Working with San Francisco to Build a Better Market Street
It’s not surprising to see San Francisco continue to show how it’s done by creating a transitway on Market Street. For over 150 years, Market Street has tied the city together while serving as a critical transit artery, moving thousands of San Franciscans to work, to play, and to the City’s most iconic cultural institutions. And since 2014, Market Street has also been home to Uber’s own headquarters.
That’s why we’re excited to support the City of San Francisco’s efforts to revitalize the corridor through the Better Market Street Project, an initiative aimed at improving transit reliability, safety, and overall walkability. Fundamentally, this effort is about more than just improving traffic flow and congestion, it’s about envisioning a Market Street that is not just a way to get where we are going, but a place to stop, spend time, and enjoy the City’s vibrant character.
Part of the plan to make Market Street more livable and to better serve the people of San Francisco is transit prioritization. We know that high quality transit is a better option than Uber in the dense core of cities; and not only have we said so, we’ve also taken a variety of steps in San Francisco to demonstrate our commitment. That includes launching our transit journey planning tool last September, working with the City to support Prop D — which allocates funds for transit projects — and improving access to alternative modes of transportation with JUMP electric bikes and scooters.
Our support for Better Market Street represents the next step in this journey. Starting today, the City will prohibit private vehicles from traveling on key segments of the street — westbound from Steuart to Van Ness and eastbound from 10th to Main — and will create new passenger and commercial loading zones on adjacent streets. We’re helping the City direct trips to these zones by sending riders and drivers to them with our in-app pickup tool, ultimately optimizing the use of the curb space while also making pickups and dropoffs more efficient and safe. In a further effort to support the initiative, we updated in-app driver navigation to ensure that routing does not direct them along Market Street.
In addition to these product updates, we’re pleased to continue our partnership with the non-profit SharedStreets to bring aggregated and anonymized pickup and dropoff data to more and more cities, including San Francisco. As we continue our work with SharedStreets to build standards and tools for public-private data sharing, our hope is that this data proves useful to San Francisco’s efforts to measure the success of Better Market Street’s new loading zones while also helping the City identify other potential areas of opportunity.
San Francisco has long been at the heart of the technological revolution, but with the Better Market Street Project, the City is also setting an example for cities and communities across the country to create great civic spaces with people at its center. We’re excited to support San Francisco’s continued leadership with the Better Market Street Project.
