Supporting a Better Market Street in San Francisco
Lyft was founded on the idea that we can reorient cities and streets around people. That’s why we are excited to support the City of San Francisco in transforming downtown Market Street — one of the city’s busiest corridors — to prioritize movement for people biking, walking, and taking transit through the Better Market Street project. Market Street is the front door to San Francisco, the artery that connects people to the City’s employment center, shopping and entertainment areas, tourism destinations, and more. Every day, over 500,000 pedestrians walk across the street’s sidewalks, and another 75,000 people ride transit above ground.
Beginning Today: Car-Free Market Street
The first step in a larger set of transportation improvements planned through Better Market Street include restrictions on private cars along the thoroughfare in downtown. This will improve Muni reliability across the city and bring safety benefits that help San Francisco move towards its Vision Zero goal of eliminating traffic fatalities.
As part of the project, riding in a car with Lyft will look a little different along this corridor. Beginning today, the Lyft app will direct people getting picked up or dropped-off along the corridor to designated passenger loading zones on nearby side streets. The dedicated loading zones will help both riders and drivers find each other more easily and keep the travel lanes moving. These efforts build on our work in 2015, as part of the first round of traffic improvements on Market St. between 3rd- 8th St.
Supporting Better Curb Management
The Better Market Street project is the start of a conversation in San Francisco about how to best allocate limited space in the public right-of-way. For this project, the City worked closely with Lyft and many other stakeholders to thoughtfully convert over two miles of roadway into a streetscape that prioritizes transit, walking, and bicycling. Through pilots across the city — such as the annual Outside Lands music festival, along Valencia Street, and during the baseball season at Oracle Park — Lyft has worked closely with the City to pilot both digital and built environment tools to better understand how they impact surrounding traffic and street operations.
As the SFMTA studies how travel patterns shift as a result of Better Market Street and continue to refine the best locations for loading zones, we are excited to share new tools to support data-driven decision-making.
To celebrate the launch of Better Market Street and to help encourage multimodal street improvement projects citywide, San Francisco is the newest city to our SharedStreets curb management data sharing program.
Through this partnership, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) will have access to a dataset of aggregated ridesharing activity across the entire city. This information can be used to identify areas of high demand for passenger loading and other infrastructure improvements to help create safe streets that work for everyone on the road.
Looking Ahead to a Better Market Street
Fundamental to the success of the Better Market Street project is the diversity of transportation options for people to travel along the corridor. During peak hours, as many as 200 buses per hour cruise down Market Street. Many of the Muni Metro light rail routes converge at Market Street, providing quick and uninterrupted service underground. The corridor is also served by nine Bay Wheels stations, where approximately 45,000 people started or ended a Bay Wheels bike trip last year. In 2019, over 25% of all San Francisco Bay Wheels bike trips started or ended along the Better Market Street corridor.
Last year, Lyft publicly supported the City’s plans for the Better Market Street project, and now we’re excited to continue helping people understand the breadth of multimodal options on Market Street. To easily see the time and cost tradeoffs of different transportation options, the Lyft app has fully integrated Bay Wheels bikeshare service and public transit options.
With the expansion of Lyft’s hybrid e-bikes, riders will no longer be constrained by Bay Wheels bikeshare station availability and can easily lock-up at nearby bike racks. And as people who regularly take transit, we know the most common question for riders is “when will my bus arrive?”. To answer this question, Lyft users in San Francisco now see transit on their home screen. Tap through to see nearby transit stops and their nearest real-time departure, along with walking instructions to get there.
Better Market Street is an incredible milestone for the City of San Francisco. It’s taken countless hours of advocacy from organizations like the SF Bicycle Coalition, Walk SF, People Protected Bike Lanes, and the SF Transit Riders Union, as well as dedication from city agencies like SF Planning, SFMTA, and Public Works to make this project a reality. We look forward to playing a role in supporting its ongoing roll-out and helping support new curb management projects around the city. By continuing to prioritize our streets in a way that empowers people with safe and reliable alternatives to owning a car and driving alone, we can build not only a Better Market Street, but a Better San Francisco.
