Note: GJEL Accident Attorneys regularly sponsors coverage on Streetsblog San Francisco and Streetsblog California. Unless otherwise noted in the story, GJEL Accident Attorneys is not consulted on the content or editorial direction of sponsored content.

The SFMTA has eliminated a detour from its plans for Slow Noe Street, even though traffic volumes and speeds suggest it is necessary for safety reasons. “We do not yet have a consensus on whether to proceed with the traffic detour at Noe and 15.^th Street, so we are pausing work on the detour,” SFMTA spokesman Michael Roccaforte confirmed in an email to Streetsblog

SFMTA’s internal documentation contains the following paragraph, which was recently crossed out:

A concrete guide island (on which emergency vehicles can mount) with a bicycle passage will prevent motorists from entering Noe Street from the intersection with 15th Street heading north. The daylight-lit southbound access on Noe
The road at 15th Street would be reinforced by a marked safety zone with an island or planter.

In this document (PDF), the SFMTA also eliminated requirements to reduce vehicle throughput, even though the Slow Streets program has a maximum criteria of 1,000 cars per day.

Residents were dismayed by the decision to remove the detour, which they described as being made “behind closed doors.” “SFMTA has a mandate,” said attorney and Noe Street resident Pavan Yedavalli in an interview with Streetsblog. “There is still no solution to the fact that 1,800 cars travel on Noe Street every day. How do they solve that?”

Yedavalli stressed the importance of achieving the promised goals to use the street for more than just traffic. A farmers’ market and regular plant swaps already take place here. He would like to see more events on the street.

This was, after all, the basic idea behind the city’s Slow Streets program. But the city has repeatedly allowed the program to be watered down in the face of resistance from motorists.

Streetsblog readers will recall that in 2023, the SFMTA removed the “Local Traffic Only” signs from its seventeen slow streets without discussion. The agency replaced those signs – and reopened the streets to through traffic – with purple plastic signs that simply instruct drivers to go slow (similar to the sign on the right in the main image). They did this just before public discussion about the future of the Slow Streets program. Leaked communications at the time indicated that the mayor intended to end the Slow Streets program.

Still, SFMTA staff agreed to monitor the number and speed of cars, and if they exceeded certain limits, the agency would tighten physical restrictions on designated slow streets until speeds were reduced to 15 miles per hour and the number of cars was reduced to 1,000 per day.

“My four-year-old learned to ride a bike on our street,” says Yedavalli. But that has changed over time. “Now it’s extremely dangerous. The slow street is extremely affected.”

One local activist described a June meeting at the Duboce Triangle Neighborhood Association that included motorists opposed to the detour and the slow road. “There was a group of five to 10 neighbors who were very loud, very aggressive, very rude,” wrote the activist, who asked Streetsblog not to use his name for fear of retaliation from neighbors. “SFMTA was there to present its traffic calming proposal, which calls for a northbound traffic detour and speed bumps to try to get under the benchmarks of 1,000 cars per day and 15 mph average speed.” They added that SFMTA officials “were extremely calm and deserve a lot of credit – it can’t have been easy to deal with that much vitriol.”

Safe streets advocates in the area believe this group of spiteful neighbors has found the ear of Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, whose district includes Noe Street. “The SFMTA Slow Streets staff I spoke with this weekend have reaffirmed that your office ‘killed’ this project. Can you confirm that? And can you please define ‘consensus’ in this context?” advocate Adam Egelman wrote in an email to the supervisor that was forwarded to Streetsblog. “This problem is not going away – my neighbors on 15th & Noe feel incredibly betrayed by your office.”

SFMTA Slow Streets staff involved in the project did not respond to Streetsblog’s inquiries. “However, I want to clarify that our office has not directed the MTA to stop the northbound routing,” wrote Calvin Ho, Mandelman’s parliamentary aide. “We have simply asked staff to consider the needs of all neighbors who live or work in the Duboce Triangle when coming up with solutions to reduce car traffic in the neighborhood.”

The push to remove the detour is reminiscent of similar efforts on Slow Page Street. In that case, however, Supervisor Dean Preston pushed hard to keep the traffic diversion at Divisadero. The detour is still there today, but only with plastic posts. A concrete detour is currently being designed.

Streetsblog asked Mandelman’s office if he supports the diverter at Noe or fought to save it like Preston did at Divisadero instead of simply supporting the “consensus”. Streetsblog will update this post.

Activists who spoke to Streetsblog reported that they spent months collecting signatures and building support for a concrete diversion. They told Streetsblog that they had reached a consensus, but “behind closed doors they rejected the diversion completely,” Yedavalli said.

“At our plant swap, where there were probably twenty children present, a driver drove up on a sunny Saturday morning and shouted, ‘Get off the road, you wankers!'” he said. “We claim we are a city for people, for families, for active sustainability, but here we are coddling the drivers.”