Keith Goldstein remembers the day 15 years ago, riding his bike along Illinois Street, when he got a real-life lesson on the law of inertia. His front tire got jammed in an abandoned rail track, the bike stopped, but Goldstein kept going. When he hit the pavement, he broke his wrist.
Back then, this sliver of San Francisco’s Central Waterfront had just begun distancing itself from its industrial bayshore past. UCSF’s Mission Bay campus and the neighborhood around it were growing, and the dancing excavators of the Chase Center groundbreaking would arrive seven years later.
Today, Illinois Street still has some industrial vibe. It fronts a three-block-long former can factory, now full of small businesses, and trucks pull in and out of the loading bays. There are crane and truck rental firms, and PG&E vehicles are a constant presence with the utility firm’s switching yard here.
But the street is also the main inroad to two major developments along SF’s Central Waterfront, an expansion decades in the works. Pier 70 and the Potrero Power Station will bring more than 4,000 new homes and 3.9 million square feet of office, lab, retail, and arts space.
Notably, those new homes will each have, on average, less than one new parking space. It’s a 21st century neighborhood that planners hope will shift dramatically away from cars.
Third Street’s Muni rail line is one block away, and several bus lines are nearby. And in this very flat part of town, more bicycles will be in the mix.
There’s already a protected bike lane along the bay from Fisherman’s Wharf to the Chase Center, where Illinois Street begins its 1.25 mile run south. But not on Illinois itself. A neighborhood group wants to change that.
Dubbing themselves Safer Illinois, more than 30 neighborhood associations and businesses in Dogpatch, Potrero Hill, and Mission Bay have banded together to draft a plan for a two-way, protected bike lane.
A neighborhood group and dozens of merchants have proposed a new protected bike lane along Illinois Street. (Map: SF Department of Elections; The Frisc)
So far, it’s a hard left turn away from the divisive merchants-versus-bikes politics in other parts of the city, especially on Valencia Street.
“When you look at a map, Illinois is one of those routes that’s a no-brainer,” says Dogpatch Neighborhood Association president and Safer Illinois member Donovan Lacy.
Not everyone is on board, at least not yet. Goldstein, whose wrist has long since healed, is president of the Potrero Dogpatch Merchants Association. Neither he nor the group have taken a stance on the plan, although he tells The Frisc, “I’ve been waiting for Illinois to become more bike friendly.”
The support for Safer Illinois, even with Goldstein’s hesitation, already shows a level of promise worth a double take: Are we still in San Francisco?
On March 4, SF’s streets and transit agency (SFMTA) unanimously approved the city’s future biking network — or at least a broad outline for it, called the Biking and Rolling Plan.
A survey in the new plan showed 53 percent of city residents would pedal around town if streets were designed to keep bikes separated from cars. The crux of the plan was a “North Star Network” map that targeted streets, including Illinois, for new infrastructure. Yet it didn’t say how or when those changes would pan out.
Today’s Illinois wasn’t meant for pedestrians and bicycles. There are white-striped bike lanes and “share the lane” arrows, or sharrows, painted on the asphalt to warn drivers. But for three long blocks, vehicles don’t have a stop sign.
Large trucks turn into loading docks, and there’s a lot of double parking. Railroad tracks, a vestige of the industrial past and a bane of bicyclists, remain in the asphalt between 20th and 23rd Streets. (There were 23 injury collisions between 2018 and 2024.)
“Illinois is extraordinarily dangerous right now,” says Lacy of the Dogpatch Neighborhood Association.
Old train tracks, a remnant of the industrial waterfront, run next to a painted bike lane on Illinois Street. (Photo: Kristi Coale)
In 2023, he and other Safer Illinois organizers decided to address these issues. They contracted an engineering firm to make a conceptual design of a protected bike lane along the mile-and-a-quarter stretch from 16th Street to Marin Street.
Part of their motivation was SFMTA’s 2020 transportation profile that identified Bayview-Hunters Point, just south of them, as a priority for bike improvements to create safe north-south routes.
“It just jumped out at us that if Illinois were safer, it would connect the existing bike lanes on Cargo Way to those on the Embarcadero for a six-mile safe bikeway,” says Safer Illinois organizer Peter Belden.
Their idea is to create a 10-foot wide, two-way bike lane on the eastern side of Illinois Street, separated from traffic by a parking lane, a four-foot buffer space, and plastic bollards.
