Back in the spring of 2024, the fear along West Portal Avenue wasn't about rent or competition. It was about parking. When the city first floated turn restrictions and speed tables for the streets around West Portal Station, merchants worried that anything making it harder to drive straight up to a storefront would send customers to Stonestown or the Sunset instead. The worry made sense on paper. It just turned out to be wrong.
The occasion for revisiting that argument is a report the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency published this past July, roughly nine months after the last piece of the station-area work was finished. The numbers in it settle a debate that started with a tragedy and dragged on for close to two years through public meetings, watered-down proposals, and no shortage of shouting at community hearings. They also happen to explain something that's been obvious to anyone walking down the avenue this year: the corridor didn't just survive the redesign. It filled up with restaurants.
The bet nobody wanted to make
The project traces back to March 16, 2024, when a driver going roughly 70 miles an hour struck a bus shelter outside the West Portal branch library, killing Matilde Ramos Pinto, Diego Cardoso de Oliveira, and their two children as they waited for a bus to the zoo. The city's response moved fast, then stalled. SFMTA's initial plan, dropped on the neighborhood with a 10-day comment window that April, drew immediate backlash from merchants and residents who felt blindsided. The agency went back to the table, and in July 2024 its board approved a compromise that nearly doubled the project's footprint to about ten blocks, trading the most aggressive changes for a broader set of speed tables, turn restrictions, and traffic-calmed side streets.
The rollout happened in pieces. Turn restrictions and initial calming measures landed in October 2024. A pedestrian beacon at Ulloa and Wawona went in that March 2025. By October 2025, the city had finished the station-area work that gets photographed most, the planters, the bikeshare dock, and the mural of colored circles across the horseshoe entrance, and officially declared the project complete.
Through all of it, the anxiety among business owners was specific and reasonable. Fewer left turns and a red transit lane meant fewer ways to pull up in front of a shop. Nobody running a storefront on a narrow commercial strip wants to bet on a customer's willingness to circle the block.
What the ledger actually shows
SFMTA's July 2026 evaluation is the first hard look at whether that bet paid off, and the numbers are more lopsided than either side of the 2024 argument probably expected.
| What changed near the station | Result since the project was completed |
|---|---|
| Illegal U-turns at the West Portal Station approach | Down 75 percent |
| Drivers making legal movements at West Portal and Ulloa | 97 percent compliance |
| Pedestrians crossing outside designated crosswalks | Down 75 percent |
| Injury crashes in the project area, per year | Fell from an average of 6.7 to 2.7, a 60 percent drop |
| Muni-vehicle collisions | Down about a third, with none recorded since fall 2025 |
| Sales tax receipts along the corridor | Continued outpacing the citywide growth rate, a trend that held both before and after the changes |
That last line is the one worth sitting with. It would have been easy for SFMTA to report calmer streets and call it a win regardless of what happened to local business. Instead the agency tracked sales tax receipts specifically because merchants had raised it as their central objection, and the data came back showing West Portal's retail tax revenue kept growing faster than the city average through the entire process. In the same survey, 95 percent of respondents said they visit West Portal businesses as often or more often than before the redesign, and that held true even among people who get there by car.
Mission Local's own review of the report in July 2026 landed on a similar read: collision rates in the half-square-mile radius around the crash site dropped 60 percent comparing the eighteen months after the changes to the eighteen months before. The debate over whether the specific redesign would have saved that particular family is a separate and unresolved question, one Supervisor Myrna Melgar has said isn't really what the evaluation was built to answer. But on the narrower question merchants actually asked in 2024, whether slower traffic would empty out their stores, the data points the other way.
While the intersection calmed down, the storefronts filled in
The timing lines up with something anyone who eats out in West Portal already knows: this is the busiest the avenue's restaurant scene has been in years. In the twelve months before the Chronicle first tallied it in early 2025, at least seven new food and drink spots opened within a few blocks of each other, filling storefronts that sat empty or underused for years before the pandemic and after it. By the time the Standard revisited the corridor this June, it was describing West Portal as a place people now travel to on purpose to eat, not just a stop for people who already live there.
- Elena's, which reportedly drew waits as long as four hours in its first weeks
- George's Donuts & Merriment, a marble-clad café
- Khao Tiew, a Thai spot
- Binu Bonu, a Sardinian-focused wine bar run by Massimiliano Conti
- Lion West Portal, a sushi restaurant
- Snow Bliss, a bingsu shop
- Copper Chimney, an Indian restaurant
Nearly all of those openings were run by people who already lived in or near West Portal, or who had long-standing ties to the neighborhood, which is part of why the additions read as continuity rather than disruption. They sit alongside businesses that predate all of this by decades: Shaws, the ice cream and candy counter that's been on the avenue since 1931, and the Philosopher's Club, a bar on Ulloa Street that's been pouring drinks for generations. Kids still walk to Shaws after school in the same uniforms their parents wore.
The newest addition is in a location that mattered symbolically as much as commercially. Papenhausen Hardware closed in 2024 after 88 years at 32 West Portal Avenue. In its place, owner Sam Pederson set up Hardware Coffee Co., a café and flower shop that sources its coffee from Oakland's Grand Coffee Roasters and was targeting a late April 2026 opening with six-in-the-morning-to-six-at-night hours, seven days a week. Pederson has framed the name as a deliberate nod to what the space used to be, telling a Chronicle reporter that the goal was to match the old store's reliability with a different kind of product. It's a small detail, but it's the kind of detail that tells you something about how this particular commercial strip thinks about turnover: not as erasure, but as a relay.
The next test isn't about traffic anymore
None of this means the corridor's anxious streak is over. It's just aimed at a different target now. Earlier this month, plans surfaced for a project across from the shuttered Empire Theater that more than doubled in scale from what merchants had been told to expect, from an original proposal to a building with 172 apartments across 12 floors and 7,000 square feet of ground-floor retail. Twenty-six of those units will be designated below market rate.
The reaction from small business owners has been closer to resignation than relief. Bullard, a board member of the West Portal Merchants Association who has run a bookstore across the street from the Empire Theater for two decades, pictures construction vehicles and jackhammers replacing the sidewalk traffic her store depends on. She's also said publicly that she isn't confident the building's future residents will become her customers at all. Supervisor Melgar has acknowledged that the extended community listening sessions merchants pushed for during the 2024 traffic fight are no longer a requirement the city can impose, which means this round of change is moving on a faster, less negotiable timeline than the last one did. El Toreador owner Esperanza Mahan is another named merchant on the same stretch now watching the project take shape.
It's a familiar shape. In 2024, the fear was that a city-driven change to the street itself would hollow out the businesses that make West Portal feel the way it does. The data says that fear didn't materialize. Whether the same holds for a twelve-story building and years of construction noise is the next thing this neighborhood will find out, and it's worth watching not because the outcome is predictable, but because West Portal has already been through one version of this argument and come out with a busier avenue than it started with.
If you're weighing what a neighborhood like this actually offers day to day, not just what a listing photo shows, that's the kind of read the Denis Lancerin Group spends its time on. Reach out if you want a conversation grounded in what's actually happening on the ground here, not just what the comps say.
