Connect with us

San Francisco, CA

SF delays action on controversial bike lane despite many reporting it’s ‘killing’ business

Published

on

SF delays action on controversial bike lane despite many reporting it’s ‘killing’ business


SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — The evaluation report on San Francisco’s controversial Valencia Street center bike lane was scheduled to be released at the end of this year, but now it’s been postponed.

ABC7 News reporter Luz Pena has been following this story for months and spoke to business owners who don’t know how much longer their businesses can survive if the bike lane is not revised.

A month ago, we introduced you to Eiad and Rafik – two business owners on Valencia Street who’ve been struggling to survive. They blame the center bike lane for the decline in business. We caught up with them on Wednesday.

“We chatted a month ago. What is happening today? Today – as of today, I decided to close today. Just today not permanently. No reservations whatsoever. Zero business. So I rather close today than having staff at a loss,” said Rafik Bouzidi, owner of Gola Restaurant.

Advertisement

“How are things going now? Horrible. Really, really bad. Businesses keep going down. Customers keep complaining about the bike lane,” said Eiad Eltawil, owner of Yasmin restaurant

SF restaurant owners say Valencia St. will ‘die’ if controversial bike lane is not revised

Eiad is falling behind on personal bills to be able to pay his staff.

“We are really struggling right now. We are paying them out of our own pockets,” said Eiad Eltawil.

The Valencia Street bike lane was approved in April of this year as a 12-month pilot program, leading to the removal of about 70 parking spots.

Advertisement

That lack of parking is what some say is killing their business.

SFMTA was expected to release an evaluation of the bike lane by the end of the year, but last week, the director announced:

SF’s new bike lane faces mixed reviews from cyclists, drivers but will it actually be safer?

“We will continue to make adjustments while we do our larger and more formal evaluation that will be coming to you with in early 2024,” said Jeffrey Tumlin, SFMTA director.

We followed up with SFMTA and over email, they said:

Advertisement

“The data gathering started later than anticipated so we’ll have to start early 2024 in order to have three months of reliable data.”

Sustainable transportation advocate, Luke Bornheimer says even cyclists are reporting the need for a new design.

“All the signs are really clear that this bikeway design is not working,” said Bornheimer, “People are sandwiched between driving cars and trucks. We are seeing the conditions of some of these plastic posts here – most of them have been hit or run over or destroyed, those could be people’s bodies.”

MORE: SF supervisors explore offering bounties for reporting of drivers blocking bike lanes

The latest survey by the Valencia Street Merchants Association found that almost 64% of people “hate” the center bike lane and 2% said they loved it.

Advertisement

“It has gone down a lot ever since the bike lane was built,” said Michael Ho, owner of Chick-n-time, “I think I lost about 20% of revenue due to parking. I’m here every day and they are out here even at night giving tickets.”

In the meantime, they are protesting the bike lane with these posters while keeping their doors open as long as they can.

“Every week, a restaurant shuts down. A business shuts down. Here it is this week – Armandos Bar on Valencia and 24th closed doors,” said Bouzidi.

SFMTA said they are continuing to make changes including changing some loading zones into customer parking.

MORE: Big changes coming to 2 Financial District streets as SFMTA gears up to create two-way bike lane

Advertisement

Full SFMTA statement:

“The SFMTA is committed to making Valencia Street a safe and inviting place for everyone, and that includes businesses, residents, those who drive in the area and those who walk, bike and roll. The corridor is a dynamic and culturally important part of our city, and we want it to prosper both now and for years to come.

We want businesses on the Valencia corridor to thrive, and we want to do everything we can to support them. That’s why last week, we temporarily adjusted the type and duration of many of the loading zones on Valencia Street between 15th and 23rd streets and on several side streets (18th, 19th, 20th, 22nd) to create more general parking availability in the neighborhood.

