The Valencia Bikeway in San Francisco’s Mission District is a center-running bike lane spanning 9 blocks of Valencia Street between 16th and 25th.

And it’s HIGHLY controversial.

Last week the MTA released its 3-month pilot evaluation since the bikeway’s opening in August of last year, and the results are interesting.

The pilot was launched after years of dissatisfaction with the old design, which was incredibly unsafe for bikers. Under the old “side-running” design, there were cyclists getting doored, cars double parking, essentially bike purgatory.

Valencia Street is a hot destination in the city and one of its most heavily trafficked corridors. We’re talking pedestrians, bikes, scooters, taxis, food delivery, and many local businesses contending for all this traffic.

The street also accommodates delivery trucks, loading zones, bike racks, restaurant parklets, and emergency responders.

Oh..and..private vehicles.

Among other things, the new bikeway is optimized for micromobility traffic.

And from what we can tell, the design is working. The MTA found that bikers faced fewer conflicts and had a more predictable riding experience, and riders testified feeling safer on the corridor.

Additionally, double parking dropped by 77% and vehicle loading times improved as the new street design better accommodates diverse loading needs.

Now there’s a lot to cover here, and you can read MTA’s full evaluation and proposed next steps.

But I think the elephant in the room here IS. private. vehicles. North America in general is notorious for prioritizing cars, and Valencia Street is no exception. Despite many positive outcomes, most of the outstanding issues raised in the evaluation were attributed to cars, and their deprioritization.

Half of the bicycle-related collisions during the study were caused by illegal left turns or U-turns made by vehicles. Also, parking spaces were taken away, and shop owners point to lack of accessibility by car for declining sales, despite there being two parking garages along the corridor that are cheap and easily accessible.

I think there’s a strong case to be made for the induced demand for driving on Valencia, sometimes referred to as the “just one more lane” fallacy – the study showed that daily vehicle volumes on Valencia were down by 26%, yet there was no significant change in foot or bicycle traffic on the street, and importantly no significant change in car traffic on parallel neighboring streets.

So where’d the extra cars go? Induced demand suggests that these car trips simply didn’t happen, or they rerouted, or they found another way, because driving was deprioritized.

At the same time, loading zones were prioritized, and total loading events including pickups and dropoffs of passengers and goods increased by 27%.

So what does this mean for Valencia? Unfortunately, the MTA wants to convert some of the loading zones back into street parking in the near term.

But I think San Francisco is uniquely positioned to make Valencia car-free altogether and move vehicle loading to its cross streets. With the stated goal of making Valencia Street a destination AND the proven model of converting streets to being car-free in many places in Europe (that Americans love to visit and take beautiful pictures of), the MTA can resolve these outstanding issues and make Valencia a truly human-centered place to be, and not just another place for cars.