SF's Biking and Rolling Plan: Will It Ever Get Built?

In March 2025 the city adopted the Biking and Rolling Plan (BRP), which proposes a “North Star” bicycle network that SFMTA calls safe for “all ages and abilities.”

From the SF Bicycle Coalition’s review, we know that the current BRP is a good start, but won’t get us to a bike network that’s “perceived as safe by people ages 8 to 80”. But this is the plan we have, and it’s a good start.

A year and a half later, are we making progress?

Drumroll please…

So far, SFMTA has added about 5 miles of all ages and abilities bikeway from the plan. We need to build 255 miles more to finish the plan.¹ At this rate, when our great-grandkids learn to bike on a Woom 1000, they still won’t have a safe bike network!

This post looks at where we are today and one way we might move more quickly: a city law that mandates bikeway upgrades after a street gets repaved.

Note: To stay consistent with the BRP, we count miles once for each direction of travel, so a mile of street with a bikeway on both sides counts as 2 miles.

A Brief History of San Francisco’s Bike Network

San Francisco has improved its bikeways over the last decade, especially during the pandemic.

If we accept the Biking and Rolling Plan’s definitions for what’s close enough (a quarter mile) and accept that unprotected bike lanes are good enough for all ages and abilities, we went from 63% of SF residents connected to the network in 2015 to 81% by 2020.²

Data as of September 28, 2026. See the live version on sf-works.org.

81% sounds like we’re almost done. We’re not.

ITDP’s Atlas uses a threshold that’s closer to what most people consider safe and connected: a physically separated bikeway within 1,000 feet or less from home.³ By that measure, only 24% of San Franciscans are connected. In Copenhagen, 95% of residents live within 1-2 blocks (500-1000 feet) of a separated bikeway, and it was a joy to bike there earlier this year. Montreal is similar to SF in block layout and density and 45% of its residents are within 1000 feet. When we biked there last year, it also felt safer and more convenient than SF.

So San Francisco, we have a long way to go, and the Biking and Rolling Plan is just the first step.

At the Last 10 Years’ Pace, the Plan Won’t Be Done Until After 2050

In the last 10 years (2016-2025), the city added about 10 miles of all ages and abilities bikeway each year.⁴

In 2025-2026, progress stalled as SFMTA faced a $307 million budget gap and put “fast, safe, and reliable Muni service” first.⁵ In the coming years, based on planned projects, we’re still below the 10 miles a year pace.

Data as of September 28, 2026. See the live version on sf-works.org.

At a 10 mile per year pace, the 255 remaining miles in the plan won’t be done until after 2050.

Data as of September 28, 2026. See the live version on sf-works.org.

The City Promised to Add Bikeway When We Repave, But We’re Not Keeping This Promise

City law says a repaving project “shall include, to the maximum extent practicable and feasible, … Pedestrian and bicycle safety improvement measures” from the city’s adopted plans (§2.4.13(a)(2), Ordinance 220-14). So when Public Works (DPW) or the city’s water and sewer agency (SFPUC) repaves a street in the plan’s network, the city is supposed to add the plan’s bike improvements where it can.

We looked into whether the city is actually doing this by matching up the city’s pavement records and street-work calendar against SFMTA’s bikeway map and project pages.

From April 2025, the month after the plan was adopted, to September 2026, the city repaved 7.9 miles of streets that called for a better bikeway in the BRP. Out of these streets, the only one that got the required upgrade was Winston Drive (0.7 miles).⁶

Street work under way or starting by 2028 touches another 54 miles that need the upgrade. So far, SFMTA only has plans to upgrade 12 of these miles.⁶

Data as of September 28, 2026. See the live version on sf-works.org.

Ask the City to Build Faster

Want the city to build faster? Send a message to your supervisor below, and ask them to make SFMTA and Public Works work together better and follow the repaving law. This way, every repave should lead either to the upgraded bikeway or to a documented reason why the bikeway wasn’t feasible.

Also message me at [email protected] if you want better tools to review upcoming projects or simulate bike plan scenarios. As part of writing this post, I prototyped a few of these tools to better understand the public data the city shares.

I’ll be back soon with a look at SFMTA’s upcoming Safe School Connections plan, which is SFMTA’s attempt to better connect the bike network to schools. Its public survey closes Monday, October 12, so if you have kids in SF schools, fill it out now.

Photo and Data Credits

How we built every map and chart is on sf-works.org’s About the Data page.

Photos

• Project photos on the map: SFMTA, from each SFMTA project page
• Officials’ photos: San Francisco Board of Supervisors (Chan, Sherrill, Sauter, Wong, Mahmood, Dorsey, Melgar, Mandelman, Fielder, Walton, Chen), Wikimedia Commons (Public domain (PD-CAGov)), cropped; Office of the Mayor, City and County of San Francisco (Lurie), Wikimedia Commons (Public domain (PD-CAGov)), cropped

Data Sources

• Network map: Census Bureau 2020 census blocks, with American Community Survey estimates for other years
• Network map, pace chart, repaving since the plan and street work through 2028: SFMTA’s bikeway layer; recent SFMTA project pages
• Network map and pace chart: historical copies of the bikeway layer on Internet Archive
• Repaving since the plan: city pavement records
• Street work through 2028: the city’s street-work calendar, as of 2026-09-28
• Contact officials: Names and addresses from the Board of Supervisors and Mayor’s Office pages on sf.gov, as of 2026-10-06

References