Market Street’s detritus is a visual metaphor of the decades-long dysfunction on the road and its sidewalks.

San Francisco has been trying to fix Market Street for as long as most of us can remember.

As far back as 1962, the city was struggling to “restore … its main thoroughfare, to something of its former prominence,” as the New York Times put it back then.

BART hadn’t been built yet in the 1960s, but the challenges were pretty much the same then as now: a desire for a pedestrian concourse, an uncertainty about how to merge above and below ground transit, how to achieve the right mix of retail and business, how to deal with the riffraff.

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No solution was found.

Even after BART opened, the hope for transformation of Market Street never materialized. 

Not for lack of trying.

The first phase of San Francisco’s multi-departmental Better Market Street project began in 2011. It identified public support for several key ideas to “make Market Street more memorable”: limited or car-free access, social gathering spaces, paving, furniture and lighting improvements, and more restaurants, cafes, grocery stores, trees and bike lanes.

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We did ultimately get a mostly car-free street. But the ambitious parts of the project generally collapsed. The city didn’t prioritize or fund them, and the pandemic was the last straw.

So, we’re left with a mess.

No one can decide what to do with its bus stops and bike lanes. Mayor Daniel Lurie has prioritized autonomous vehicle access, which serves no one but autonomous vehicle ride-hailing companies. The street’s yellowish lighting gives the street and the people on it a ghoulish cast. There’s a near-complete absence of greenery save for a few tired street trees.........

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