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The death of San Francisco's Market Street
- imichael 1mo agoMy dream is that the San Francisco Centre mall would be transformed into a huge place dedicated to having fun: restaurants, bars, gaming centers, roller skating, play spaces, live music and so on.
- computomatic 1mo agoAdd in shops, and I think you've just described a mall.
- arjie 1mo agoSeems 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%2C_and_Roshan%27s_mum_walking_down_Market_Street_in_San_Francisco.webp https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/images/4/46/Julie%2C_Astra%2...
- Arainach 1mo agoSo 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.
- peezd 1mo agoYeah I came here to post that, such a nonsensical statement
- Analemma_ 1mo agoNoah Smith is like Gell-Mann amnesia personified. He's good at writing columns such that he sounds like he knows what he's talking about, until he opines on something you happen to be familiar with, and you realize he's completely full of shit and that his main talent is the ability to rapidly pump out a Wikipedia-skim-tier opinion on whatever happened to draw his attention that day. Would strongly recommend putting him on your mental ignore list.
- esseph 1mo agoWhen you operate in the attention economy, you have to keep pumping out slop to keep visibility in the algorithm.
- adw 1mo agoThe Noah Smith/Nate Silver axis of opinion-politics writers are — literally — Stephen J Smith and Skip Bayless for people who think politics is sports. They're in the entertainment business.
- adjejmxbdjdn 1mo agoThere’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.
- cyberax 1mo agoSeattle and SF did the same. The streets are now horror shows. NYC is just an exception, because it has so much pre-concentrated urbanistic misery that adding a bit more is not noticeable.
- nanolith 1mo agoI had a contract with a company in the SF Bay Area back in 2011-2012. I spent 50% of my time in the Bay Area, despite living in Florida. I often stayed in a San Francisco hotel and walked to a commuter bus that would take me to corporate headquarters. I visited SF on other occasions in 2015 and 2022. The contrast between 2011 and these dates was staggering. In 2011, I did not have to step around human feces in the street. There was and is always a significant presence of homeless people -- who don't bother me -- but at least back then, I felt pretty confident walking at night through any part of the city, even the Tenderloin. In 2015? It was pretty bleak. Crime was up, and folks were much more aggressive. In 2022, I had my head on a swivel. I'm used to significantly more, uhh, vigorous urban areas, and SF started pinging my situational awareness in 2022 like it didn't eleven years earlier. Don't get me wrong: SF is a kitten compared to Chicago, Detroit, or Baltimore. But, it's sad that it has descended so far. It is still a charming city that I'd love to visit again, but some of that charm has been lost.
- SirFatty 1mo ago"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.
- magnusdopus2 1mo ago2022 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.
- magnusdopus2 1mo agoI used to spend some time on Market St in the late 90s and it's not that different than it is now. I'm pretty sure they allowed cars back then. Union Square is radically changed but Market was always a street that lacked what the GenZers refer to as aura. You have all these 5 or more story buildings that feel pretty empty. Wide sidewalks with people speed walking to work. OP would like it to be more like the Mission. But those streets have the requisite low rent needed for small artisan stores to flourish.
- crq-yml 1mo agoUnmentioned elephant: Work. From. Home. Downtown SF has not had lively nightlife in most living memory, but the commuter crowd filled it up and gave it some bustle. That era ended with 2019 and all the activity has shifted to the neighborhoods, which always had the better activity destinations.
- kaikai 1mo agoThe article mentions remote work multiple times, as part of the Doom Loop
- intrasight 1mo agoIn the decade I spent traveling to the Bay area to do consulting work I never visited San Francisco. I did go to a conference in the 90s that had me Downtown and I recall it being pretty dead other than us conference goers.
- bluegatty 1mo agoI was there in the late 1990's and it was all vibrant. Sketchy in obvious places but vibrant. People didn't like tech workers then. Now it's mostly tech.
- DeepYogurt 1mo agoI was there this morning and it was poppin'
- BrandoElFollito 1mo agoI am French. When working for a large US company, I visited SF several times between 1998 and 2008. It was usually great, especially in the earlier years. Then I went to visit with my kids in 2019. Oh man, what a change. The city felt really, really different. Even the guy who was giving us a tour had some nostalgia in his voice. I won't be back soon.