The Safer Illinois plan puts protected bike lanes next to each other (right) and out of the way of vehicles. (Courtesy Safer Illinois)
By putting the bike lanes together on one side of the street, the Safer Illinois proposal reduces exposure to the old train tracks, says Belden. “It’s bad enough if you hit the tracks and hit the ground, but it’s worse if you fall where there are speeding cars and large trucks.”
In the plan, parking would remain roughly the same. Near the loading docks, Safer Illinois says “a few more spaces” may need to be eliminated to allow room for the turning radius of large trucks.
The design leans on SFMTA’s “Quick Build” toolkit to move fast, says Belden. “It’s more accurate to put down paint and plastic posts to see what works and get feedback.”
For now, the design is meant to show businesses and residents what their street could look like. Neither SFMTA nor the Port of San Francisco, which owns some of the land along Illinois Street, have signed on Port spokesperson Eric Young said via email that his agency “looks forward to working with the SFMTA and the community to improve the bicycle facilities along Illinois Street that balance the demands of the many users.”
Businesses on board
In the meantime, Belden and Lacy of Safer Illinois are using the blueprint to gain local support. Thirty businesses have signed on, as well as two neighborhood associations and seven advocacy groups including Livable City and the SF Bicycle Coalition.
But the main business group in the area — the Potrero Dogpatch Merchants Association — hasn’t taken a position. Goldstein, who told The Frisc about his biking mishap, declined to talk about the plans. He said he was “not up to speed on the Safer Illinois movement.”
One major sticking point might be the old can factory, known officially as the American Industrial Center (AIC). It sprawls across two large buildings along Illinois between 20th and 23rd Streets.
In the Biking and Rolling Plan, SFMTA highlighted the AIC as an example of business considerations that can complicate bike-lane planning. “The width of the street and turning radius required for large delivery vehicles present design challenges that require more study,” it stated.
Pedestrians walk in the Illinois Street bike lane to avoid a truck sticking out from an American Industrial Center loading dock. (Photo: Kristi Coale)
AIC facilities manager John Micheletos is an Illinois bike rider himself. He bought an e-bike last year to go back and forth between the buildings and has logged more than 500 miles. But he’s not in tandem with Safer Illinois.
He wouldn’t mind if the west sidewalk, across Illinois from the AIC, were replaced with a protected bike lane. That would keep the current street width, which he says large trucks need to maneuver into and out of AIC’s more than 50 loading docks. “The street is zoned industrial, and that means a lot of large trucks on the street,” Micheletos tells The Frisc. Even better, he says, would be moving the bike lane off Illinois completely, either closer to the bay or two blocks west to Tennessee Street.
It’s bad enough if you hit the tracks and hit the ground. It’s worse if you fall where there are speeding cars and large trucks.
Peter Belden, Safer Illinois organizer
At least nine businesses with AIC space support the Safer Illinois plan, including Blendsville, Body Manipulations, Dogpatch Boulders, Neighbor Bakehouse, and Peak Design, whose founder Peter Dering recorded a testimonial video. Dering and most of his employees bike to work. He says a protected bike lane “totally changes the game to feeling good about your commute from being really worried that you’ll be smacked by a car.”
An adult and two kids ride bikes past Scuderia Motorcycles on 22nd Street, one of the first major tenants of the Pier 70 development. (Photo: Kristi Coale)
Another AIC business tenant, Nick Korobi, who says he has a “love-hate” relationship with bikers who “want to be free to blow through stop signs,” likes the idea of moving the lane to the east side of the street. “There has to be something to make everyone safe,” says Korobi, who runs an antiques shipping firm.
It’s a rarity in SF to have merchants and advocacy organizations on the same side when it comes to bike lanes. A larger test will come when SFMTA issues its official proposal. (There’s no timeline yet.)
Meanwhile, the neighborhood continues to grow with new residents and businesses. The city’s first new YMCA in 30 years opened last month in Crane Cove Park. In 2023, its president wrote to the district supervisor Shamann Walton that a protected bike lane was in sync with the Y’s mission of healthier living. He also noted it could bridge economic gaps by “empowering young people, opening access wherever they want to go for free.”
It’s not a stretch to say Illinois Street is a main artery of SF’s future, with growing neighborhoods in every direction. The newest, built from scratch, are to the east. A few businesses, including Restoration Hardware and Scuderia Motorcycles, have moved into Pier 70, but much of it remains fenced off. The Potrero Power Station is still in early construction. (Neither developer answered questions for this story.)
Despite chain-link fences and dirt lots all around, the sidewalks along 22nd Street — which separates the Pier 70 and Power Station developments — already have bike racks. Some day they’ll be put to their intended use.
