Perhaps you've noticed that there's now a bright red lane that extends 330 feet down mid-Market, ending at 6th Street. It's meant to tell confused drivers, who remain perennially confused about where the hell they're supposed to be/turn while driving down Market Street, that they are in the wrong lane, but it's made very confusing to everyone new to the city because the only other lane looks like it's for bikes only. Thus KRON4's resident finger-wagger Stanley Roberts gets plenty of footage of unwitting motorists driving half-in, half-out of the red lanes, panicking as they approach the mandatory turn onto 6th Street (which some people also continue to ignore despite the city being five years into this traffic-calming experiment).
As Stanley points out, "The transit lanes have always been there. It's only now that the SFMTA has decided to color them red." And yes, you're supposed to stay completely out of them, making sure to be close to the curbside and preferably turning off of Market on 8th or 10th Street.
SFStreetsBlog noted the transit-lane painting project, which just started last weekend, and it's going to extend from 12th all the way down to 5th Street, shouting loud and clear that citizen drivers are not welcome in the center lanes. And leave it to Stanley to run out there to find some "people behaving badly" in these newly painted lanes, no sooner has the paint even dried.
He also can't keep himself from making a "red carpet" joke before finishing the segment, or from randomly referring to some creepy Christian prayer teens he found at 6th and Market doing some summer volunteer prayer work. "It will take more than a prayer to get yourself out of a ticket if you're not a bus or a taxi," quips Stanley.
Can we all just agree that driving through the middle of the city is a complete and total nightmare, and a confusing one, for anyone who has lived here less than four or five years?
[KRON4]
[SFStreetsBlog]
