Small Business Week: Supporting Merchants With Better Transportation

Small businesses shape San Francisco’s neighborhoods. We’re proud to celebrate this vital community as a sponsor of San Francisco Small Business Week, May 21 - 28.

Of course, our efforts to help small businesses thrive aren’t limited to this one week – they’re key to our work to improve transportation every day.

As we shape our changing streets, we work to deliver people and goods to merchants’ doorsteps safely and efficiently. This means collaborating with communities and merchants to build a vision based on common goals.

Business-friendly changes we make on the streets range from big to small. The smaller tweaks requested by merchants often include providing curb zones for loading and short-term parking, installing bike parking and adjusting loading hours and parking meter prices to increase turnover.

On the larger scale, we work with merchants to transform streets and make it easier to get to neighborhood businesses by transit, walking, bicycling and other means. For example, the large Van Ness Improvement Project — a revitalization of this grand avenue that will include bus rapid transit — has a second advisory council made up solely of the merchants along the corridor and, like our other projects, the project team is working closely with all of the businesses along Van Ness to understand and account for their delivery needs during construction.

For info on how to request street improvements for your small business, see our Installation Requests webpage. You can get further assistance by calling 311 or at sf311.org. Don't forget to support your favorite SF small businesses and follow the conversation on social with #SFSBW2016.