Almost the entire block of 11th Street between Harrison and Folsom streets in San Francisco’s South of Market is taken up with thick plastic barriers and heavy earth-moving equipment. In the Presidio, a section of Mason Street is lined with cones and a pedestrian detour. On Ocean Avenue in Ingleside, an entire lane is closed in places to repair pedestrian islands. Across town, in the Tenderloin, Taylor Street is being repaved. Even City Hall is not immune. Signs on Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place announce “road work ahead.”
If you’ve been feeling like this sort of construction work is more common than usual around the city, it’s not just your imagination. “You are correct about there being quite a few projects happening on the roads right now,” said San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesperson Michael Roccaforte.
Across San Francisco, streets and sidewalks are getting closed off or torn up at an above-average rate. The intersection of Polk and Filbert streets in Nob Hill has several excavators parked at the corners every morning, while a stack of heavy pipes sits on nearby Bay Street, eliminating all parking on the block between Larkin and Hyde streets.
The work being done on 11th St. is part of an improvement project meant to make the street — a nightlife corridor that doubles as a bike-commuter thoroughfare by day, with several bus routes — safer and more comfortable. According to the “No Stopping” signage posted to the orange-and-white-striped horses, the construction is set to continue through Dec. 27.
The city deems much of this work to be urgently necessary. For instance, an intermittent stormwater improvement project on a low-lying section of Folsom Street in the Mission will help prevent flooding of the kind that happened on New Year’s Eve 2022.
But many of the projects are so-called “quick-builds,” as well. And they’re not arbitrary. “Many of these projects that are complete or in progress are proof of our commitment to pedestrian safety improvements and San Francisco’s Transit First policy,” said Roccaforte. He added that numerous agencies — including San Francisco Water Power Sewer, the Department of Public Works and PG&E — are also working on or under the city’s streets.
To some extent, construction is a permanent feature of life in the city. Something, somewhere, always needs repairs. On the other hand, this is a big dig moment for the city. “There are a lot of projects going on,” said Rachel Gordon, a spokesperson for the San Francisco Department of Public Works. “We’re always making upgrades — paving, streetscape design, utility work.”
At least a few projects are massive, once-in-a-generation undertakings, such as the multi-agency L Taraval Project that has wreaked disruption in the Sunset district for the past five years. (It’s slated to wrap up this fall.) The ongoing Better Market Street project is radically reworking a 2.2-mile segment of San Francisco’s main thoroughfare. More large-scale endeavors are on the horizon, like SFMTA’s Howard-Folsom Streetscape Project, an effort to improve pedestrian safety, restripe bike lanes and facilitate transit boarding. It’s set to begin next year and last until 2027.
Could it be that all of this construction is a side effect of it being an election year? Capital projects can be a good way for politicians to show that they are getting things done. While Mayor London Breed is locked in a tight race for a second full term, however, many projects won their approval years ago, with a few dating to before she took office in 2017.
The current glut of urban improvements may actually have a simpler explanation: Covid.
“It may feel like there is a greater-than-average number of roadwork projects across San Francisco at the moment, because planning and work on construction projects … slowed during the pandemic,” said Nancy Crowley, press secretary for the Public Utilities Commission. “Now, it’s back to normal.”