A Yes vote is the beginning of a decade

Vol. I, No. 14 · San Francisco — Thursday, July 30, 2026

BY CONSTANCE FEENEY, CITY HALL

My grandmother typed in this building through the 1907 graft trials and kept the good pages, so I was raised to understand that a vote in San Francisco is a beginning, not an end. Nothing about a bond measure builds anything. When the city asks you to approve a general obligation bond — a seawall, a fire station, a housing fund — you are not ordering a thing built; you are authorizing the city to borrow the money to build it, someday, at a pace it does not put on the ballot. The interesting question, the one the ballot never answers, is how long the road runs between the Yes and the concrete. The city keeps a ledger that answers it, and I have been reading it.

There are a dozen bond programs open on that ledger, running from a 2012 parks measure to two bonds the voters passed in 2024, and together they carry about $4.2 billion in budgeted work. Sixty cents of every budgeted dollar has been spent. That is the average, and like most averages it hides the only thing worth knowing, which is that the money divides cleanly by age. The bonds from 2012 through 2016 are almost done: the 2015 affordable-housing bond is 99.7 percent spent, the 2014 transportation bond ninety percent, the 2012 parks bond ninety-seven. The money does flow. It simply flows on a decade’s clock — several of those 2012 park projects finished seven and eight years after their own original deadlines, and finished all the same.

The bonds from 2018 on are a different picture: thirty-two cents on the dollar, taken together. Part of that is nothing more than youth — the two 2024 bonds have scarcely been issued, and you cannot fault a two-year-old bond for having built little. But the 2020 earthquake-safety bond, $628 million for fire stations and a firefighting water system, is eighteen percent spent six years on. And then there is the one I keep returning to, because it was sold as the most urgent of them all.

In November 2018 the voters approved $425 million for the Embarcadero seawall — the first, smallest installment on a barrier meant to hold three miles of downtown waterfront against both the next earthquake and the rising bay. Eight years later, the city’s own accounting shows about half of it issued as bonds and an eighth of it — $57 million, thirteen percent — actually spent. The construction lines are nearly untouched: the $136 million marked for early construction shows a million and a half gone. Almost all of the money that has moved has moved into study and design. And the design itself has slipped the way nothing else on the ledger has: the “Final Design” milestone, once due in April 2024, is now projected for December 2035. The city has spent eight years, and will spend at least nine more, deciding precisely what to build against the water.

Here is where my inheritance makes me gentle rather than sharp. The record says slippage is the rule, not the scandal — bonds in this city are drawn slowly and spent slowly and, on the evidence of every measure old enough to judge, finished. The reassurance and the warning live in the same sentence: the money lands, but on a clock measured in presidential terms, and the seawall is behind even that patient norm. A wall against a rising sea is being drawn at the pace of a government that assumes it has time, and is quietly wagering the ocean agrees. My confidence is high on the figures — this is the city’s financial ledger, refreshed this April, and it says what it says. The reasons are the honest guesswork of anyone who has watched public works: a three-mile engineering problem, a partnership with the federal Army Corps, and sea-level targets that keep moving under the drafting table. One caveat I owe you: the program renamed its line items between reports, so the exact dollar spent is fuzzy at the edges. The shape of it — borrowed but unspent, designed but unbuilt — is not.

San Francisco’s share of the Bay Wheels system carried 422,533 station trips this June, against 322,951 a year ago — up nearly thirty-one percent. Four of every five were electric, three of every four were members, and the busiest docks in the city sit at the mouths of the trains.

BY INES CALLOWAY, TRANSIT DESK — ABOARD THE N, INBOUND

I file from aboard whatever is moving, which lately means watching the bike racks at every stop empty out faster than they used to. The numbers bear the eye out. Lyft posts every Bay Wheels trip, month by month, and the San Francisco docks — the ones lettered SF — started 422,533 rides this past June. The same month a year earlier they started 322,951. That is a jump of nearly thirty-one percent in twelve months, in a system that has been on these streets since the Ford GoBike days, and it is the kind of growth Muni has not seen on any line in a decade.

What grew was the electric slab. Of this June’s San Francisco trips, 337,796 — four in five — were on an e-bike, and the electric fleet is where nearly all the new riding came from: e-bike trips rose a third over the year, classic pedal bikes only a fifth. This is the plainest fact about cycling in a city built on hills: the motor is the reason. The assist erased the topography that was San Francisco’s standing excuse, and the moment it did, the hills stopped being an argument.

Who is riding, and from where, is the part that tells you what the system has become. Three of every four trips — 76 percent — were taken by members, people who pay by the year, not tourists renting an afternoon along the waterfront. And the busiest docks in the city are the doorways of the transit system: the Caltrain station at Townsend Street started 5,667 rides in June, nearly two hundred a day, the single busiest dock in town; behind it come Powell and Montgomery BART, the 22nd Street Caltrain platform, the Ferry Building — and then the flat commuter groove of the Wiggle and the Panhandle, Waller and Page and Pierce. The map that the trips draw is not a tourist’s map. It is a commute: off the train, onto a battery, across the one level corridor the city allows.

So read this as transit ridership by another name. When the city argues about Muni’s recovery and BART’s empty cars, here is one mode quietly up a third in a year, doing the last mile the trains can’t. My confidence on the count is total — every trip is logged to the second. My confidence on the commute reading is only moderate, because the file records no trip’s purpose; I am inferring it from the member share, the dock geography, and the shape of a working week. One honest caveat cuts toward more, not less: the fastest-growing trips of all are the dockless ones, the free-floating e-bikes that start at no station and so appear in none of these station counts — those quadrupled across the Bay this year. The thirty-one percent is a floor, and the floor is already remarkable.