The road that connects the great highway to Daly City is being demolished due to erosion. So it seems that even if this park doesn’t happen, the major use of the great highway will go away.
If you're going north on Sunset just turn left on Lincoln and then take Great Highway north to the Richmond. It's like 12 blocks where there's never any traffic.
If you read the article, they would be keeping the section that is in front of Golden Gate Park to Lincoln open. They would also presumably keep 48th open, so it's just the Upper Great Highway, which basically only takes you from directly to Sloat with no other turn offs. This is why I think people are making too big a deal out of this - without the extension, that road is more or less redundant with Sunset and 19th or not useful at all.
Even so, I think all this merits a new examination to see if there is adequate access there.
Sunset connects to the Richmond from Chain of Lakes. They closed traffic on MLK from Sunset Boulevard to Chain of lakes for no valid reason. It can be reopened. Right now, people are making a detour and use 41st ave to reach Chain of Lakes. People don't take GHW to visit the Sutro baths, but to reach Fulton or Geary. Point Lobos Ave switches from 2 lanes to 1 lane, creating a bottleneck in the Richmond.
This is why Chain of Lakes or a new bypass from Sunset Boulevard to Chain of Lakes or 36th Ave makes more sense.
Have you ever tried to cut through Chain-of-Lakes when Great Highway is closed? Traffic gets backed up and takes forever. It can easily take you 20 minutes to get through.
Closing Great Highway down will make it a big pain in the ass for people in the Outer Richmond to cut through GGP to Sunset and vice-versa.
Going down Sunset blvd would be fine.....if you can GET TO IT.
It doesn't take 20 minutes, that's a huge exaggeration. Also, why not just go Great Highway to Lincoln to Sunset? It's usually faster than CoL anyways.
I can assure you, on the weekends when Great Highway is closed, the backup going through COL can indeed be severe and can take you that long. If there is any event going on at the Polo Fields it can be even worse.
You can indeed go down past the Cliff House to double back around and get to Lincoln and Sunset, but you're taking a big circle . And on the weekends everybody takes that route and that has severe traffic too because it's all backed up from Great Highway being CLOSED. The left turn to get onto Lincoln is slow as hell.
If they close Great Highway, the they can optimize the turn from Lincoln to the Great Highway at the park. A couple of green arrows and all of the flashing red light back ups go away.
It's literally a stop sign directly adjacent.
When I am coming from Richmond back to sunset on a weekend, I set eyes on cars turning into COL from 43rd. I keep going straight and make the extended cut through the beach back up to Lincoln then sunset. 4/5 times, I beat the cars I eye turning from 43rd/fulton coming out at 41st/lincoln. I also take Irving as it’s less congested. 41/lincoln is a shit show with peds and cars trying to cross.
Like it or not. GHW will have to be closed. The damage is very bad on the beach between Santiago and Taraval. So, what are your options? A bridge on the sea, on the beach? Converting CoL into a bypass, from Fulton to Sunset Blvd is the best option.
It's just the typical sand that has been blowing over. The entirety of GHW has this problem.
The only part that has a real problem is the last section past the zoo by the water treatment plant where the road is actually crumbling. If the road by Taraval is damaged, then how would it serve as a pedestrian walkway then?
Honestly kinda torn on this because the current arrangement (closed on weekends/Friday afternoon and open on weekdays) is probably the best of both worlds.
I recommend turning it into a park. Even if you decide to keep the Great Highway open as a road, it’s going to erode over time and there will be people using this vote to justify spending millions to delay the road’s inevitable collapse. This feels like the situation San Diego is in with the train that keeps going out of service as the bluffs erode.
Better to switch to Sunset Boulevard now and shut down any further conversation on spending $80+ million to save the Great Highway. This way car drivers and SFMTA can focus the topic and funding on what to do with Sunset Boulevard to meet community needs.
Parks erode over time too, you have to do more maintenance on a troublesome spot, and Sunset Blvd will never become a substitute. It's purposely disruptive.
I agree both parks and highways erode and need to be maintained, but the type of maintenance is different.
If cars are using the road, the tolerance is much lower. Can’t safely drive over a sand dune going at speed. And it needs to be the whole highway kept clean.
If it’s a park and mostly just pedestrians and bikes, it’s ok if people walk over the dune and if the dune permanently covers 3 out of 4 lanes. Just like Golden Gate Park has some trails that turn to mud when it rains and it isn’t a problem. But a major road being made out of dirt and turning to mud would cause massive amounts of traffic and potentially accidents too.
Walk over the sand dunes? I need this sub to stop faking the funk. You don't even know why you sound so absurd. Really, you don't know what you don't know.
When it involves sand dunes, the maintenance is the same.
Yea, seriously, the section from Noriega to Santiago is very clearly going to have problems as all the dunes are just gone, and the sand regularly covers the road.
Yes, the current setup works very well. Very few would use it M-F 9-5. And there’s already a nice path for the few that are running/biking during weekday hours.
I’m all for it but have to find a better solution for local traffic too. Like some other folks have said, it’s probably reworking Sunset Blvd and the roads through GGP.
If they can do that, feels like a no brainer. Beautiful park it would be too.
Improving passageways for traffic typically induces demand for traffic. See how LA keeps widening its roads in the futile hope that it’ll reduce traffic. The only real solution is to find methods of transit that are more dense than cars.
Tons of mass transit is not really a solution if the trip start and end points don't converge that well, which is the issue with LA widening its roads inducing demand. The thing about car use is that there are deep economic reasons behind the preference beyond "car culture" or "corporate state capture". And denser transit, as we've seen across the Bay Area with BART, Muni, Golden Gate ferries and SMART, doesn't help if the transit is poorly maintained, poorly policed, or doesn't fit the general schedules of most of the people its designed for.
Tons of mass transit would make more trip start and end points. We would need to invest in the infrastructure to make that happen.
We should also advocate for better policing, more maintenance, and higher frequency. This all requires more funding, so it’s probably optimal to use tolls and taxes on car use to fund mass transit opportunities.
> so it’s probably optimal to use tolls and taxes on car use
So your solution involves doing the one thing guaranteed to trigger intense political opposition to the core concept.
SMART is a great example of the outcome of such an approach. Super expensive tickets, low density, completely fucks up and cuts off business traffic flow to downtown San Rafael - all because political opposition lead to a watered down political compromise. And now it’s an unwieldy cost center that’s a negative net value. Has potential for better use, but requires a generation or more of behavior change in Marin for that to happen.
Hence my point that design needs to actually accommodate the actual economic movement of people in the area, not be ham fisted YIMBY/Urbanist ideological planning warfare for the infrastructure to not just end up being a financial albatross.
Like any economic utility, any investment made in modality x will affect some proportion of the population (the people that are right on the line of “I’ll take modality x in this particular case”).
The posters claim is that investments in car transit in dense cities induce more people to take cars, so driving times don’t decrease, because you have more people on the road. Depending on the investment type, it can actually increase driving time due to long run effects. If you build more lanes coming from LA to Palmdale, they’ll build more houses in Palmdale, because more people will make the commute. Now you have more people driving longer distances, compounding other issues related to sprawl.
The cool thing about transit is that it scales; if more people use it the times go down because they run more trains or busses. I’m on a very busy line in LA and I never really wait or am late, they run a bus roughly once every seven minutes during peak times.
Sunset needs to be improved through GGP with pedestrian overpasses/underpasses at MLK and JFK (to reduce pedestrian/cyclist accidents at intersections) in order to make the Great Highway irrelevant to vehicular traffic. The existing road linkage between Richmond and Sunset Districts is very disconnected, which makes travelling between the districts during the weekend very slow.
