Here’s a stunning article about what it looks like to stop giving preference to travel by auto: Why S.F. drivers say owning a car in the city is ‘miserable’
Then, in January 2020, the city banned cars on Market Street. Later that year, spurred by pandemic stay-at-home orders, officials closed the Great Highway and Golden Gate Park’s JFK Drive to cars and created a network of about two dozen Slow Streets where motorists are expected to drive slowly and share the road with cyclists and pedestrians.
The fight over Slow Streets prompted bitter hearings, and the battle over car-free JFK Drive led to an expensive, failed ballot measure to overturn it. Yet, most of those changes became permanent.
Changing a culture is not easy or painless. People who have been privileged by auto-oriented policies are inevitably unhappy. This article details how it’s going.