These changes will help customers who drive patronize Valencia businesses while keeping the street safe for people on foot, bicycles and scooters. Small businesses are an important part of all that makes San Francisco the incredibly special city that it is, and we all benefit when they succeed.

These temporary changes will be in effect while the project team evaluates permanent curb changes that would be made in early 2024.

Advertisement

We turned just over a third (34%) of the loading zones that we recently installed into general parking after 12 noon. We turned the vast majority (82%) of the new loading zones into general parking after 6 p.m. previously they ended at 10 p.m.

The reason there are fewer parking spaces on the street is because there’s more competition for curb space. Shared Spaces parklets, which have been a lifeline for struggling businesses, are taking up some of the curb space that was previously general parking. And some other parking spaces had to be turned into loading zones. Without the loading zones, delivery drivers double park, which creates a dangerous situation for drivers as well as for people on bikes when someone has to veer around a double-parked vehicle.

In addition to on-street parking, the SFMTA also operates two garages in the neighborhood: the Mission-Bartlet garage at 3255 21st Street and Hoff garage at 41 Hoff Street off of 16th Street. Garage pricing and up to date information is available on the Demand-Responsive

Parking Pricing page on our website (SFMTA.com/ParkingRates).

This SFMTA blog post has additional information: Temporary Parking Changes Will Support Valencia Street Businesses | SFMTA

Advertisement

As we move forward, SFMTA staff plan to return to the agency’s Board of Directors in early 2024 with an update on how the pilot project is performing. Safety, economic vitality, and movement/access of people and goods have been our project priorities, and our evaluation will encompass a comprehensive range of factors.”

If you’re on the ABC7 News app, click here to watch live



Source link

Continue Reading
Advertisement
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

San Francisco, CA

Trump promises mass deportations, history shows they could disproportionally target US born children

Published

on

Trump promises mass deportations, history shows they could disproportionally target US born children


SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — Patricia Aguayo remembers the day in 1989 she was felt like she was a different class of American citizen.

She was at Club Elegante, a Mission District nightclub, when San Francisco police officers walked in followed by immigration agents.

“They locked the door and said nobody could leave. People were scared. Who was ever to think that this was going to turn into a deportation,” recalled Aguayo.

Immigration agents asked everyone for identification, including the workers and musicians.

Advertisement

Aguayo, who was born in San Francisco, felt racially profiled so she refused to show her I.D.

“I was not going to show them anything because if I were Anglo they would not have asked me for documentation,” said Aguayo. “I was legally here I wanted to let them know that they were not going to just profile people and assume that everybody in that club was undocumented.”

Patricia and the ACLU of Northern California filed a class-action lawsuit claiming immigration agents violated their constitutional rights by detaining and questioning them simply because they were Latino. They won.

The incident shaped the future of San Francisco politics.

At the time, San Francisco was a sanctuary for Central American refugees who faced deportation.

Advertisement

After the nightclub raid, the city adopted a more expansive sanctuary policy and forbid local law enforcement from cooperating with immigration agents.

Immigrant advocates say raids at places where Latinos gather may come back under the Trump administration.

“The last time President Trump was in office, one of the one of the places that was subject to immigration raids were 7-Eleven stores and convenience stores and in relatively low budget stores in neighborhoods where Latinos were heavily populated,” said Kevin Johnson, professor at the U.C. Davis School of Law.

Johnson said the intention of public raids is to make undocumented immigrants so afraid of being apprehended while grocery shopping or dropping their children off at school that they will leave the country on their own, a type of self-deportation.

The United States has had two previous mass deportations of primarily Mexican immigrants in the last 100 years.

Advertisement

The first happened during the Great Depression, when unemployment was high and many people blamed people of Mexican ancestry of taking jobs meant for Americans.

Local and state police carried out the mass arrests.

“People were rounded up who looked Mexican, were put on buses, trains driven by social workers even to the U.S.-Mexico border and dumped,” said Johnson.