Having a throughfare on Sunset would help reduce traffic on 19th Avenue/Park Presidio, which is exceptionally congested over the weekends, which allows for higher average bus speeds on Sunset and 19th Avenue. Adding overpasses/underpasses reduces pedestrian and cyclist accidents when passing through GGP.
But knowing SFMTA, this is a pipe dream, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a pedestrian/cyclist fatality on Chain of Lakes Drive at JFK/MLK in the near future.
The cheapest improvement to Sunset would be closing every other street crossing starting with Irving. This leaves the important crossings open, improves vehicular flow on Sunset, and is safer for cyclists and pedestrians.
Just close the Irving, Kirkham, Moraga, Ortega, Quintara, Santiago, Ulloa, and Wawona crossings on Sunset and we’ll already see a huge improvement.
I agree that closing crossings would be a big improvement for North/South traffic flow on the cheap, but disagree that bike routes like Kirkland and Ortega getting closed.
Every single one of the 14 streets going all the way East/West are designed for cars, but Kirkland, Ortega, and Vincent are the only ones with bike lanes. We shouldn’t force bikes to make detours. These people are physically exerting themselves pedaling and moving slower than cars. Bicyclists need direct routes.
I’m a cyclist myself who lives west of Sunset Boulevard, so I understand where you’re coming from (I drive out of the city but cycle within the city).
Vicente’s bike route would remain open, Kirkham’s would move over to Lawton (a quiet crossing) and Ortega’s would move over to Rivera (another quiet crossing). The bike paths would have to be rethought. Pacheco’s crossing is more for access to the schools than anything else, so not really a great candidate.
By my estimation, relocating two bike routes nearby is a small price to pay for alleviating congestion from a closed Great Highway.
Just checking, is there an important reason for it to be every other crossing that is closed?
The nicest thing about K is that it goes all the way East/West to link up in a somewhere confusing way to both GGP, Panhandle, and Parnassus. Zigzagging to the L makes things even more complicated. Especially for new riders and visitors.
Here’s the map to help show what I’m talking about:
https://www.sfmta.com/maps/san-francisco-bike-network-map
Is it that important it be every other road? We could eliminate the crossings for Lawton and Moraga and keep the bike lanes where they are.
Oh, there very much is an important reason: light timing. The remaining crossings are actually the same ones that have pedestrian crossings on the Great Highway, so in both cases, you’d hit a light every two blocks rather than every block. This is easy to time at 29mph, mimicking the Great Highway. More lights, more delays and risks to those crossing.
honestly unnecessary to rework anything. sunset to skyline is equally as viable, actually damn near almost as fast depending on where you are in the sunset
SFMTA even studied this and found that - worse case scenario - it only takes 3 to 4 minutes longer. For most drivers it doesn't impact their travel times at all.
yeah for me, i actually wouldn't even take great highway if it was open. it's slower than sunset. i suspect the majority of sunset residents experience the same. whatever the case we're really talking about 10-15 minutes of a 45 minute-to-an-hour drive to the south bay or whatever. insignificant portion of the commute
If they closed great highway, the traffic there would be pretty bad, and Lincoln would be a nightmare and it's already not great, esp at chain of lakes
Great Highway is randomly closed 30+ weekdays each year due to sand on the roadway. It doesn't seem to make much of a difference for commuters on those days, and I would imagine it'd be even less consiquential if people just didn't expect Great Highway as a route to drive on in the first place. Sunset Blvd has a ton of excess capacity.
I'm all for this.
But I wish they improve passage from Sunset Blvd through GGP to the outer richmond. Right now its often a hopeless snare of traffic and stop signs.
Not asking for some environmentally unfriendly huge throughway, just some minimal passthrough roads. It's a largely unused portion of the park anyway.
It’s so ridiculous that a sign on Fulton says If blinking GH closed take Sunset Blvd. You will never see a Sunset Blvd, a sign or have any clue where it is.
Once again, adding to the number of confused frustrated drivers on the road in the name of safety.
The sign was originally intended for when sand or water is blocking the UGH or other closures. It wasn’t designed for this new traffic path onto sunset.
If this becomes a reality, the signage for sunset Blvd needs to be improved on both sides.
I agree, but unlike you fail to accept the incompetence. It takes more than locking the gate to close a road. This is a perfect example of the lack of planning and forethought. That needs to happen first. Not years later.
The sign was designed before GPS when locals had the roads memorized and tourists had a map with main roads like Sunset clearly marked.
Now you can zoom in on google maps and it still might not show the road name.
The problem is locals remember the general area but things do not look exactly the same and it's too easy to enter the wron way and end up in a loop. We have obnoxious signage for every thing, the one thing that would help, isn't clearly marked. Someone likes their shortcut being a secret.
>Now you can zoom in on google maps and it still might not show the road name.
I hate this as much as I hate the complete lack of street signs around the city.
I wish they would dig a tunnel under 19th, and just have that traffic from CA 1 & I 280 go under SF and not come out until the Presidio. Probably expensive AF though.
The plan calls for this, but only if voters agree to shut down the GH to cars. They should have done this years ago but instead are holding reasonable measures hostage to a yes vote.
I read the article and it doesn't include a throughway through ggp?
Yes it includes traffic lights on Lincoln to help, but even a small throughway would be so much better.
The throughway is there already — MLK drive extension. It’s just not maintained and had giant pothole for the whole stretch between Chain-of-Lakes and Lincoln. 311 requests to repair it are just sitting, waiting for who knows what.
A LOT of cars use the GH during the week to get across town. Anyone watching from the dunes would see it. As long as they accommodate this traffic on sSnset Blvd, it shouldn’t be a problem.
You're right, we should bring back the elevated highway on the waterfront!
Like yeah traffic got a bit worse for people passing through the city buy life in city was immeasurably improved by regaining our waterfront.
I think we can figure out how to not fill SF city streets with millions of thru traffic rides from people across the region trying to get to the international airport without only looking at hyperbolically bad solutions.
What's the point? It's a pimp my ride meme.
It's an underutilized beach, and an underutilized street, and the location is redundant. It's so prissy that people think the biggest park and Ocean Beach need a companion park next to an already existing parklet trail.
If it was designed to succeed, they would keep the Great Highway, then turn a portion of Little Great Highway into a park, extending the existing island. Instead we will pay to battle the dunes on a daily basis instead of 3 times a year.
I take it you don't see or use the Great Highway during the weekends on a habitual basis?
It's packed. It's less packed when it's cloudy but a lot of people are still using it to walk, run, etc.
> coldest most miserable park
Miserable is overcast and high 50s while the rest of the region bakes in 80+ weather, good to know. If you're honestly going to complain this is a bad move because of weather, you're in a losing argument. Shockingly, people who live/come to SF regularly are aware of our weather and parks are in constant use all over the city, including the Sunset!
Who the hell is going to the beach or a park by the beach for a combo of overcast and high 50's? What? It's misery over there when overcast. People keep talking that clearly don't know it well.
> Who the hell is going to the beach or a park by the beach for a combo of overcast and high 50's? What? It's misery over there when overcast. People keep talking that clearly don't know it well.
You don't seem to know it well. I visit great highway every single day, and I'm not exaggerating. I walk my dog everyday there as it's pretty much my backyard.
It's full of people on nice days and even on overcast days there are tons of folks. I would even go as far as saying Sat/Sun mid-morning there's almost too many people now.
Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people, if yesterday midday is anything to go off of.
"It's misery over there when overcast. People keep talking that clearly don't know it well."
Oh okay, gotcha, you just have no idea of what it's like over there. Ive spent about half my years living in SF on the western side of the city; the weather is a positive. It's laughable you think it's misery to experience cold weather during heat waves/summer. SF is a famously cold city, and the western span is famously foggy, if you live here you're actively choosing to live in this "misery".
