The now 19-month experiment to move the Valencia Street bike lanes to the center of the street will come crumbling apart starting Monday, when construction crews start ripping those center bike lanes apart, and moving the lanes back to the curbside.

The SF Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) made the bold but unconventional decision to move the bike lanes on Valencia Street to the center of the street in April 2023, and it didn’t take long to find that people hated this counterintuitive design once construction started that summer. So the SFMTA started talking about scrapping the new design in December 2023, and after countless meetings, finally approved moving the bike lanes back to the curbside in November 2024.

And today, the Chronicle reports that construction to move those bike lanes back to the curbs starts Monday, February 10.

“Construction on the new side-running bike lane on Valencia Street begins Monday, Feb. 10!” SFMTA announced in a Wednesday tweet. “Work hours will be 7 am to 5 pm starting between 23rd and 22nd Streets, with removal of the center-running bike lane.”

The center-running bike lane does not cover all of Valencia Street, only the stretch between 15th and 23rd streets of that corridor. The rest of Valencia has its old-style curbside bike lanes, and the area in question will also move back to that design.

“This project is expected to last two to three months, depending on weather conditions,” the SFMTA says in their full announcement. “Work will take place between 7 am and 5 pm on weekdays. There may be occasional work outside of those timeframes.”

Both cars and bikes will still be able to move through during construction, though some individual blocks will be partially or fully closed at times.

It won’t be the exact same bike lane design as before. The new design will create “protected” bike lanes wherein parked cars serve as buffers between bike lanes and moving car traffic. (Green lines represent the bike lanes in the map above, while the parking spaces are white lines.) The bike lanes will also swerve around existing parklets in some places.

And even though this is the undoing of a generally unpopular experiment, there is likely to be more outcry from Valencia Street merchants over reduced parking. As the Chronicle points out, “The redesign will cut roughly a third of the existing street parking, but preserve 26 parklets that line the 8-block stretch.”

Related: It’s Official: Valencia Street Bike Lanes Moving Back to the Curbside, Starting in January [SFist]

Image: SFMTA