It started as a temporary pandemic-era amenity for San Francisco: a two-mile stretch of coastal road closed to cars in April 2020, giving locals a stunning oceanfront park to enjoy on foot or bike. The change proved popular enough to keep after COVID, and in 2024 the city’s voters agreed to turn it into a full-time park.
But that wasn’t the end of the controversy surrounding Sunset Dunes Park, created on what was the city’s four-lane Upper Great Highway. It even cut short the political career of Supervisor Joel Engardio, who led the movement for the park’s creation. Now there’s a proposal on the Nov. 3 ballot, Proposition G, to open the park back up to cars during weekdays, giving voters in California’s densest, most progressive big city a chance to do something unthinkably L.A.
I hope voters in San Francisco don’t cave to the backlash and concede another public space to cars.
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This is the third time Sunset Dunes has been on the ballot – or fourth, if you count the 2025 recall of Engardio. He won his seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 2022, the same year that voters rejected a proposal to end the weekend closure of the road.
Two years later, Engardio spearheaded Proposition K, which made the highway closure permanent and created Sunset Dunes Park, the largest pedestrianization project in California history. The measure passed with 55% citywide but failed resoundingly in adjacent districts, including Engardio’s. Constituents complained of increased traffic in residential neighborhoods from cars diverted from the closed road. They gathered enough signatures to hold a recall election in 2025, which the first-term supervisor lost by 26 percentage points.
“It can all be seen as a cautionary tale of what not to do or or how to approach anything involving street safety or climate change or the environment,” Engardio told me.
We’ll see how much of a warning it is in a few weeks. The park is unquestionably popular: In its first year of operation, according to city data, Sunset Dunes drew about 1.7 million visitors. Notwithstanding locals’ anger, my money is on voters citywide affirming the choice they’ve made twice since 2022 and rejecting Proposition G.
Golden State staff
Engardio may have been willing to lose his political career in service of the greater good, but the same can’t be said for leaders in California cities with far worse traffic safety problems. I want San Francisco voters to send these officials the message that projects prioritizing the safety of people outside a car are worth it, if only because they’ll outlast the anger they inevitably touch off.
It’s a lesson that officials in Los Angeles – where traffic deaths have outnumbered homicides three years in a row – desperately need to learn. In May, following opposition from local groups and nearby cemeteries, Mayor Karen Bass halted a plan in the works for years to remove vehicle lanes and improve bike safety along Forest Lawn Drive, a notoriously dangerous stretch of road in the San Fernando Valley. Recently, she offered her own plan that would leave Forest Lawn Drive a four-lane road.
Bass’ behavior is nothing new for the city where I’ve logged thousands of miles on bike and foot. In 2017, vehicle traffic lanes were briefly removed from Vista del Mar between Playa del Rey and El Segundo along Dockweiler Beach – not to fulfill some urbanist fantasy, but because the city admitted after a wrongful death lawsuit that the road was unsafe for pedestrians.
Rage ensued. Recalls were threatened. Two months after the change to Vista del Mar, then-L.A. City Councilmember Mike Bonin – known for fearlessly defending homeless housing in his district – announced he was “truly sorry” for inconveniencing Westside drivers and that Vista del Mar would see its traffic lanes fully restored. That street remains dangerous, and the city is still figuring out how to curb deaths without aggravating motorists.
Lloyd Dixon
Engardio, who is now campaigning against Proposition G, told me he has no regrets about championing Sunset Dunes Park. “There’s a finite amount of time that we have in these offices and … you could spend all of your time playing it safe and trying to keep your job,” he said. “But then what will you have to show for the end of the day? What's the point?”
Hopefully, after Nov. 3, San Francisco will have a lasting oceanfront park to show for Engardio’s short political career – and the rest of California will have an object lesson in standing up to motorist backlash for safer, more livable cities.
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