"Balanced use" of city streets?

Mayor Breed

A letter to the editor in today's SF Chronicle:

Ban hurts businesses

I agree with Carl Nolte’s column “Car-free Valencia? Slow down” (Native Son, Feb. 2). Banning cars on Valencia Street is a bad idea. 

I have owned and managed Valencia Cyclery for almost 35 years. Doing business in San Francisco has gotten to be increasingly difficult for a number of reasons, including the lack of parking. If cars were banned completely on Valencia Street, we would probably have to close.

Most of our new bike customers drive here and return home with their new bike in their car. This is especially true for children’s bikes. Likewise, a lot of bicycles in need of repair are not rideable and are driven here to be fixed. 

Parking on the street has gotten prohibitively expensive and harder to find. Many parking spaces are taken by the banks of share-rental bikes and parklets. 

It seems that our bike lane will soon become a “protected bike lane,” which inevitably results in even more spaces lost. If the city is truly interested in keeping small businesses, especially legacy businesses, alive and well, then there needs to be a balanced use of our public streets.

Paul Olszewski

San Francisco

Rob's comment:

As I pointed out in the previous post, the city doesn't really care about small businesses in the neighborhoods, since the Bicycle Coalition and its enablers in City Hall are making the decisions to redesign city streets on behalf of a small minority of cyclists.