It’s estimated up to a million people of Mexican ancestry were removed from the United States and returned to Mexico during what became known as the Mexican Repatriation.

MORE: Immigration raids in Central Valley create fear among Half Moon Bay farmworkers

Advertisement

An unexpected three-day border patrol operation in the Central Valley is amplifying fear for the farming community in Half Moon Bay.

Some historians say two-thirds of those forced to leave were U.S. citizens, many of them children of immigrant parents.

Johnson called it a form of ethnic cleansing.

“They terrified communities and they violated the rule of law and they are what some would say is a national disgrace,” added Johnson.

A second mass deportation happened in the 1950s. It was called “Operation Wetback”, a racial slur used to describe Mexican immigrants who crossed the Rio Grande and got their backs wet.

Advertisement

“The US government carried a military type operation where immigration officials went to job sites, schools, and neighborhoods and deported immigrants who were caught there. Their family members often didn’t know where those people had been sent, what happened to them,” explains Anna Raquel Minian, author of ‘In the Shadow of Liberty’ and a professor of history at Stanford University.

MORE: Trump deportation vow causes concern in Napa Valley; immigration advocates brace for impacts

Just like the mass deportation two decades earlier, many of those deported were U.S. citizens.

“They couldn’t leave their children in the United States by themselves, so they were forced to take them with them, even though these children were American citizens. It was absolutely devastating,” said Minian.

Donald Trump has promised a mass deportation when he returns to the White House, starting with immigrants with criminal records or previous deportation orders.

Advertisement

“Prioritizing the people who pose the most danger and removing those people, that’s certainly going to happen. But it doesn’t mean that they’re going to just turn a blind eye to everybody else,” said Ira Mehlman, media director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).

That was certainly the case in mid-January when agents from the U.S. Border Patrol arrested 78 people during a three-day operation in Kern County.

MORE: Post-inauguration ICE raids starting as soon as Tuesday, likely in Chicago, sources tell ABC News

The Border Patrol said among those arrested were a convicted sex offender and others with records or warrants for theft and drug possession.

The agency said “Operation Return to Sender” focused on “disrupting the transportation routes used by Transnational Criminal Organizations.”

Advertisement

But agents were videotaped casting a wider net. Footage from a Chevron gas station in Bakersfield shows agents questioning Latino customers.

“Law enforcement goes through these processes all the time. That’s how they identify the people that they’re going to target. It doesn’t mean that there’s going to be racial profiling,” said Mehlman.

Children born in the United States with undocumented parents could again be caught in the net.

In an interview with NewsNation, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan said U.S. born children of undocumented immigrants could be held in halfway houses if they are caught in a mass deportation.

“As Tom Homan has said, that there is no reason why people have to be separated from their families. They can make a choice. It is their choice to either go home with their entire family, or to go home and leave the parts of their family that are citizens in this country,” explained Mehlman.

Advertisement

MORE: SF legal experts worried over growing waitlist of people in need of attorneys for deportation court

Johnson said these type of mass deportations have left a stain in the country.

“We had citizen children who were in effect deported with their parents and in effect told even though you’re a citizen, you’re not a citizen like white Americans,” said Johnson. ” It had tremendous impact on the sense of belonging of people of Mexican ancestry in the United States and it lingers to this day in certain ways.”

Copyright © 2025 KGO-TV. All Rights Reserved.



Source link

Advertisement
Continue Reading

San Francisco, CA

NBA HOFer Charles Barkley refuses to attend NBA All-Star Game, criticizes San Francisco again: “Y'all are not gonna make me like San Francisco!” – The Times of India

Published

on

NBA HOFer Charles Barkley refuses to attend NBA All-Star Game, criticizes San Francisco again: “Y'all are not gonna make me like San Francisco!” – The Times of India


Charles Barkley does not want to attend NBA All-Star Game (Image via Getty Images)

