Folsom Street Quick-Build Project
Project Update 12/30/2021: The project is now fully complete!
As a reminder, the Folsom Quick-Build Project is a temporary improvement to traffic safety in the project area. The Folsom-Howard Streetscape Project is the long-term and permanent traffic safety improvements on Folsom Street between 2nd and 11th streets and Howard Street between 4th and 11th streets. Construction for the Folsom Street segment is anticipated to begin in 2024 and last for approximately two years. Construction for the Howard Street segment is anticipated to begin in 2025 and last for approximately two years.
The Folsom Street Quick-Build project is an effort to improve traffic safety and comfort for all people traveling along Folsom Street between 2nd and 5th streets by implementing cost-effective and temporary design treatments that can be installed quickly.
This project is part of the SFMTA’s Vision Zero Quick-Build Program, which stems from Mayor London Breed’s executive directive for faster traffic safety improvements on the City’s High Injury Network. It also builds on an additional executive directive to deliver higher quality bikeway facilities, such as protected bikeways, to prevent collisions and increase safety.
Project Background
Since 2016, the SFMTA has been working to improve traffic safety and livability on Folsom Street, as part of the Folsom-Howard Streetscape Project. After several years of community engagement, analysis, and conceptual design development, the project was approved by the SFMTA Board of Supervisors in June 2019. The project is now in the detailed design phase and the project team is working on finalizing civil design details, coordinating utility work for the proposed hardscape changes, and developing construction level documents. This phase and the actual construction work require an additional couple of years, meaning traffic safety improvements to Folsom Street would not be delivered for a while.
During the community engagement and conceptual design phase of the Folsom-Howard Streetscape Project, the project team constantly heard from the community that improvements needed to be implemented sooner to address the ongoing traffic safety issues. Knowing that the project would take years to develop and fully construct because of the scope of the capital improvements, the project team, while concurrently working on the long-term project, designed and implemented near-term improvements along Folsom Street between Falmouth and 11th streets in 2018. The rest of Folsom Street in the Folsom-Howard Streetscape project area, between 2nd to 5th streets, were not considered in the near-term improvement effort because of constraints that would have required more time to resolve.
This project aims to complete the work of bringing near-term safety improvements to Folsom Street. Through the Vision Zero Quick-Build Program, this project will deliver improvements quickly and serve as a short-term treatment to address traffic safety in the project area until the permanent features of the Folsom-Howard Streetscape Project are fully constructed.
Project Goals
This project is in support of the city’s commitment to Vision Zero and its main goal is to quickly improve traffic safety conditions for all who travel along Folsom Street. This project will implement traffic safety improvements to better facilitate interactions of various modes, reduce the potential for conflicts, and increase comfort in bicycling and walking.
Vision Zero
Based on the most recent 5-year collision data available (July 2014 – June 2019), there have been 31 collisions involving a bicyclist or pedestrian on this segment of Folsom Street. Moreover, these collisions represent 42% of the total collisions in the project area and 5 of them resulted in severe injuries.
The Folsom Street Quick-Build Project is in support of San Francisco’s Vision Zero commitment to eliminating all traffic deaths and serious injuries.
Proposed Improvements
The project will implement the following quick-build improvements to improve traffic safety:
- Upgrade the existing bike lane to a parking-protected bikeway in the eastbound direction to provide a more comfortable and separated space for people riding bikes
- Daylighting and modifying or adding advanced limit lines at intersections to improve visibility
- Improve loading conditions for businesses and residents in the area
- Traffic lane reduction to redistribute roadway space for all road users
Project Outreach
Project outreach started in early 2020 and the project team notified the project area of planned design work for the Quick-Build project. Businesses and residential complexes were engaged with to determine loading needs, and stakeholder groups were informed about the project details and proposed safety improvements in the project area.
The project team held a virtual Engineering Public Hearing to share the proposed design and gather feedback from the public. The interactive event was live, from 9:30 am on August 12th, 2020, through 11:30 pm on August 26th, 2020. To learn more about the Virtual Public Hearing event, please visit Virtual Public Hearing event. Although the public commenting period is over, the interactive event webpage is still live and can be accessed below:
