“Sunset Buzz” is a recurring column on changes, tidbits and other news from the Sunset. Got news? Send us tips at junyao@missionlocal.com.
For years, the yellow campaign signs with black text that covered the Sunset were synonymous with the fight to reopen the Great Highway to cars.
That was the design for materials to open the Great Highway through a lawsuit aiming to overturn Prop. K, which closed the roadway in exchange for Sunset Dunes park, and for the recall of former Supervisor Joel Engardio who advocated for the park in 2025.
But this year’s campaign for Prop. G, the latest ballot measure to bring cars back to the Great Highway on weekdays, has ditched its signature black and yellow. In its place, advocates for Prop. G opted for what resembles a pedestrian crossing sign and reads “Safe streets & great parks, SF needs both.”
But pedestrian safety advocates at the nonprofit Walk SF, which opposes Prop. G, said they were “frankly horrified” when they saw the new signs, calling them “deceptive tactics.”
“This is a complete misappropriation of pedestrian safety symbolism,” said Marta Lindsey, the communications director at Walk SF. “In what world does adding vehicle traffic to a road make pedestrians safer?”
The Yes on G campaign claimed that “traffic injuries rose 34 percent in the Sunset,” and “accidents increased when Great Highway commuters were routed through neighborhoods.”
But city data shows that there has been no increase of traffic injuries in District 4 since the road closure.
Jamie Hughes, the spokesperson for the Yes on G campaign, argued that reopening the roadway would make the neighborhood streets safer by decreasing the number of “frustrated” drivers speeding down the avenues after sitting in traffic.
“This isn’t about ‘I wanna drive my car all the time,’” Hughes said. “If you have to get to your job in Daly City that starts at 8:30 in the morning and drop off your kids at school on the way, driving is the only viable option.”
After the 11-year-old Mediterranean restaurant LaLe closed last November in the Inner Sunset, its doors remained shut, its parklet empty, until recently. Construction is underway at the former space of LaLe, and a new restaurant offering similar cuisine, Istanbul Kebab & Gyros, will open in its place, according to business filings.
The new owner, Hayri Kabulantok, also runs Mesopotamia Kitchen, another Mediterranean restaurant in Noe Valley on 24th Street.
This is the newest addition to a thriving Mediterranean cuisine scene in the Inner Sunset that includes Lavash, Mezze and Moore II and Park Gyros.
It feels like in every Sunset Buzz, there’s a coffee shop opening.
This time, it’s a new cafe that may be coming to the vacant space at 725 Lincoln Way near Ninth Avenue as soon as next year. A new building permit filed on Tuesday indicated “proposed tenant improvement for a coffee shop” at the site.
The owner wants to open a grab-and-go cafe serving coffee, tea, salad and perhaps sushi for park-goers to bring across the street to Golden Gate Park, said Jefferson Jin, a designer helping the building owner with permitting. The details haven’t been finalized, he said.
The space was occupied for over 60 years by Cuschieri’s Cabinet Shop, run by Paul Cuschieri, a veteran who made custom furniture.
Jackie, an employee at the neighboring Sip Tea Room, remembered “an old man” who had been doing woodwork in that space for almost all his life.
“There were these beautiful woodwork pieces all over the place,” he recalled.
The storefront windows were covered by wooden frames, soldiers and chess boards.
Cuschieri died in 2020 and the building was sold in 2024. The new owner has been doing “construction nonstop,” Jackie said.
For a while, residents who frequent Irving Subs in the Inner Sunset could sit down and eat their Dutch crunch at an additional dining area a few doors down at 1046 Irving St. The sandwich shop itself has very limited seating, just a public bench in the front.
But Irving Subs owner Frankie Lee recently shuttered that dining area and said he is thinking of different projects for the space.
“It was not really necessary. It was always empty,” Lee said of that space.
When he first leased the spot a couple of years ago — it was too good of a deal to miss — he planned to open a vegan spot, but that didn’t pan out.
“Stuff with the city. Too much going on,” he explained. He hasn’t decided what to do with the space yet, but if anything were to come to fruition, it would be around the holiday season, he said.
If people are driving like assholes due to “frustration” then those drivers are the problem. Catering to people who are driving aggressively on residential streets because we turned upper great highway into a park is like, excuse the comparison, hiding in your room and trying to be quiet so your drunken father won’t beat you. Noisy kids are not the problem in that imaginary case and sunset dunes park is not the problem in the putative case of people driving too fast in the sunset (which may not even be happening as the article explains)
“People”.
It is supposed to be a partnership out there on the roadways. Daemonizing one group and turning driving into an obstacle course doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
It’s just basic and straightforward that having 20,000 more drivers go through a dense residential area controlled only with haphazard stop signs is inherently more dangerous for any “type of driver” than bypassing it along a well-controlled wide open corridor that actually saves fuel and reduces pollution overall by comparison.
Why pretend not to understand that? People who don’t live in the Sunset seem to have problems understanding the basic issue for some reason, deliberate or not. Why?
The story has a graph, where’s your graph?
Additionally I’m proud to say I moved out of d4 partially due to the dead end car brain culture out there. You live in the city, driving in the city sucks. Why should d4 be an exception? I say get used to it.
You just exposed yourself as a deliberately dishonest person pushing an agenda that has zero to do with safety, who claims to have left the district affected by prop K “because cars bad” – which imaginary district did you move to without cars trucks or emergency vehicles?
Good luck pretending!
Mission Local is acting as stegonographer for lies and not even bothering to report the facts of the situation. “If you have to get to your job in Daly City that starts at 8:30 in the morning and drop off your kids at school on the way, driving is the only viable option.” This quote is false, and it should be identified as such.
The southern Great Highway extension is closed to southbound cars. It will close completely soon, because of coastal erosion and constant sand encroachment. Even if Prop G passes, there will be NO WAY to get to Daly City via Sunset Dunes. Why is Mission Local not highlighting this obvious omission and bias by Prop G supporters?
I make the point all the time about the GH extension being permanently closed – things are never going back to the way they were. But since you like facts, let me point out “there will be NO WAY to get to Daly City via Sunset Dunes” just isn’t true. A southbound car on GH would just take a left on Sloat and then a right on Skyline.
And what’s false about the quote from Jamie Hughes? It’s a subjective statement anyway – “viable” is doing a lot of the work there.
The water treatment plant down by the zoo needs protection by filling in and reenforcing the beach. While at it, we might as well keep GH open south of Sloat.
Well, Fact Enjoyer, If you live in the Richmond or Sunset Districts, and you have to get to your job at 8:30am in the morning (dropping off your kids to school en route), how do you do that without a car? ?
My guess is you just got to the city only a couple of years ago after the pandemic. The crossing North to South into Daly City was ALWAYS SMOOTH. The only time it was not was coastal flooding that happens ONLY WHEN WE HAVE HEAVY, HEAVY RAINS. That’s happened a handful of times in the 50+ years I’ve lived here and drivin nearly 35 of those years. THE COASTAL HIGHWAY NEVER CLOSED IN ANY OTHER CASE. Sure, there is sand and the Great Highway will close for 1 to 2 hours LATE IN THE EVENING for the sweepers that make one solid pass on either side and it’s reopened again.
You’re making stuff up and this is why your side of issue is failing. None of it is true and comes from people who, frankly, have no history here and are open about disrespecting the elderly and the history of District 4. Yes on G will pass because many people now understand the mistake of closing the Great Highway to consistent commercial traffic. Walkers HAVE ALWAYS HAD ACCESS TO THE HIGHWAY WITH THE PATHS THE ARE CREATED ON EITHER SIDE OF THE EMBANKMENT FOR THAT PURPOSE. The tech bros who took part in closing the Great Highway were carpetbaggers (most have left the area already) and bribed a goofy unsophisticated man who held a civil position that was way over his head. Now the good people of District 4 have to correct it with this proposition and things will be back to the way it was which was ALWAYS SAFE and people were happy.
“In what world does adding vehicle traffic to a road make pedestrians safer?”
Great Highway is the #1 safest major SF thoroughfare for both cars and pedestrians, Melgarites are delusional. Yes, you can get to Daly City much faster bypassing the on-off stop sign regime of the Sunset, and having that many more cars going through a residential area without traffic controls is OBVIOUSLY much riskier than an open, well-controlled and safe roadway that bypasses it!
You’re not truth tellers if you pick one sentence that you find false as if that represents the entirety of the problem? Your arguments are disingenuous and false. If Prop G passes there is a direct shot to Sloat, and the road from Merced to Sloat has to be maintained for the Pump Station / Zoo / USArmy and to maintain the sewer lines that run underneath. It’s a straight up lie to say there’s no way to get to Daly City via the Great Highway. Why lie? Engardio got fired for it because that’s how the Sunset deals with dishonest carpetbaggers who tell bald fibs.
I certainly felt safer before the closing when I followed the traffic light to cross over to the beach. People were biking and jogging on the lane parallel to the highway. Now I have to dodge the bikers and electric vehicles and even skateboarders to cross over. It’s totally unregulated. It’s not shutting down the “park”, which is often empty during the week more and more now that cold weather approaches. This is at the inconvenience of the commuters, and affects the quality of life and SAFETY of the neighborhood residents. Marta Lindsey, get real, you are playing shell games with the “pedestrians” – you are shifting the cars from the highway to the neighborhood streets. How is it safer there?
Someone posted that the slow traffic, stopping and going, cause more pollution. Not good for the neighborhood
Why not share? You still have your park on the weekends!
Just one more freeway in SF — that will finally solve traffic forever!
If you don’t commute in the district you don’t understand the obvious issue.
But in this case you seem to deliberately misunderstand it. Why?
In 2022, when the board of supervisors had the great highway open to cars on weekdays, and closed to cars on weekends, the pro car people could not wait for the board of supervisors to make a decision about how the road should be used and put a proposition on the ballot to open the great highway to cars. They lost and so in 2024, the anti car people put it on the ballot to close the great highway to cars all the time, which passed. The pro car people then came back in 2026 with another proposition to once again open up the great highway to cars to the way it was before all these political battles. If the pro car people win this compromise, there is nothing to say they will not once again push to make it open to cars all the time since they will have been successful in getting rid of all the parts that make it a park. The pro car people lost this vote twice already and considering what else is on the ballot, there’s a lot of other things we should probably be focusing on such as the mayors power grab in all the changes to the city charter.
The delusions of the Yes-on-G crowd continue to escalate. They seem to be coming to the (obvious) realization that The City *loves* Sunset Dunes and all the money they’ve set on fire to get this on the ballot is looking like a folly.
Quick! Pivot to confusing the electorate! “Sunset Dunes park shown to cause erectile dysfunction and hair loss” coming to a placard near you. The only remedy: MOAR CARS.
November 4th can’t come soon enough. Long live the Park!
Perhaps if there was… oh I don’t know…. some enforcement for drivers speeding and ignoring stop signs in residential neighborhoods?? Would we then be allowed to have this small stretch of a road available for people who are not in cars? Of course not, because we all know these people don’t care about pedestrian safety. They are simply sore losers who can’t let it go that they lost last time and when they lose again in November they will invent some reason why the election was unfair.
If this was about safer streets, Sunset residents, pro and anti Sunset Dunes, would work together to implement real traffic calming measures (modal filters) to make routing traffic onto Sunset Blvd and 19th Ave more effective.
It sure looks like this is really about having one more place to drive fast.
As for the “drop my kids off at school and go to Daly City” line – if we worked together to make Sunset (and other SF) streets safer, more kids could walk or bike to school.
(Or, we could open the zoo to cars on weekdays and pave Lake Merced and make it really easy to get to Daly City by car, if that’s what makes SF great.)
prop G delusions of efficacy.
Vote no on G: stop Sylvia Chu from hurting your kids.
The only place you don’t see cars and traffic is a car commercial.
Here is a fact. Prop K only won by 54.73%. The vote was from the entire city and it very much effected the lives of commuters and families who live on the west side. There is no longer a commutable road that goes north and south, and in and out of the City, beyond 19th Ave, and also Sunset. That means that the 15,000 to 20,000 autos that once used TGH have to disburse along the Avenues between Lincoln and Sloat. If Prop G passes, the GH will be open to autos Mon-Fri and close at 6pm Fri to become a weekend and holiday park. I ask all voters to consider this…Do you use the Dunes Park during the week as well as the weekend, or do you only use it on weekends? Because if you only use it weekends, passing Prop G won’t be a negative for you at all. It will be open every weekend and on holidays for your recreational use anyway. Allowing people to commute like before the pandemic would also make the overloaded with traffic avenues, much safer. And as someone said earlier, all you have to do is turn left at Sloat to go around the Zoo and south towards the Peninsula. It just makes sense to “share” the road that way.
I often ride down to the dunes park along Golden Gate Park before heading home after work. If the great highway was to be opened during the week, it would cut my use of the park at least in half if not more. Just speaking personally, it was a bit nerve wracking riding on the edge of the road when cars used to drive there and when I tried the winding worn path on the east side, it made me wish for more suspension on my e-bike as well as more space to pass the joggers, dog walkers and baby strollers. Not sure when that path was repaired but it could use some work although it seems fine when going on foot or at a slower pace.
No- to all the air and noise pollution. No- to machines over nature. No- to taking away playgrounds from children. No- to stealing sanctuary from wildlife. No- to selfishness over community joy. This isn’t about cars, this is a class war. Power To The People.
There have been THREE major injury accidents on the Great Highway since the road was closed! The last was two months ago. While the city has claimed they were going to act, all they did was put a few signs at the end of the road “suggesting” that e-bikes use one side and pedestrians use the other.
Channel 5, KPIX, did a story on this a year ago, but nothing has happened since.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAemeCU1rUI
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1652509069157510/permalink/1659158235159260/
So you show city data that annual injury accidents averaged 105 over the prior 3 years but this year the annualized figure is 136
Then state:
“But city data shows that there has been no increase of traffic injuries in District 4 since the road closure.”
That makes absolutely no sense
Makes sense if your numbers are just wrong. Or made up.
Because what you said doesn’t match the graph in the story, at all.
LOL The graph is highly misleading if you fail to read the footnote or apply some critical reasoning skills. The number for 2026 is for HALF of a year. Note we’re currently in August of 2026.
2023: 110
2024: 106
2025: 99
HALF of 2026: 68
So exactly as I stated: injury accidents averaged 105 over the prior 3 years but this year an annualized figure is 136 (68×2) — which means accidents are UP 29%, not down.
Reading is difficult for google lawyers?
How much are the tech oligarchs paying Walk SF?
Over the last 2 decades, the roads has been dumbed down to cater to the incompetent drivers that don’t pay attention. Bring the streets to crawl isn’t a transportation solution.
Get the digital pacifiers aka cellphones out of driver’s face, then they might stand a better chance at becoming a better driver.
“In what world does adding vehicle traffic to a road make pedestrians safer?”
The answer is right there in the article! Accidents are up in the neighboring streets since the GH was closed.
It was totally obvious and predictable that that was going to happen. The safest roads in the city per passenger mile are 80, 101 and 280. If they didn’t exist then you’d have thousands more vehicles on residential streets killing people.
If I were a resident, pedestrian or cyclist in the Sunset then the last thing I would want is angry and frustrated drivers cramming the local streets because the obvious and direct route has been arbitrarily removed. Same thing if you closed 19th Avenue.
@Bill – There is no evidence that collisions (not “accidents”) are up in the neighboring streets. Consult the city’s open data, linked to from this article.
“In what world does adding vehicle traffic to a road make pedestrians safer?” Asks Marta Lindsey of Walk SF. Answer: Sometimes in the real world. For example, in the far far outerland world of the inexplicably park hating car crazy Outer Sunset. When the Great Highway was closed for the “park”, speeding traffic and stop sign rolling picked up noticeably on certain streets. Many drivers now favor cutting across the neighborhood on 42nd, 44th, and 45th Avenues as well as the Lower Great Highway. Why? Because the city’s preferred detour of Sunset Blvd. was deemed unappealing by these drivers. Some may ask, wasn’t the Great Highway dangerous? Or Why should we reopen a dangerous highway? Answer: No. When the Great Highway was open, dangerous cross traffic was not a major issue in the neighborhood. The highway itself was very safe records show. I credit the timed traffic signals that rewarded drivers with green lights when they obeyed the speed limit.
I’m not questioning your observations about dangerous driving in the sunset, but I will question the cause of it. Police have cut ticketing for reckless driving by 90+% over the last decade. On top of that, during covid times people learned bad driving habits that were not punished. In my neighborhood – far from the great highway – dangerous driving has been way worse since 2020 as well. I guarantee you that Prop G would not solve bad driving in the sunset any more than it would in my neighborhood. But it would remove the one refuge of safety from that danger that sunset residents – especially kids – have.
Ben – good point about the lack of policing and the pandemic era driving. Those factors are absolutely in the mix and made too many of our roads dangerous. However I would argue the closure of the Great Highway was also in the mix. Why? The closure itself caused a significant increase in commuter cross traffic on the blocks cited -with a lot more speeding, stop sign rolling and frustrated drivers. The crash/injury stats so far do not capture what the neighborhood is seeing (we’ll see with a few more years of data). But the people who would know best are saying it with their votes. I like the park, but the truth is the Great Highway serviced most of the cross traffic commuters, kept them off of residential streets, and provided a safe, orderly and efficient road. The bike/walk SF lobby may now shower me with down votes! 🙂
A driver killed an elderly woman crossing Great Highway mere months before the park opened, but sure.
The reality is drivers and traffic all across the city have gotten steadily worse since COVID. The Sunset isn’t special in this regard, and if anything has actually seen some improvement over time compared to the rest of the city. “Frustrated speeding drivers mad about the park” is a completely fictional narrative based on correlation instead of causation.
The Great Highway was very safe, huh? Tell that to the family of Melissa Lai Chow.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/pedestrian-killed-upper-great-highway-identified-20011746.php
@Bill M – Your “picked up noticeably” tale is not supported by evidence. It was a claim made during the pandemic and never shown to have happened. It was predicted by the 2024 No-on-K campaign but never shown to have happened. Now it’s asserted by the 2026 Yes-on-G campaign but never shown to have happened.
You’d think that at some point in this whole deal there’d be data to support this, but nope. Sounds like your side is just hoping that repeating unproven claims over and over and over and over and over and over again will do the trick.
Very interesting, except for the fact that it’s pure fiction. There is no evidence of increased traffic danger on nearby streets, it’s just a bogeyman people (like you?) use to justify getting what they want – a convenient nearby thruway, and fewer people coming to the neighborhood.
But how could there be less traffic on those adjacent residential streets when you have just closed off the obvious arterial route nearby?
The law of unintended consequences has struck again.
Someone didn’t even look at the huge graph in the article that refutes this entire point. Gotta love fact deniers! 😂😂😂😂😂
It’s good news, but keep in mind it is only a few years of data and the reduction is fairly modest. There is also the fact that SFMTA has been feverishly installing speed bumps and adding stop signs to many of the corners the last few years. It was almost as if they were anticipating dangerous cross thru traffic caused by Sunset Dunes “park”!!!! Oh, then there is the recent curb daylighting work. Well now, could this mean with the road re-opened, the safety stats could be even better??? Yes. Please weigh when voting on G at the polls.