Valencia Street

Valencia Street is a major road in San Francisco, California. It starts at Market Street near Hayes Valley and goes through the Mission District before ending at Mission Street in Bernal Heights. The street marks the edge of several neighborhoods and is named after the Valencia family, who were early settlers from Mexico in California.

Many years ago, a streetcar line ran along Valencia Street as part of the Market Street Railroad. Service began in 1860 and used cables to pull the cars until after a big earthquake in 1906. Electric trolleys started running there in October of that year. Streetcars stopped running on January 15, 1949, and were not replaced with buses, so the street had no public transit for a long time.

In the 1990s, people who liked biking worked to make Valencia Street better for cyclists. They removed a middle strip of the road to make space for bike paths. Over time, the city made the road narrower, added more bike lanes, and made sidewalks wider. In 2023, they tried a new idea for bike lanes in the middle of the street, but it didn’t work well. In February 2025, they changed it back to regular bike lanes on the sides of the road.