I asked your office twice if you would now support building protected bike lanes on Market, because if the protected bike lanes that were part of the Better Market Street plan had been built, this tragedy would not have happened<\/a>. Your office sent this:<\/p>\n My number one priority is the safety of our residents. The tragedy on Market Street is heartbreaking, and my condolences go out to Yebin\u2019s family and friends. Under our Street Safety Initiative, we\u2019re bringing city departments together to help everyone travel around our city safely\u2014including cyclists, scooter riders, pedestrians, kids, and seniors. As the city investigates the incident on Market Street, we will continue to move the work forward to create safer streets for all San Franciscans.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll be frank: I\u2019m tired of asking your office specific questions and getting generic slop in response. <\/p>\n So I ask you to think about how your response would differ if it were your son or daughter, or another loved one, who died that morning.<\/p>\n I think it\u2019s smart, as a mayor, to let the SFMTA\u2014the experts on transportation and streets\u2014handle what happens on Market Street, to a point. But I can tell you as a bit of an expert myself, if SFMTA engineers or director Julie Kirschbaum or people on your staff are telling you it\u2019s impossible to add protected bike lanes to Market Street or that such crashes are inevitable, then I don\u2019t care what qualifications they have on paper; they\u2019re full of crap. It\u2019s an intrinsic principle of Vision Zero<\/a> and Dutch design<\/a> that you don\u2019t mix trucks and transit vehicles, the heaviest machines on the street, with your most vulnerable road users, cyclists and scooterists. But that\u2019s exactly what happens every day on Market Street with entirely predictable results. Kim\u2019s death was no accident\u2014it was the inevitable outcome of incompetent design.<\/p>\n SFMTA\u2019s own studies show that San Francisco\u2019s streets are more deadly than they were in 2014, when the city signed its Vision Zero pledge<\/a>. That\u2019s because previous mayors failed to follow through on street safety. It\u2019s because the SFMTA itself failed to complete safety projects<\/a> whenever driver throughput and parking became a factor.<\/p>\n People continue to be injured and killed on Market Street. It\u2019s long past time to undo the deadly mistake made by your predecessor\u2019s administration and instruct SFMTA to put concrete protected bike lanes on Market Street.<\/p>\n It is absolutely possible to run world-class transit on Market, support businesses fully, and keep everybody safe, including pedestrians, cyclists, and scooterists. Market is not that dissimilar to the vibrant central streets in Rotterdam<\/a>, or even Market Street in Philadelphia, which now has protected<\/a> bike lanes<\/a> for part of it. We can do this. If you have staffers telling you otherwise, get rid of them<\/a>.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/PXL_20230515_111515731.MP_.jpg\")
Blaak Street in Rotterdam has bike lanes, transit, and cars, just like Market Street, except it\u2019s safe. Photo: Streetsblog\/Rudick<\/p>\n