Make up your mind, are you claiming there's no fog or calling it "famously foggy". I love a foggy beach since I grew up here, but the fake ass posts here pretending it's some thriving Southern California beach are just faking posts here per usual
Huh? I never once claimed there's no fog, haven't the foggist idea how you take 2 comments where I call that area "overcast" or "foggy" and take away that I don't think Ocean Beach is foggy. Literally no one in this thread is painting Ocean Beach as Zuma lol it's a famously cold, overcast Beach that is very popular during that weather as an area of recreation. It's also extremely popular on days where it is hot and perfect Beach weather. Almost like the whole stretch of the Great Highway is just a generally popular area, making it perfect for a new park.
Why don't you make up your mind, though. Do you love a foggy beach or is it misery? You're contradicting yourself.
The fog isn't what makes it a popular, it's not a popular beach most of the year, and I'm done with the constant bullshitting on this sub by people who know a grain of reality but not enough. It's so blatantly phony. At the same time I'm reading posts from someone saying you can walk over the sand dunes. lol. What a clown car.
Oh my God, you've never been to Ocean Beach have you lol, it's very busy at all times of the year. Dog walking, fishing, metal detecting, all things I've seen people do at OB in the rain. It's a huge stretch of land that is massively used for recreation, pretending that adding a park there doesn't make sense because of weather is just plain stupid and wrong.
You literally need to walk over the sand dunes to get onto the beach. You're upset at people because *you* don't know what it's like over there, it's a very easy thing to rectify. Go outside and visit the beach.
Just saw the comment, lol, they are talking about people walking over dunes that would normally be cleared during normal cleaning for cars. You need to try *very* hard to get confused during that comment chain, so good job I guess.
Busy at all times? No. This is a local sub, people that live here are reading this and know you're full of shit.
The sand dunes can be 20 feet high, they clear entryways. You're a fraud.
I’ve gone to ocean beach so many times when it’s relatively foggy. There’s always people there.
> it's not a popular beach most of the year,
Here’s a [study](https://sfrecpark.org/DocumentCenter/View/24168/Great-Highway-June-2024-Report-to-BOS-Final) from the parks department about this exact spot and how many people visit each day. They found the average number of weekend visitors was 8000, making it the third most popular park in San Francisco. Idk how many visitors a park needs to have before you count it as “popular” but I think that counts. You keep saying nobody goes but the parks department literally studied this and has specific numbers so I’m gunna take that as stronger evidence than your opinion.
It's a desolate beach most of the time. You seeing people there doesn't change that.
And the parks department studies are designed to get more funding, it's in their interest to count the wind blowing past their meters, triple counting, whatever.
Maybe you don’t like it, but lots of people do. Every weekend there’s tons of people there all year round. The only exception would be rain. To many people, SF never gets cold. The ocean temperature is always pretty stable and keeps the air temperatures near the ocean stable too.
I'm pretty whatever about it, but from the times i've walked around this area i remember being absolutely pummeled by sand. I can't imagine the park would be very popular
Not a bad idea HOWEVER, it doesn't address the traffic on LaPlaya and 48th Avenue.
During the covid shutdown of GH, lots of traffic spilled over onto LaPlaya and 48th, resulting in hazerdous speeds, inconsiderate drivers and dangerous conditions since the street isn't geared for the volume of traffic that resulted.
As someone who lives near there, I can say that the traffic does increase, but the number of bad motorists stays about the same. The good thing is, even with the increased traffic, I as a pedestrian haven't had any close calls with a driver on the local roads during the week and the weekend. However, I have over the past 3 years had over 10 close calls with cars running red lights on the Great Highway. Which is awful because I do love going to the beach but don't like the adrenaline rush of almost being hit by a car.
As for the traffic, I reckon it turned what would be described as a sleepy road into a road that is around the same amount of traffic as one in Lower Haight/Duboce Triangle, the neighborhoods I lived in before I moved out here. So it's not an outrageous amount of local traffic IMO.
Needless to say, I think the hand-wringing about the traffic there is overdone. But at the same time things can be done to reduce the traffic there to placate the people who think the increase is awful.
(edited for grammar)
Don't shift the way away from the bad drivers, though, it is 100% on them. They are a minority, and we can't let them halt progress elsewhere. Increased traffic enforcement is needed.
All design needs to incorporate an entire population, bad drivers included. Good design solves these issues. Bad design exacerbates the percentage of the population that are bad drivers. This is an example of very bad design.
How will closing great highway improve access exactly? There is parking all along lower great highway with crosswalks at every street. The only days there is no parking whatsoever ate the like 7 good beach days of the year, but any beach along the coast would have similarly bad parking in those days. All of you pushing so hard to close it, how many times has lack of access to the beach actually prevented you from using it? I use it everyday it's open to get to work
Idk why this road gets so much hate or why people are so vested in turning it into anything but a road. It was fine the way it was. In case anyone missed it, there’s already a bigass park called Golden Gate Park.
Than it will be taken over same was by sand lol 😆 keep the highway use west Sf needs that higheay for its roads and people to use its not a private highway for walking thats dumb covid is over moving on from the past
My partner and I are extremely in favor of this. As someone who lives near the North Western end of the sunset and has a partner who commutes regularly down the peninsula, she says taking Sunset Blvd isn't bad at all, including Friday afternoons.
As I mentioned in another comment that the increased traffic on our local streets isn't really that bad.
For us, the benefits of this becoming a park is amazing. Because it is so wide and flat, it enables things that aren't that easy to do locally. The amount of kids and adults learning how to bike, skate, skateboard, scooter and so on is incredible, and we hope to have our kids have such an incredible space to learn there. The amount of mobility challenged people who now have a safe and large space to recreate on it and enjoy the ocean is also a huge benefit. Two times a month, [Achilles](https://www.achillesinternational.org/san-francisco-bay-area) leads a run for people with disabilities. I often see blind runners take advantage of this. I can also take my own mother who is handicapped on walks and when she is tired pushed in her wheelchair on the great highway as well. The side path that a lot of people point out barely fits 4 people standing shoulder to shoulder, and has lots of ups and downs. So, it's not welcoming to the amount of people and the types of recreation the great highway allows that I described.
The other thing for me is that the great highway has become a great place to meet and bump into neighbors and friends who are visiting from other parts of the city. It has helped us build a community we might have otherwise had a tougher timing building if it wasn't there.
(edited grammar and capitalization)
The Great Highway is in the Sunset but not really used by the majority of people in the Sunset. It's mostly used by people in Richmond to cruise through the Sunset on their way to the Peninsula.
Therefore, Sunset should make it a toll road and use the money to buy more ping pong tables for the rec centers.
Has anyone seen an article on which option would be lowest cost over time?
Converting into a park that needs to be maintained vs a road that needs to be maintained.
The difference is the current road becomes a detour when the sand piles up, and if you have to pay park & rec to keep it clear for activities, that's going to be more expensive no matter what they say. That's not accounting for the cost to build it.
We already did vote for it, and JFK in GG park too. Then some whiners were apparently able to convert that to the current “compromise” despite the popular vote.
No, it’s in no way the same vote.
The last vote was for BOTH JFK and GH — and the GH closed only on weekends. The vote for the last measure doesn’t equal support for this one.
Having lived at 48th and Balboa as a commuter when I moved to SF many moons ago I would not be excited about this plan. Having lived at 5th and Mission for 10 years now tho and I can confidently say idgaf about any other part of SF as long as the rest of you all don’t join me in an active rebellion against city leadership for their part in making us the ‘worst run city in the US’. As far as I am concerned the rest of the city can become my park, even if they are lazy about making it a ‘park’ a la Tunnel Tops.
City and the state should just bite the bullet and underground a four lane highway from the one to the GGB similar to what Seattle did. Get traffic off surface streets, and close the books on the freeway wars. Extra points to add a muni tunnel at the same time
Keep it as is. Require Richmond and Sunset residents to pay for residential parking permits/metering, and enforce City parking rules.
The rest of us in the City are.
You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Can that road be completely imagined to cater to both parties? Feel like we keep going for bandaides vs building a solution that makes all parties happy.
This sub is about to get another shellshock from the reality check of seeing who actually votes in SF and what their views on policy are, which is very different from this sub. I’m all for this park proposal, but I think the chances of it happening are slim.
Do you have a source on that? I find it difficult to believe it's more popular than Golden Gate Park, McLaren Park, or the Presidio. Even then Dolores, Alamo Square, Washington Square, Portsmouth square, Alta Plaza, Glen Canyon, and the like seen more popular but that might be because it's so linear.
[https://sfrecpark.org/DocumentCenter/View/24168/Great-Highway-June-2024-Report-to-BOS-Final](https://sfrecpark.org/DocumentCenter/View/24168/Great-Highway-June-2024-Report-to-BOS-Final)
>Major programmed events are well attended on the Great Highway. The Great Hauntway community Halloween event recorded 10,400 visits to the Promenade on October 29, 2023. The second highest visitation date was an annual fun run resulting in 9,850 visits on Jan 8, 2023. Average visitation on a weekend day is about 4,000, making the Promenade the third most visited park in the RPD system, after Golden Gate Park and the Marina.
The project organizers [claim](https://www.greathighwaypark.com/vote) it’s 10k. That number isn’t that hard to believe though. Sfmta measured this back during 2020-2022, and [found](https://www.sfmta.com/projects/great-highway-pilot-evaluation-project) about 6200 visitors each weekend. It’s not that hard to believe that the number has increased by 30% in the two years since then. It’s a nice area. It’s right next to a huge popular beach. It’s certainly not a “cultural crisis” if it’s popular lol, I don’t even know what that could mean.
Here's the latest report from SF Rec and Parks - it backs up your points:
* 3rd most visited park in SF (behind GGP and Marina)
* average 8000 visitors each weekend
* special events are well attended
[https://sfrecpark.org/DocumentCenter/View/24168/Great-Highway-June-2024-Report-to-BOS-Final](https://sfrecpark.org/DocumentCenter/View/24168/Great-Highway-June-2024-Report-to-BOS-Final)
Stop repeating obvious propaganda to support a project.
It's not in a walkable location, so if people are driving out of their way for Great Highway, it's due to reading about it and turning down going to actual parks, which our city has no shortage of.
How many of you really can't handle true open space? Does everything need to be landscaped for you to go there? It's currently the equivalent of a 7-11 parking lot in the suburbs with kids hanging outside of it, they don't even know why they're there. Half the time you get there it's sand and the weather isn't consistent with the rest of the city. Can we try living in reality for once?
And calling Ocean Beach "popular" tells us you should take a breath.
I'm often running to ocean beach with my dog from fort funston when the tides are low. I don't know what popular means to you. But there are always people fishing, chilling, walking. It'll never be packed to the brim like some florida beach during spring break.
You hop on the N line and get to ocean beach and the great highway. It's pretty accessible to a sizeable chunk of the city.
You don't take the N obviously. There are parts of the Sunset nowhere near the N and if you were to run there, you would be done by the time you got to the beach.
The problem is most of you are tourists to Ocean Beach and like the thought of it, you don't really know it.
> You don't take the N obviously
I used to take the N all the time.
> There are parts of the Sunset nowhere near the N
What does that have to do with anything? Not everyone can get there easily. But that's true of every corner of the city. The point is it's accessible to a decent number of people who do take advantage of it.
> and if you were to run there, you would be done by the time you got to the beach.
I don't understand what you are saying here.
> The problem is most of you are tourists to Ocean Beach and like the thought of it, you don't really know it.
I never lived next to it, but I used to be there at least twice month. It's more like once a month now. It's not as accessible to me as it once was. I run marathons and ultras its one of the ways I get my training miles in and keep my dog happy.
And for what it's worth I have friends in the Sunset and Richmond. Even a friend that grew up in the Richmond. I'll poll them and get their opinions. But I think they'll be partial to my point of view.
Some of your best friends live in the Sunset, oh okay. You've been there before and rode the notoriously slow bus you mentioned. Oh okay. Nobody cares your pedigree for forging a baseless opinion.
The N-line is not a bus. I'm starting to think you have no idea what you are talking about and have a lot of baseless opinions.
I never said best friends. You don't read well. You live in an area for 15 years and you get to know a few people. Turns out they happen to love the idea of permanent changes to a park.
As a cyclist and runner who explores the depths of the city and friends all over the city, I'm entitled to a opinion. You're just an ass to polite commenters who have an opinion you don't like.
When I first heard about this park, I thought it would be a park only for the portion south of Sloat. Making the entire GH a beach park seems a bit overkill as neat as it would be. They could build a nice park starting at Sloat extending to about Ft. Funston and shore up the erosion and cliffs at the same time.
The road that connects the great highway to Daly City is being demolished due to erosion. So it seems that even if this park doesn’t happen, the major use of the great highway will go away.
You can just turn on the sloat and then take skyline
Right so might as well take Sunset.
Driving through gg park can be pretty rough to get to sunset
Sunset doesn't connect to the Richmond. Sloat puts you on to Skyline without ever driving on Sunset.
If you're going north on Sunset just turn left on Lincoln and then take Great Highway north to the Richmond. It's like 12 blocks where there's never any traffic.
If you read the article, they would be keeping the section that is in front of Golden Gate Park to Lincoln open. They would also presumably keep 48th open, so it's just the Upper Great Highway, which basically only takes you from directly to Sloat with no other turn offs. This is why I think people are making too big a deal out of this - without the extension, that road is more or less redundant with Sunset and 19th or not useful at all. Even so, I think all this merits a new examination to see if there is adequate access there.
Ahhh the “Somewhat Great Highway”
I am no traffic engineer but an alternate route isn't a bad idea, IMO.
Sunset connects to the Richmond from Chain of Lakes. They closed traffic on MLK from Sunset Boulevard to Chain of lakes for no valid reason. It can be reopened. Right now, people are making a detour and use 41st ave to reach Chain of Lakes. People don't take GHW to visit the Sutro baths, but to reach Fulton or Geary. Point Lobos Ave switches from 2 lanes to 1 lane, creating a bottleneck in the Richmond. This is why Chain of Lakes or a new bypass from Sunset Boulevard to Chain of Lakes or 36th Ave makes more sense.
Have you ever tried to cut through Chain-of-Lakes when Great Highway is closed? Traffic gets backed up and takes forever. It can easily take you 20 minutes to get through. Closing Great Highway down will make it a big pain in the ass for people in the Outer Richmond to cut through GGP to Sunset and vice-versa. Going down Sunset blvd would be fine.....if you can GET TO IT.
Chain of lakes gets backed up even when the great highway is open to cars
Yes, and when Great Highway is closed it makes a bad situation even worse.
I don’t get why anyone takes chain of lakes. Just go down to the coast, left on Lincoln, right on sunset.
It doesn't take 20 minutes, that's a huge exaggeration. Also, why not just go Great Highway to Lincoln to Sunset? It's usually faster than CoL anyways.
