age! Long after most pedestrian malls in the U.S. have failed, reminding cities that the best approach is multi-modal transportation that allows driving, mass transit use and bicycling on the same road.
One can't help but wonder if San Francisco city and traffic planners are still stuck in the mid-20th Century, with their hare-brained revitalization schemes and neighborhood-destroying traffic congestion "solutions," forever trying to fix what ain't broke, ignoring tradtion, disrupting lives and hurting whole economies in the process.
Who benefits from all this, really? Because it isn't the taxpayer!