Parks are Awesome for Local Businesses

I’m excited to share our latest data analysis that focuses on a particularly contentious issue here in San Francisco. On Tuesday, voters will decide whether to continue allowing vehicle traffic on a two-mile segment of San Francisco’s Great Highway or permanently convert the roadway into the city’s newest oceanfront park.

Proposition K, which will determine the fate of the Great Highway, has become a divisive lightning rod this election cycle and to combat any misinformation, we decided to throw our hat in the ring to help voters understand the facts.

The top three concerns we’ve heard from opponents of Prop K are that closing the Great Highway to vehicles will potentially:

1. Increase traffic crashes throughout the neighborhood

2. Slow down the city’s response time to emergencies

3. Hurt local businesses that are struggling to rebound from the pandemic

To validate the legitimacy of these concerns, we analyzed city data and eight case studies where waterfront roadways and industrial areas have been converted into public parks.

View Our Analysis

In every one of the case studies we analyzed, converting the roadway into a public park created an economic windfall for local businesses and the regional economy. Furthermore, our analysis of San Francisco crash data and 16,000 calls to 911 found that vehicle crashes are less frequent and emergency response times are faster on weekends when the Great Highway is closed to cars. This is surprising because there is more vehicle traffic in the neighborhood on weekends vs weekdays according to a recent traffic study conducted by the SFMTA.

TL’DR – Our analysis estimates that Proposition K will:

• 💰 Generate $6.3M – $12.6M in additional revenue for local businesses by bringing 760,000 – 1.3M new visitors to the neighborhood annually

• 🚑 Reduce vehicle crashes by as much as 22% and speed up emergency response times by as much as 12%

I published an op-ed in The San Francisco Standard that shares the key takeaways from our analysis and my personal relationship with the Great Highway and surrounding Sunset District. I hope you’ll give it a read.

Read My Op-Ed in The Standard

If you’re registered to vote in San Francisco and are still undecided about Prop K, the data is clear that Prop K will generate millions for San Francisco businesses and will make the Sunset District safer for everyone. If you value healthy, safe, car-free spaces and support local businesses, please vote Yes on K.

Join Our Fight For Safer, Healthier Cities.

This was one of our most extensively researched projects to date and took over two months to produce. I want to give a huge shout out to Laila Hamidi, Sam Vogt and Beaudry Kock for their amazing work helping me pull this together.

We are a small team of designers, researchers, data analysts and engineers passionate about climate justice and making our cities safer, healthier and more equitable. We pour our hearts into this work which is only possible because of the generosity of people like you.

If you have the means, please make a tax-deductible donation to support our work or if you need help telling stories with data to achieve results, please reach out. We’d love to collaborate with you on a project!