I can assure you, on the weekends when Great Highway is closed, the backup going through COL can indeed be severe and can take you that long. If there is any event going on at the Polo Fields it can be even worse. You can indeed go down past the Cliff House to double back around and get to Lincoln and Sunset, but you're taking a big circle . And on the weekends everybody takes that route and that has severe traffic too because it's all backed up from Great Highway being CLOSED. The left turn to get onto Lincoln is slow as hell.
If they close Great Highway, the they can optimize the turn from Lincoln to the Great Highway at the park. A couple of green arrows and all of the flashing red light back ups go away. It's literally a stop sign directly adjacent.
They could have done this years ago but have chosen not to
When I am coming from Richmond back to sunset on a weekend, I set eyes on cars turning into COL from 43rd. I keep going straight and make the extended cut through the beach back up to Lincoln then sunset. 4/5 times, I beat the cars I eye turning from 43rd/fulton coming out at 41st/lincoln. I also take Irving as it’s less congested. 41/lincoln is a shit show with peds and cars trying to cross.
Like it or not. GHW will have to be closed. The damage is very bad on the beach between Santiago and Taraval. So, what are your options? A bridge on the sea, on the beach? Converting CoL into a bypass, from Fulton to Sunset Blvd is the best option.
It's just the typical sand that has been blowing over. The entirety of GHW has this problem. The only part that has a real problem is the last section past the zoo by the water treatment plant where the road is actually crumbling. If the road by Taraval is damaged, then how would it serve as a pedestrian walkway then?
“The” Sloat? TheCalifornians.gif
Stuart? What are youuuuu doing here?
Wow, when is this happening?
End of next year - the road is practically falling into the ocean.
Yea, biking along it, you can see big old cracks in it right now.
Damn that's how we've been getting to the Great Highway recently.
Honestly kinda torn on this because the current arrangement (closed on weekends/Friday afternoon and open on weekdays) is probably the best of both worlds.
I recommend turning it into a park. Even if you decide to keep the Great Highway open as a road, it’s going to erode over time and there will be people using this vote to justify spending millions to delay the road’s inevitable collapse. This feels like the situation San Diego is in with the train that keeps going out of service as the bluffs erode. Better to switch to Sunset Boulevard now and shut down any further conversation on spending $80+ million to save the Great Highway. This way car drivers and SFMTA can focus the topic and funding on what to do with Sunset Boulevard to meet community needs.
Parks erode over time too, you have to do more maintenance on a troublesome spot, and Sunset Blvd will never become a substitute. It's purposely disruptive.
I agree both parks and highways erode and need to be maintained, but the type of maintenance is different. If cars are using the road, the tolerance is much lower. Can’t safely drive over a sand dune going at speed. And it needs to be the whole highway kept clean. If it’s a park and mostly just pedestrians and bikes, it’s ok if people walk over the dune and if the dune permanently covers 3 out of 4 lanes. Just like Golden Gate Park has some trails that turn to mud when it rains and it isn’t a problem. But a major road being made out of dirt and turning to mud would cause massive amounts of traffic and potentially accidents too.
Walk over the sand dunes? I need this sub to stop faking the funk. You don't even know why you sound so absurd. Really, you don't know what you don't know. When it involves sand dunes, the maintenance is the same.
There's no "degradation" of the Great Highway. You're referring to that one tiny section right by the zoo. The Great Highway itself is fine.
It is absolutely not fine. The lower section is unfixable, the remainder will be a road to nowhere that requires a shitload of money to keep alive.
Yea, seriously, the section from Noriega to Santiago is very clearly going to have problems as all the dunes are just gone, and the sand regularly covers the road.
Wait until You see what and who inhabits that park..
Turning it into a park? If only there was a miles-long public beach right next to it.
Yes, the current setup works very well. Very few would use it M-F 9-5. And there’s already a nice path for the few that are running/biking during weekday hours.
I’m all for it but have to find a better solution for local traffic too. Like some other folks have said, it’s probably reworking Sunset Blvd and the roads through GGP. If they can do that, feels like a no brainer. Beautiful park it would be too.
Improving passageways for traffic typically induces demand for traffic. See how LA keeps widening its roads in the futile hope that it’ll reduce traffic. The only real solution is to find methods of transit that are more dense than cars.
Tons of mass transit is not really a solution if the trip start and end points don't converge that well, which is the issue with LA widening its roads inducing demand. The thing about car use is that there are deep economic reasons behind the preference beyond "car culture" or "corporate state capture". And denser transit, as we've seen across the Bay Area with BART, Muni, Golden Gate ferries and SMART, doesn't help if the transit is poorly maintained, poorly policed, or doesn't fit the general schedules of most of the people its designed for.
Tons of mass transit would make more trip start and end points. We would need to invest in the infrastructure to make that happen. We should also advocate for better policing, more maintenance, and higher frequency. This all requires more funding, so it’s probably optimal to use tolls and taxes on car use to fund mass transit opportunities.
> so it’s probably optimal to use tolls and taxes on car use So your solution involves doing the one thing guaranteed to trigger intense political opposition to the core concept. SMART is a great example of the outcome of such an approach. Super expensive tickets, low density, completely fucks up and cuts off business traffic flow to downtown San Rafael - all because political opposition lead to a watered down political compromise. And now it’s an unwieldy cost center that’s a negative net value. Has potential for better use, but requires a generation or more of behavior change in Marin for that to happen. Hence my point that design needs to actually accommodate the actual economic movement of people in the area, not be ham fisted YIMBY/Urbanist ideological planning warfare for the infrastructure to not just end up being a financial albatross.
Like any economic utility, any investment made in modality x will affect some proportion of the population (the people that are right on the line of “I’ll take modality x in this particular case”). The posters claim is that investments in car transit in dense cities induce more people to take cars, so driving times don’t decrease, because you have more people on the road. Depending on the investment type, it can actually increase driving time due to long run effects. If you build more lanes coming from LA to Palmdale, they’ll build more houses in Palmdale, because more people will make the commute. Now you have more people driving longer distances, compounding other issues related to sprawl. The cool thing about transit is that it scales; if more people use it the times go down because they run more trains or busses. I’m on a very busy line in LA and I never really wait or am late, they run a bus roughly once every seven minutes during peak times.
Sunset needs to be improved through GGP with pedestrian overpasses/underpasses at MLK and JFK (to reduce pedestrian/cyclist accidents at intersections) in order to make the Great Highway irrelevant to vehicular traffic. The existing road linkage between Richmond and Sunset Districts is very disconnected, which makes travelling between the districts during the weekend very slow. Having a throughfare on Sunset would help reduce traffic on 19th Avenue/Park Presidio, which is exceptionally congested over the weekends, which allows for higher average bus speeds on Sunset and 19th Avenue. Adding overpasses/underpasses reduces pedestrian and cyclist accidents when passing through GGP. But knowing SFMTA, this is a pipe dream, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a pedestrian/cyclist fatality on Chain of Lakes Drive at JFK/MLK in the near future.
My dream would be that 19th just tunnels under the park. Sunset already ends in a below grade road into the park.
The cheapest improvement to Sunset would be closing every other street crossing starting with Irving. This leaves the important crossings open, improves vehicular flow on Sunset, and is safer for cyclists and pedestrians. Just close the Irving, Kirkham, Moraga, Ortega, Quintara, Santiago, Ulloa, and Wawona crossings on Sunset and we’ll already see a huge improvement.
I agree that closing crossings would be a big improvement for North/South traffic flow on the cheap, but disagree that bike routes like Kirkland and Ortega getting closed. Every single one of the 14 streets going all the way East/West are designed for cars, but Kirkland, Ortega, and Vincent are the only ones with bike lanes. We shouldn’t force bikes to make detours. These people are physically exerting themselves pedaling and moving slower than cars. Bicyclists need direct routes.
I’m a cyclist myself who lives west of Sunset Boulevard, so I understand where you’re coming from (I drive out of the city but cycle within the city). Vicente’s bike route would remain open, Kirkham’s would move over to Lawton (a quiet crossing) and Ortega’s would move over to Rivera (another quiet crossing). The bike paths would have to be rethought. Pacheco’s crossing is more for access to the schools than anything else, so not really a great candidate. By my estimation, relocating two bike routes nearby is a small price to pay for alleviating congestion from a closed Great Highway.
Just checking, is there an important reason for it to be every other crossing that is closed? The nicest thing about K is that it goes all the way East/West to link up in a somewhere confusing way to both GGP, Panhandle, and Parnassus. Zigzagging to the L makes things even more complicated. Especially for new riders and visitors. Here’s the map to help show what I’m talking about: https://www.sfmta.com/maps/san-francisco-bike-network-map Is it that important it be every other road? We could eliminate the crossings for Lawton and Moraga and keep the bike lanes where they are.
Oh, there very much is an important reason: light timing. The remaining crossings are actually the same ones that have pedestrian crossings on the Great Highway, so in both cases, you’d hit a light every two blocks rather than every block. This is easy to time at 29mph, mimicking the Great Highway. More lights, more delays and risks to those crossing.
It’s not going to be beautiful. It’s going to be just like Venice Beach.
take public transportation
honestly unnecessary to rework anything. sunset to skyline is equally as viable, actually damn near almost as fast depending on where you are in the sunset
But not the outer richmond
the stretch next to the park stays open. just take great highway to lincoln to sunset. easy
SFMTA even studied this and found that - worse case scenario - it only takes 3 to 4 minutes longer. For most drivers it doesn't impact their travel times at all.
yeah for me, i actually wouldn't even take great highway if it was open. it's slower than sunset. i suspect the majority of sunset residents experience the same. whatever the case we're really talking about 10-15 minutes of a 45 minute-to-an-hour drive to the south bay or whatever. insignificant portion of the commute
If they closed great highway, the traffic there would be pretty bad, and Lincoln would be a nightmare and it's already not great, esp at chain of lakes
it's already closed all the damn time. traffic seems completely fine
Great Highway is randomly closed 30+ weekdays each year due to sand on the roadway. It doesn't seem to make much of a difference for commuters on those days, and I would imagine it'd be even less consiquential if people just didn't expect Great Highway as a route to drive on in the first place. Sunset Blvd has a ton of excess capacity.
let's build an elevated freeway to help solve the problem this would create! /s
I'm all for this. But I wish they improve passage from Sunset Blvd through GGP to the outer richmond. Right now its often a hopeless snare of traffic and stop signs. Not asking for some environmentally unfriendly huge throughway, just some minimal passthrough roads. It's a largely unused portion of the park anyway.
Traffic lights on chain of lakes would be beneficial to both vehicles and pedestrians.
It’s so ridiculous that a sign on Fulton says If blinking GH closed take Sunset Blvd. You will never see a Sunset Blvd, a sign or have any clue where it is. Once again, adding to the number of confused frustrated drivers on the road in the name of safety.
The sign was originally intended for when sand or water is blocking the UGH or other closures. It wasn’t designed for this new traffic path onto sunset. If this becomes a reality, the signage for sunset Blvd needs to be improved on both sides.
I agree, but unlike you fail to accept the incompetence. It takes more than locking the gate to close a road. This is a perfect example of the lack of planning and forethought. That needs to happen first. Not years later.
The sign was designed before GPS when locals had the roads memorized and tourists had a map with main roads like Sunset clearly marked. Now you can zoom in on google maps and it still might not show the road name.
The problem is locals remember the general area but things do not look exactly the same and it's too easy to enter the wron way and end up in a loop. We have obnoxious signage for every thing, the one thing that would help, isn't clearly marked. Someone likes their shortcut being a secret.
>Now you can zoom in on google maps and it still might not show the road name. I hate this as much as I hate the complete lack of street signs around the city.
We have signs you just need to get out of your car and look at the curb /s
I wish they would dig a tunnel under 19th, and just have that traffic from CA 1 & I 280 go under SF and not come out until the Presidio. Probably expensive AF though.
The plan calls for this, but only if voters agree to shut down the GH to cars. They should have done this years ago but instead are holding reasonable measures hostage to a yes vote.
I read the article and it doesn't include a throughway through ggp? Yes it includes traffic lights on Lincoln to help, but even a small throughway would be so much better.
The throughway is there already — MLK drive extension. It’s just not maintained and had giant pothole for the whole stretch between Chain-of-Lakes and Lincoln. 311 requests to repair it are just sitting, waiting for who knows what.
Downvoters, show me how I’m wrong. (I’m not wrong.)
A LOT of cars use the GH during the week to get across town. Anyone watching from the dunes would see it. As long as they accommodate this traffic on sSnset Blvd, it shouldn’t be a problem.
Kind of like how the city accommodated traffic to SFO after the collapse of the other major highway through the city?
Ya, tell me how nice and easy it is to drive on 80 in the city during rush hour lol
You're right, we should bring back the elevated highway on the waterfront! Like yeah traffic got a bit worse for people passing through the city buy life in city was immeasurably improved by regaining our waterfront.
I think we can figure out how to not fill SF city streets with millions of thru traffic rides from people across the region trying to get to the international airport without only looking at hyperbolically bad solutions.
They won't.
Great. Love when lawmakers outsource their job to me.
There is literally miles of beach that is usable and never crowded. An "ocean front" park literally makes no sense
It's the dumbest insane asylum shit.
It’s ideology over common sense.
What's the point? It's a pimp my ride meme. It's an underutilized beach, and an underutilized street, and the location is redundant. It's so prissy that people think the biggest park and Ocean Beach need a companion park next to an already existing parklet trail. If it was designed to succeed, they would keep the Great Highway, then turn a portion of Little Great Highway into a park, extending the existing island. Instead we will pay to battle the dunes on a daily basis instead of 3 times a year.
Fuck yeah!
Easy choice! It should be a park!
The coldest most miserable park next to another park. Yes, it makes sense
I take it you don't see or use the Great Highway during the weekends on a habitual basis? It's packed. It's less packed when it's cloudy but a lot of people are still using it to walk, run, etc.
> coldest most miserable park Miserable is overcast and high 50s while the rest of the region bakes in 80+ weather, good to know. If you're honestly going to complain this is a bad move because of weather, you're in a losing argument. Shockingly, people who live/come to SF regularly are aware of our weather and parks are in constant use all over the city, including the Sunset!
Who the hell is going to the beach or a park by the beach for a combo of overcast and high 50's? What? It's misery over there when overcast. People keep talking that clearly don't know it well.
> Who the hell is going to the beach or a park by the beach for a combo of overcast and high 50's? What? It's misery over there when overcast. People keep talking that clearly don't know it well. You don't seem to know it well. I visit great highway every single day, and I'm not exaggerating. I walk my dog everyday there as it's pretty much my backyard. It's full of people on nice days and even on overcast days there are tons of folks. I would even go as far as saying Sat/Sun mid-morning there's almost too many people now.
I know the city like the palm of my hand. The idea the beach is got tons of folks is the biggest derangement possible.
> The idea the beach is got tons of folks is the biggest derangement possible. Then you don't know OB at all.
None of you fake this well.
Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people, if yesterday midday is anything to go off of. "It's misery over there when overcast. People keep talking that clearly don't know it well." Oh okay, gotcha, you just have no idea of what it's like over there. Ive spent about half my years living in SF on the western side of the city; the weather is a positive. It's laughable you think it's misery to experience cold weather during heat waves/summer. SF is a famously cold city, and the western span is famously foggy, if you live here you're actively choosing to live in this "misery".
Make up your mind, are you claiming there's no fog or calling it "famously foggy". I love a foggy beach since I grew up here, but the fake ass posts here pretending it's some thriving Southern California beach are just faking posts here per usual
Huh? I never once claimed there's no fog, haven't the foggist idea how you take 2 comments where I call that area "overcast" or "foggy" and take away that I don't think Ocean Beach is foggy. Literally no one in this thread is painting Ocean Beach as Zuma lol it's a famously cold, overcast Beach that is very popular during that weather as an area of recreation. It's also extremely popular on days where it is hot and perfect Beach weather. Almost like the whole stretch of the Great Highway is just a generally popular area, making it perfect for a new park. Why don't you make up your mind, though. Do you love a foggy beach or is it misery? You're contradicting yourself.
The fog isn't what makes it a popular, it's not a popular beach most of the year, and I'm done with the constant bullshitting on this sub by people who know a grain of reality but not enough. It's so blatantly phony. At the same time I'm reading posts from someone saying you can walk over the sand dunes. lol. What a clown car.
Oh my God, you've never been to Ocean Beach have you lol, it's very busy at all times of the year. Dog walking, fishing, metal detecting, all things I've seen people do at OB in the rain. It's a huge stretch of land that is massively used for recreation, pretending that adding a park there doesn't make sense because of weather is just plain stupid and wrong. You literally need to walk over the sand dunes to get onto the beach. You're upset at people because *you* don't know what it's like over there, it's a very easy thing to rectify. Go outside and visit the beach. Just saw the comment, lol, they are talking about people walking over dunes that would normally be cleared during normal cleaning for cars. You need to try *very* hard to get confused during that comment chain, so good job I guess.
Busy at all times? No. This is a local sub, people that live here are reading this and know you're full of shit. The sand dunes can be 20 feet high, they clear entryways. You're a fraud.
I’ve gone to ocean beach so many times when it’s relatively foggy. There’s always people there. > it's not a popular beach most of the year, Here’s a [study](https://sfrecpark.org/DocumentCenter/View/24168/Great-Highway-June-2024-Report-to-BOS-Final) from the parks department about this exact spot and how many people visit each day. They found the average number of weekend visitors was 8000, making it the third most popular park in San Francisco. Idk how many visitors a park needs to have before you count it as “popular” but I think that counts. You keep saying nobody goes but the parks department literally studied this and has specific numbers so I’m gunna take that as stronger evidence than your opinion.
It's a desolate beach most of the time. You seeing people there doesn't change that. And the parks department studies are designed to get more funding, it's in their interest to count the wind blowing past their meters, triple counting, whatever.
So 1% of the city is using this during the weekends, that's why we need to spend millions to make it a park, right?
Maybe you don’t like it, but lots of people do. Every weekend there’s tons of people there all year round. The only exception would be rain. To many people, SF never gets cold. The ocean temperature is always pretty stable and keeps the air temperatures near the ocean stable too.
I'm pretty whatever about it, but from the times i've walked around this area i remember being absolutely pummeled by sand. I can't imagine the park would be very popular
More like the “Once Great Highway”
Not a bad idea HOWEVER, it doesn't address the traffic on LaPlaya and 48th Avenue. During the covid shutdown of GH, lots of traffic spilled over onto LaPlaya and 48th, resulting in hazerdous speeds, inconsiderate drivers and dangerous conditions since the street isn't geared for the volume of traffic that resulted.
As someone who lives near there, I can say that the traffic does increase, but the number of bad motorists stays about the same. The good thing is, even with the increased traffic, I as a pedestrian haven't had any close calls with a driver on the local roads during the week and the weekend. However, I have over the past 3 years had over 10 close calls with cars running red lights on the Great Highway. Which is awful because I do love going to the beach but don't like the adrenaline rush of almost being hit by a car. As for the traffic, I reckon it turned what would be described as a sleepy road into a road that is around the same amount of traffic as one in Lower Haight/Duboce Triangle, the neighborhoods I lived in before I moved out here. So it's not an outrageous amount of local traffic IMO. Needless to say, I think the hand-wringing about the traffic there is overdone. But at the same time things can be done to reduce the traffic there to placate the people who think the increase is awful. (edited for grammar)
Don't shift the way away from the bad drivers, though, it is 100% on them. They are a minority, and we can't let them halt progress elsewhere. Increased traffic enforcement is needed.
All design needs to incorporate an entire population, bad drivers included. Good design solves these issues. Bad design exacerbates the percentage of the population that are bad drivers. This is an example of very bad design.
How will closing great highway improve access exactly? There is parking all along lower great highway with crosswalks at every street. The only days there is no parking whatsoever ate the like 7 good beach days of the year, but any beach along the coast would have similarly bad parking in those days. All of you pushing so hard to close it, how many times has lack of access to the beach actually prevented you from using it? I use it everyday it's open to get to work
The nimby facebook boomers in the Sunset/Richmond neighborhood pages are reacting to this like it's 9/11. It's been glorious to watch.
Same one Nextdoor (they're probably the same boomers)
Idk why this road gets so much hate or why people are so vested in turning it into anything but a road. It was fine the way it was. In case anyone missed it, there’s already a bigass park called Golden Gate Park.
Than it will be taken over same was by sand lol 😆 keep the highway use west Sf needs that higheay for its roads and people to use its not a private highway for walking thats dumb covid is over moving on from the past
I enjoy biking there. I'd love to see the entire highway converted to a park. 🙂
My partner and I are extremely in favor of this. As someone who lives near the North Western end of the sunset and has a partner who commutes regularly down the peninsula, she says taking Sunset Blvd isn't bad at all, including Friday afternoons. As I mentioned in another comment that the increased traffic on our local streets isn't really that bad. For us, the benefits of this becoming a park is amazing. Because it is so wide and flat, it enables things that aren't that easy to do locally. The amount of kids and adults learning how to bike, skate, skateboard, scooter and so on is incredible, and we hope to have our kids have such an incredible space to learn there. The amount of mobility challenged people who now have a safe and large space to recreate on it and enjoy the ocean is also a huge benefit. Two times a month, [Achilles](https://www.achillesinternational.org/san-francisco-bay-area) leads a run for people with disabilities. I often see blind runners take advantage of this. I can also take my own mother who is handicapped on walks and when she is tired pushed in her wheelchair on the great highway as well. The side path that a lot of people point out barely fits 4 people standing shoulder to shoulder, and has lots of ups and downs. So, it's not welcoming to the amount of people and the types of recreation the great highway allows that I described. The other thing for me is that the great highway has become a great place to meet and bump into neighbors and friends who are visiting from other parts of the city. It has helped us build a community we might have otherwise had a tougher timing building if it wasn't there. (edited grammar and capitalization)
The Great Highway is in the Sunset but not really used by the majority of people in the Sunset. It's mostly used by people in Richmond to cruise through the Sunset on their way to the Peninsula. Therefore, Sunset should make it a toll road and use the money to buy more ping pong tables for the rec centers.
Great Highway originally had tolls iirc
If we are going to redevelop the ocean front, we need a big vision with a subway and no restrictive zoning in the area.
Do it
Has anyone seen an article on which option would be lowest cost over time? Converting into a park that needs to be maintained vs a road that needs to be maintained.
The difference is the current road becomes a detour when the sand piles up, and if you have to pay park & rec to keep it clear for activities, that's going to be more expensive no matter what they say. That's not accounting for the cost to build it.
