22 San Francisco

Smith

Paris looks really nice these days. A sustained effort to kick cars out of the central city has resulted in many streets becoming pleasant pathways for bicycles and pedestrians. Some urbanists in the United States hope to copy this model. But unfortunately, the place they chose to start copying it was downtown San Francisco.

This turned out to be a huge mistake. Cars have indeed been banned from SF’s central downtown thoroughfare, the famous Market Street. But they have not been replaced by bikes and pedestrians. There are a scattered few cyclists, but not many; SF is a very hilly city, so many people don’t use bikes. And pedestrians aren’t even allowed in the middle of Market Street, lest they be hit by the occasional bus or streetcar that actually does use the road — Market Street is not a promenade.

Thus, instead of the Champs Elysees, Market Street now resembles a giant empty parking lot running right through the middle of downtown — a barren asphalt scar on a half-deserted urban landscape. Between the Market Street closure and the emptying out of downtown offices due to remote work, downtown SF is dying; without foot traffic or car traffic, stores and malls have been closing left and right. The whole area feels as if it’s stuck forever in the pandemic.

But in fact, the Market Street closure is part of a larger debacle of urban politics and governance that has seen the city of San Francisco spend hundreds of millions of dollars to destroy its most important commercial area. This story in the San Francisco Standard tells the tale, and it’s absolutely worth your time if you want to understand why SF is so dysfunctional.

Smith (2023) San Francisco’s Market Street debacle helped destroy its downtown