Editor:
Not to beat a dead horse, but it mystifies me why common sense hasn’t prevailed in the Upper Great Highway (UGH) opening/closing debate. But I guess common sense is not all that common.
It seems fairly obvious to all but the smallest percentage of people, that if the highway is going to be open to traffic during the week, it’s ludicrous to close the highway at noon on Fridays. At a time when the north/south heavy Friday commute traffic can’t use the roadway. And for Rec. and Park to claim there is no one available to lock the gates at say, 9 p.m. Friday is even more astounding to hear.
It makes no sense at all to close the UGH to traffic at noon on Fridays. With the non-stop excavation work on 19th Avenue, and Sunset Boulevard becoming a parking lot on Friday afternoons, the Sunset District’s streets between Lincoln Way and Sloat Boulevard – with their speed humps, street closures, sewer work, stop signs every block and PGE gas line replacements, etc. – have become a motorists and district residents nightmare.
Traffic flooding streets never designed to handle the thousands of cars trying to get north and south on Friday afternoons has created an epic problem for the district. If only the City’s responsible leaders could simply rectify this problem by keeping the UGH open all day on Fridays, they would do a tremendous service to the southwest end of the City.
Daniel Fulmer
Categories: letter to the editor
Richmond Review/Sunset Beacon 
IMHO, if the Great Highway were closed on Fridays at rush hour, I would expect there would be many, many more people biking on it. I would say the noon Friday closure is a tactic that vehicle drivers might think twice about before objecting.
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There are not “many many more people biking” in SF period. They City does a survey for mode of transportation and here’s the 2021 data from the SFMTA. Bicyclists 3% compared with driving alone 36%, driving with others 25%, walking 24% and public transit 11%. The numbers of bicyclists remains relatively stable despite the millions spent on bicycling infrastructure. https://www.sfmta.com/blog/how-people-traveled-through-san-francisco-2021-0
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Yeah, makes no sense! The gates should just be closed all the time.
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Common sense might also cause us to ask ourselves why we have to keep paying money to move tons of sand off of the highway each month, but we seem to do a good job of ignoring that, don’t we?
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I read in the neighborhood newspaper that the reason the Great Highway gates close at noon is that Rec and Park doesn’t” have any employee on duty at midnight to close the gate then!
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I think there are plenty of cyclists who could close the gate and plenty of drivers who could open it. We don’t need to HIRE someone to open and close the gate. Not many cyclists are riding in the dark. They could close it at 7 AM on Saturday and re-open it at 7 PM on Sunday. That would give the cyclists a total of 2 days of daylight hours and give drivers extra hours to travel at night.
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It absolutely “MAKES NO SENSE” to CLOSE GH on Friday @ Noon or any other day except for perhaps an “occasional” Special Event, when repairs need to be done or Sand cleaned up!
OPEN GREAT HIGHWAY!!!
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