Better Market Street project shelved for funding dearth

A Better Market Street project in San Francisco has become a worse headache for City Hall, which blew a key construction deadline and had to give back $15 million to Uncle Sam.

The city returned the millions in federal grant money given to help turn Market Street into a car-free zone because it failed to meet its required deadline, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

When San Francisco approved the Better Market Street project in 2019, it planned a turnaround rail loop for its historic streetcars.

Once hailed by city leaders and advocates as a project to bring sweeping transit and biking improvements to the city’s premier boulevard, the bi-directional loop was also meant to boost tourism by shuttling more streetcars to the Embarcadero and Fisherman’s Wharf.

The project was supposed to take five years and $600 million to redesign a 2.2-mile stretch of Market Street from the Embarcadero to Octavia Boulevard.

But the proposed turnaround for Muni’s F line east of United Nations Plaza at Seventh and McAllister streets has become the latest project piece to be put on hold or scaled back.

Planned as part of the first phase of construction, the F loop turnaround has now been shelved indefinitely, according to an update by project managers. That means the city had to return a $15 million federal grant it got in 2018 that aimed to launch the first phase of Better Market Street.

“Better Market Street has turned out to be one of the worst projects the city has undertaken in my lifetime, and I’m no kid,” Rick Laubscher, CEO of the Market Street Railway nonprofit and chair of the project’s citizen advisory council, told the Chronicle.

When the grant was awarded, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said it would “help deliver a modern efficient transit system worthy of America’s cradle of innovation.”

The grant required the city to break ground on the F loop by September 2025 — a deadline project leaders acknowledged they weren’t going to meet.

“Given current available funding, cost projections and anticipated construction impacts, SFMTA has deprioritized the F loop and it’s no longer part of Phase 2,” reads an update to a Municipal Transportation Agency committee.

Project leaders filled the $15 million funding hole with unidentified bond funds, and it’s unclear when, or if, the project will advance beyond its first phase, according to the Chronicle.

The city didn’t have enough funding to cover the full cost to build the F loop before it returned the $15 million this summer, according to the Public Works department and SFMTA, two city agencies overseeing the Better Market Street project.

Agency officials had hoped Proposition A, a $400 million bond for Muni, would help cover some of the loop’s costs, but voters rejected the measure in June.

“We remain committed to the goals of the Better Market Street project, including construction of the F Loop,” Public Works spokesperson Benjamin Peterson told the Chronicle. “We have not removed the F Loop but have postponed design efforts until we can identify funding.”

A scaled-back first phase from Fifth to Eighth streets will begin in January, years behind schedule. It includes upgrades to five traffic signals, repaving intersections and crosswalks, building four curb extensions, replacing street trees and utility work.

The project has $109 million in funding, Peterson said, above the $60 million price tag for the initial work.

— Dana Bartholomew

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