Basketball Hall of Famer Charles Barkley has doubled down on his criticism of San Francisco, calling it a “rat-infested place” during his appearance on TNT’s Inside the NBA. Barkley’s remarks came while discussing the All-Star candidacy of Detroit Pistons’ rising star Cade Cunningham, who he believes is a lock for the event. However, Barkley made it clear that he has no intentions of attending the NBA All-Star Game, set to be hosted by the Golden State Warriors at Oracle Arena.
“He’s going to make the All-Star Team,”Charles Barkley confidently stated about Cunningham. “I’m not going. I’m not going to that rat-infested place out in San Francisco.”
This isn’t the first time Barkley has voiced his disdain for the city. His past comments have created controversy, particularly among Bay Area fans and residents.

Charles Barkley’s previous contempt for San Francisco

Charles Barkley

NBA HOFer Charles Barkley (Image via Getty)

Advertisement

Charles Barkley’s latest remarks were prompted by a colleague’s praise of San Francisco as a “beautiful” city. Unwavering in his opinion, Barkley responded bluntly, “San Francisco is not a beautiful city. Rats. Cats. Y’all are not gonna make me like San Francisco. No. Nope, nope, nope.”
The basketball legend has a history of targeting the city. During last year’s All-Star Game alternative broadcast, Barkley compared Indianapolis, where the event was held, to San Francisco, saying he’d prefer Indiana’s cold weather over “being around a bunch of homeless crooks in San Francisco.”

Draymond Green fires back after hearing Barkley’s criticism

Golden State Warriors star Draymond Green has been one of Barkley’s most vocal critics. In response to Barkley’s earlier comments, Green labeled the Hall of Famer “crazy” and declared that he is not welcome in the city.
“Yes, you can walk around,” Green countered, defending San Francisco’s livability. Barkley, however, retorted sharply, “Yeah, with a bulletproof vest.”
The exchange shows that there is a lot of ongoing tension between Barkley and some Bay Area figures, including WNBA star Candace Parker, who has also defended the city.

While Barkley’s comments have drawn attention to San Francisco’s challenges, the city’s newly elected mayor, Daniel Lurie, is focused on addressing its issues. Lurie has committed to making San Francisco’s streets safer, tackling the city’s drug and behavioral health crisis, and increasing affordable housing.
Also read: Warriors Trade Rumor: Stephen Curry and co. reportedly eyeing blockbuster trade for LeBron James or Jimmy Butler to improve roster before trade deadline
These initiatives aim to reshape the narrative surrounding San Francisco, but Barkley’s harsh criticisms throws light on the larger issues the city faces. All eyes will be on the event as the NBA All-Star Game approaches, but Barkley has stated that he will not be attending.





Source link

Continue Reading

San Francisco, CA

San Francisco police recover stockpile of stolen bikes, parts

Published

on

San Francisco police recover stockpile of stolen bikes, parts


Stolen bikes San Francisco. Picture: SFPD

San Francisco police officers recovered several bikes worth tens of thousands of dollars following a burglary earlier this month. 

The backstory:

Advertisement

On Wednesday, police arrested San Lorenzo man Joseph Zachary Negapatan for the thefts. 

On Jan. 2, several bikes worth around $28,000 were stolen at a residence in the 2700 block of Anza Street around 10:10 a.m. 

Advertisement

Eleven days later, the victim told SFPD investigators that their bikes were being sold online. With this information, police named a Negapatan as a possible suspect.

While searching Negapatan’s home, they found the stolen bicycles and other stolen bikes, frames, and bike parts. 

The 25-year-old was booked into the San Francisco County Jail for possession of stolen property. He has since been released on his own recognizance. 

Advertisement

What’s next:

The San Francisco Police Department urges victims of bike thefts to keep records of serial numbers and use Bike Index, a free database that helps recover stolen bikes. 

Advertisement

The Source: The San Francisco Police Department

Crime and Public SafetySan FranciscoSan LorenzoSan Francisco Police Department



Source link

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Trending