- azkalam 1mo agoI sure wish this quiet street was filled with lively motor traffic :)
- teaearlgraycold 1mo agoI wish they'd turn it into a long thin park. Keep just enough space for buses and maybe cut into the sidewalks a bit for greenery.
- carabiner 1mo agoAlso like 3rd street promenade in LA. Is there a list of downtown or vibrant walkable areas that died during pandemic?
- at1as 1mo agoI do miss that mall. When I first moved to SF I'd go for dinner and then watch movies there with friends. Became a bit of a ritual. After those options disappeared, I'd still go regularly to peruse the Bloomingdales and Nordstrom, among other small stores. When those disappeared I'd still visit regularly, to get some exercise (I lived nearby) or visit the food court. Seems it's simply too large for anyone to want to take another chance on it. And yet it feels insane that a mall in the center of a major city is sitting there, abandoned while politicians discuss turning it into a soccer stadium. I could dream up so many ways to use that space
- very_good_man 1mo agoDemocrat Heaven! Way to go, Democrats! You are doing a great job creating a thriving city!
- woodruffw 1mo agoThe 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.
- forthwall 1mo ago>A lot of that is the Doom Loop — there are simply fewer stores for cyclists to visit on Market Street, so there’s less reason for them to go there. But much of downtown hasn’t collapsed the way Market Street has, and presumably cyclists could use the street as a way to get to places like the Embarcadero, Chinatown, etc. They’re not doing it. Cyclists are a relatively rare sight on Market these days. I originally thought this post was from 2022, but this guy is just lying. There are plenty of cyclists on market street, so much so that you can probably see a cyclist at any time of the day on that street, even late night (if you count delivery drivers on those "ebikes)). Is it paris level? No, but a rare sight to see is just misleading; especially rush hour, where it's just an army of bikes. I would have to agree though, Market Street's closure was done half-hearted, no protections were made to make the street nicer, though the real real reason market street is "dead" is there's very few things on that street compared to pre-pandemic, why would pedestrians walk somewhere where most stores are vacant?
- arjie 1mo agoThe 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.
- tekla 1mo agoKey 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.
- brudgers 1mo agoIn the US, I think twenty years after implementation is about the minimum passage of time to evaluate a significant CBD urban plan. In part because it averages out economic cycles like the one’s mentioned in TFA. In part because cities change slowly and twenty years is nothing in urban planning (or the life of street trees). Mostly because urban planning is planning not a collection of hot fixes. It is steering a tanker not a jetski.
- wahern 1mo agoOne 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.
- arjie 1mo agoI 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 https://youtu.be/cYoJ4S7G5tc?t=98
- Ydarbleoj 1mo agoI don't get this take. I feel like this area is feeling much of what we're seeing in many major cities (SF being the most expensive in the country); locals priced out of starting store front businesses due to high commercial rents and large corporations having more capital at their disposal. But maybe it's pedestrians and bicycles.
- jrockway 1mo agoThe 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.
- tuchsen 1mo agoI'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.
- dkarl 1mo agoThat 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.
- tristanj 1mo agoSomething similar happened to Broadway in New York City. It used to be a main thoroughfare, packed with cars in bumper-to-bumper traffic. But after the city decided to pedestrianize it, by banning cars, adding bike lanes, and converting much of the street into outdoor cafes, it's not the same place. There's no more chaos and now it's a quiet and pleasant street. It's quieter, safer, and more peaceful than before. But it's lost that chaotic and vibrant energy that made it so famous.
- nitwit005 1mo agoA bit south of SF, the city of San Mateo has kept downtown B street, their main downtown road, closed to all traffic (https://cityofsanmateo.org/4448/B-St-Pedestrian-Mall-Improvements https://cityofsanmateo.org/4448/B-St-Pedestrian-Mall-Improve...). That area seems just as popular as before. You still park in the same garages.
- sxp 1mo agoNote 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.
- petra303 1mo agoSame 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.
- EveryonePoops 1mo ago[dead]
- librasteve 1mo agowe visited old friends a couple of years ago (we lived in SF in the late 80s) … knowing the city quite well we decided to take BART from SFO downtown. our first notable experience of the decline was a drug user injecting on the BART station platform as our train pulled in. not sure I would point a finger at the removal of cars!