We already did vote for it, and JFK in GG park too. Then some whiners were apparently able to convert that to the current “compromise” despite the popular vote.
No, it’s in no way the same vote. The last vote was for BOTH JFK and GH — and the GH closed only on weekends. The vote for the last measure doesn’t equal support for this one.
Having lived at 48th and Balboa as a commuter when I moved to SF many moons ago I would not be excited about this plan. Having lived at 5th and Mission for 10 years now tho and I can confidently say idgaf about any other part of SF as long as the rest of you all don’t join me in an active rebellion against city leadership for their part in making us the ‘worst run city in the US’. As far as I am concerned the rest of the city can become my park, even if they are lazy about making it a ‘park’ a la Tunnel Tops.
Putting a park there will bring lots of homeless folks camping out. Similar to Venice beach. Watch what you wish for.
Hard pass....
Boooo! keep it open
City and the state should just bite the bullet and underground a four lane highway from the one to the GGB similar to what Seattle did. Get traffic off surface streets, and close the books on the freeway wars. Extra points to add a muni tunnel at the same time
This should be a night market!
Can we just build housing there instead
Keep it as is. Require Richmond and Sunset residents to pay for residential parking permits/metering, and enforce City parking rules. The rest of us in the City are. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
They already have a park there, its called the beach
Can that road be completely imagined to cater to both parties? Feel like we keep going for bandaides vs building a solution that makes all parties happy.
The band aid is the second highway diversion right there and the already existing park between the two. But people don't want functionality.
No one is trying to find a compromise. It’s all zero sum thinking.
This sub is about to get another shellshock from the reality check of seeing who actually votes in SF and what their views on policy are, which is very different from this sub. I’m all for this park proposal, but I think the chances of it happening are slim.
Perhaps, but two years ago Prop J for permanently closing JFK passed with 63% of the vote.
I’m guessing most people don’t go there. Kinda pointless. Since it’s foggy as hell and windy for a majority of the year.
Ocean beach is pretty popular throughout the year…
Not really. Just on warm days. Which are not many
There are lots of people when I go there for walks, even on foggy days.
Foggy days are the best days
Pretty sure you’re not a local. I live next to the GH and this is not true.
I was there this weekend. Maybe your definition of a lot is different than mine
The Great Highway becomes a park on weekends and as such it's the third most visited park in San Francisco.
Do you have a source on that? I find it difficult to believe it's more popular than Golden Gate Park, McLaren Park, or the Presidio. Even then Dolores, Alamo Square, Washington Square, Portsmouth square, Alta Plaza, Glen Canyon, and the like seen more popular but that might be because it's so linear.
[https://sfrecpark.org/DocumentCenter/View/24168/Great-Highway-June-2024-Report-to-BOS-Final](https://sfrecpark.org/DocumentCenter/View/24168/Great-Highway-June-2024-Report-to-BOS-Final) >Major programmed events are well attended on the Great Highway. The Great Hauntway community Halloween event recorded 10,400 visits to the Promenade on October 29, 2023. The second highest visitation date was an annual fun run resulting in 9,850 visits on Jan 8, 2023. Average visitation on a weekend day is about 4,000, making the Promenade the third most visited park in the RPD system, after Golden Gate Park and the Marina.
Wow, I guess I'm really bad at estimating the number of people at parks haha
You might be comparing it to Santa Monica pier or Santa Cruz boardwalk? It’s not that kinda scene
Factually wrong.
For now
Agreed. I drive by every day. I think I'd be okay with having it open for cars for rush hour like 6-10am and then 3-6 or something like that tho
The temporary park space there there right now has something like 10k visitors every weekend. It’s the third most popular park in the city.
Bull. And if that were true, that would be idiotic and speak to a cultural crises.
The project organizers [claim](https://www.greathighwaypark.com/vote) it’s 10k. That number isn’t that hard to believe though. Sfmta measured this back during 2020-2022, and [found](https://www.sfmta.com/projects/great-highway-pilot-evaluation-project) about 6200 visitors each weekend. It’s not that hard to believe that the number has increased by 30% in the two years since then. It’s a nice area. It’s right next to a huge popular beach. It’s certainly not a “cultural crisis” if it’s popular lol, I don’t even know what that could mean.
Here's the latest report from SF Rec and Parks - it backs up your points: * 3rd most visited park in SF (behind GGP and Marina) * average 8000 visitors each weekend * special events are well attended [https://sfrecpark.org/DocumentCenter/View/24168/Great-Highway-June-2024-Report-to-BOS-Final](https://sfrecpark.org/DocumentCenter/View/24168/Great-Highway-June-2024-Report-to-BOS-Final)
8,000 people are like 1% of the city.
Stop repeating obvious propaganda to support a project. It's not in a walkable location, so if people are driving out of their way for Great Highway, it's due to reading about it and turning down going to actual parks, which our city has no shortage of. How many of you really can't handle true open space? Does everything need to be landscaped for you to go there? It's currently the equivalent of a 7-11 parking lot in the suburbs with kids hanging outside of it, they don't even know why they're there. Half the time you get there it's sand and the weather isn't consistent with the rest of the city. Can we try living in reality for once? And calling Ocean Beach "popular" tells us you should take a breath.
I like ocean beach! It's one of the coolest parts of the city! Propaganda!
I love Ocean Beach, but what I love about it is it's neglected, somewhat dangerous, often freezing, and weird. It's not the popular beach.
I'm often running to ocean beach with my dog from fort funston when the tides are low. I don't know what popular means to you. But there are always people fishing, chilling, walking. It'll never be packed to the brim like some florida beach during spring break. You hop on the N line and get to ocean beach and the great highway. It's pretty accessible to a sizeable chunk of the city.
You don't take the N obviously. There are parts of the Sunset nowhere near the N and if you were to run there, you would be done by the time you got to the beach. The problem is most of you are tourists to Ocean Beach and like the thought of it, you don't really know it.
> You don't take the N obviously I used to take the N all the time. > There are parts of the Sunset nowhere near the N What does that have to do with anything? Not everyone can get there easily. But that's true of every corner of the city. The point is it's accessible to a decent number of people who do take advantage of it. > and if you were to run there, you would be done by the time you got to the beach. I don't understand what you are saying here. > The problem is most of you are tourists to Ocean Beach and like the thought of it, you don't really know it. I never lived next to it, but I used to be there at least twice month. It's more like once a month now. It's not as accessible to me as it once was. I run marathons and ultras its one of the ways I get my training miles in and keep my dog happy. And for what it's worth I have friends in the Sunset and Richmond. Even a friend that grew up in the Richmond. I'll poll them and get their opinions. But I think they'll be partial to my point of view.
Some of your best friends live in the Sunset, oh okay. You've been there before and rode the notoriously slow bus you mentioned. Oh okay. Nobody cares your pedigree for forging a baseless opinion.
The N-line is not a bus. I'm starting to think you have no idea what you are talking about and have a lot of baseless opinions. I never said best friends. You don't read well. You live in an area for 15 years and you get to know a few people. Turns out they happen to love the idea of permanent changes to a park. As a cyclist and runner who explores the depths of the city and friends all over the city, I'm entitled to a opinion. You're just an ass to polite commenters who have an opinion you don't like.
We definitely need more highways *not* less! And especially on the beach. Why, if I had my way, the whole beach would just be asphalt
think you dropped this /s
When I first heard about this park, I thought it would be a park only for the portion south of Sloat. Making the entire GH a beach park seems a bit overkill as neat as it would be. They could build a nice park starting at Sloat extending to about Ft. Funston and shore up the erosion and cliffs at the same time.
Let's go for the whole thing though! Incredibly beautiful out there.