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SFMTA is looking to improve service and reliability along a 3 block segment of Church Street by consolidating the Muni bus and rail lines into dedicated center lanes with limits on left turns during peak hours.

Having spent 5 years on the SFMTA’s advisory council and attended a number of public meetings about improving transit, the idea of dedicating lanes for transit is frequently met with a knee jerk reaction that SFMTA is “taking a lane away” when the much more important thing going on is the SFMTA is taking the vehicles that cause the most delay for car drivers and moving them into lanes of their own so they won’t block private cars.

Here is how Church Street at Market Street is currently set up in the southbound direction: the 22-Fillmore - a high frequency cross town bus - line runs on the side lanes and boards from the sidewalk curb right before the crosswalk. The J-Church - part of the heavily used Muni Metro light-rail system - runs in the center lanes and boards from an island.

Here is what it looks like when both a train and bus have arrived at the intersection at the same time.

With both of these being high-frequency lines, this is not an uncommon sight. Neither is seeing cars stuck for one or may even two full cycles of the light because the bus or train is boarding.

There is also a reverse effect that happens where 3-4 cars backed up at the intersection prevent the bus or train from reaching the stop until the next green light comes around. That leads back to the first problem.

What’s important - really the key thing to understand - is transit vehicles and private cars have different, and even competing, needs, behaviors, and motivations at intersections where there’s a transit stops.

And this isn’t a unique problem to San Francisco either. SFMTA’s experimental proposal is just to apply proven and established best practices: with two lanes in each direction, just give each mode of transportation its own lane, so they can move at their own pace.

There are a few turns that will be prevented, but in exchange the outer lanes will be free from Muni vehicles starting and stopping, pulling in and out of traffic at the worst time for drivers sharing the lane.

Having also met with the project’s team throughout the process, I’m also not worried because they explained the fallback plan is to simply removing some paint and go back to running the 22-Fillmore on the outside lanes. And even though the 22 is a trolleybus line with overhead lines powering them, overhead wires and the length of the trolley-poles take into account busses need to switch lanes to get around obstacles like roadwork or double-parked cars.

A few of the other benefits we should hope to see are cars pulling in and out of the parallel parking spaces causing less transit since and that transit only lane is going to have fewer vehicles actually using it (fewer vehicles, but more people overall) so sneaking into it a little when its clear to get around cars pulling in and out is going to make getting around those cars maneuvering in and out much easier, and keep traffic flowing more smoothly.

At least that’s the happy scenario.