SFMTA rolls out the red on Geary

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) will begin to paint red bus-only lanes on Geary Boulevard east of Stanyan Street. 

In general, SFMTA says painting transit lanes red has been shown to improve compliance by about 50 percent. Studies of three downtown San Francisco streets found that red paint led to fewer violations by private vehicles, which reduces the number of collisions and makes Muni service more reliable. 

In the coming months, residents will start to see new red lanes installed along Geary Boulevard between Stanyan Street and Van Ness Avenue. Then later this fall, after utility and repaving work is completed, existing red lanes will be refreshed and new red lanes will be installed on Geary and O’Farrell streets east of Van Ness. 

When the red treatments are completed, Geary will have gained almost 3.5 miles of red lanes along the corridor, bringing the citywide red transit lanes total to 22 miles, or about a 20 percent increase in red transit line mileage.  

Red lanes along Geary will add to the transit benefits that were realized when quick-build improvements—such as non-colored transit lanes, bus stop changes and traffic signal retiming—were made at the beginning of the Geary Rapid Project in late 2018. Those changes helped to speed up 38R Geary Rapid trips by up to 20 percent and improved reliability by 20 percent. In the coming months we’ll be crunching the numbers to understand the additional benefits of the red-colored transit lanes and other recently completed transit improvements like bus bulbs (sidewalk extensions at bus stops). 

Based on the success of San Francisco and other cities’ experiments, the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD)—the national standards governing all traffic control devices—issued Interim Approval to use red transit lane treatments in late 2019. Now the 11th edition of the MUTCD is under development and is expected to include the treatment.