The center-running Valencia Street bike lane experiment is done for, and the bike lanes will move back to the curb side. The SF Municipal Transit Agency just released diagrams of what the redesigned bike lanes might look like.

When the curious and unconventional center-running Valencia Street bike lanes were installed last summer, some flustered bicyclists nicknamed them “the Valencia meat grinder” over safety concerns. Businesses along Valencia Street also hated the center bike lanes, blaming them for an alleged drop in business. So after months of bitter controversy, the SF Municipal Transit Agency (SFMTA) decided to end this center bike lane experiment and move the Valencia bike lanes back to the curbside.

But there was still the matter of determining what these redesigned (or really, re-redesigned) bike lanes would look like. Now Mission Local reports we have a first look at the proposed new Valencia Street bike lane designs, which debuted at a Monday community meeting at the Valencia Gardens Community Room.

The design is called “parking protected,” meaning parked cars will serve as the protection buffer between bikes and moving cars.

There are only just diagrams of a proposal. But as seen above, with the bike lanes’ new location shown in green, the lanes are back along the  curb. Note that the bike lanes will “float” or swerve around the parklets that prefer to stay in their locations where Valencia Street parking spaces used to be.

“This is going to be a design that is much more familiar for both drivers and cyclists,” SFMTA spokesperson Michael Roccaforte told Mission Local. “We’re committed to making sure this works best for everybody, the merchants, the people who live here, for people who drive through Valencia.”

Those businesses who choose to relocate their parklets into parking space areas, instead of the sidewalk, will get a stipend of up to $30,000 for construction costs. There will be a loss of parking spaces, but SFMTA plans to put up signs alerting people to nearby parking lots.

The design is not yet approved, and is still in the “community meeting” phase. The full SFMTA board is not expected to vote on approving the design until November, and even then, construction would not start until January 2025 at the earliest. Construction would be expected to take at last two months.  

And you still have opportunities to chime in on the new bike lane design, at a Valencia bike lane open house on Wednesday, September 25 from 4-6 pm at the City College San Francisco Mission Campus (1125 Valencia Street).

Related: Center-Running Valencia Bike Lanes Could Be Heading Back to the Curbside in January [SFist]

Image: Google Street View