By Marcus Escartin
Along Ocean Beach, the Upper Great Highway has been many things to San Francisco. The stretch of coastline was once home to attractions like Playland at the Beach, where generations of San Franciscans made memories. During COVID-19, it became a lifeline for residents seeking outdoor activities. On April 12, 2025, after debates, a recall election and a citywide ballot measure, Sunset Dunes, a two-mile coastal park, became a reality for San Francisco residents.
The Friends of Sunset Dunes, alongside its contributors, organized PloverFest, originally planned for April 12 to coincide with the park’s first anniversary. The festival was later pushed back two weeks because of inclement weather. Stretching from Judah Street to Sloat Boulevard, PloverFest brought hundreds of residents from across the City to celebrate the anniversary. The event featured live music across four stages and local vendors, drawing visitors of all ages.
Among those in attendance were Ian Long and Aldea Meary-Miller, residents of the Richmond District, who said their connection to the park runs deeper than geography. As Richmond residents not directly impacted by the Upper Great Highway closure, they said Sunset Dunes represents something the City does not have enough of.
“We would like to see the dunes stay open,” they said, pointing to the environmental value the park has brought to restoring the coast.
However, environmental value is not the only concern surrounding the park. Sunset Dunes has also brought increased human activity closer to federally protected nesting habitats once deterred by the Upper Great Highway roadway. The preservation of habitats like those for the endangered Western Snowy Plover, the bird PloverFest is named after, remains a point of discussion among residents. Although the habitat is actively monitored during sensitive nesting seasons by the National Park Service, some residents argue that the transformation of the Upper Great Highway into a pedestrian park has increased foot traffic near federally protected habitat along Ocean Beach.
Jack, a longtime San Francisco resident who grew up in the Sunset, said the park affects more than just former Great Highway commuters. He said Sunset Dunes has had a broader impact on neighborhood life.
“It does more good than bad,” he said. Jack noted he lives in a part of the Sunset where he rarely uses the highway and said he has seen no meaningful difference in traffic since the closure. He added that his wife now regularly uses the park for morning runs.
While many affirm that traffic has not been impacted by the highway’s closure, a July 2025 study from the San Francisco Chronicle and HERE Technologies found that the average travel time for those going from the Outer Sunset/Parkside neighborhoods to the Outer Richmond had increased.
Lucas Lux, president of Friends of Sunset Dunes, said the park’s popularity is exactly what makes its future secure, even as opponents push toward another ballot fight.
“I think it’s our job to create spaces that generate positive change in our communities,” Lux said. “I believe that currently we have the best people pushing this idea forward.”
Lux pointed to visitor numbers and increased activity among businesses near the park as evidence that Sunset Dunes delivered on its promise to the neighborhood.
He expressed confidence heading into what he described as the “sixteenth proposal” to revert the space back into a highway.
Not everyone in the Sunset shares that view. The same district that voted against Proposition K in 2024 by a two-to-one ratio could once again play a central role in determining the future of Sunset Dunes this November. Proponents for a compromise solution, where vehicles could use the roadway on weekdays, are aiming for a November election.
Categories: Upper Great Highway
The “Dunes’ sit on a Stolen Highway. This major arterial is badly needed. It handled from 14,000 cars to 20,000 car A DAY. The disastrous closure of 19th Avenue for repairs put an unmistakable focus on this problem. REOPEN The Great Highway!
I would like to ask that this reporter do a follow-up story to cover the other side of this issue, which includes everything from emergency access and fire safety for the entire West Side (through the Auxiliary Water Supply System, which Sunset Beacon reporter Thomas K. Pendergast has written extensively about), to the fact that the name “Friends Of Sunset Dunes” was registered by Friends Of Ocean Beach/The Great Highway/Sunset Dunes president Lucas Lux through Poppy Gilman of OffixEdge on Noriega in 2022, long before San Francisco Recreation & Parks opened up their park naming ‘contest’, which “Sunset Dunes” subsequently ‘won’.
Rec & Park is also known as one of the most corrupt agencies in the city. Plenty of San Francisco residents, including former park employees, will tell you that former Rec & Park general manager Phil Ginsburg should be in jail. Yet none of this is mentioned in this story, despite plenty of commentary having run in the Sunset Beacon over the last three to five years.
Only interviewing Lux and giving full quotes to park supporters — while only mentioning the other side as “opponents” who are out for “another November fight”, per the headline — does a huge disservice to those who also live in this community and who have plenty of valid reasons for not wanting a section of California Highway 1 suddenly removed from the public by a park campaign funded by billionaires with massive real estate interests and influence.
Former SFPD commander Richard Corriea and Great Wall Hardware owner Albert Chow are two community leaders who have written numerous opinion pieces in the Sunset Beacon, and who have laid out their reasons for wanting the Great Highway opened in a very reasonable manner.
Sunset Beacon reporter Thomas K. Pendergast can explain how in 2017, San Francisco City Hall abandoned their plans to expand the city’s Auxiliary Water Supply System — our firefighting water system — to the West Side. Pendergast will understand that Mayor Lurie’s recent Prop A only builds out our drinking-water system, which history and scientific fact shows will 100% fail during our next major earthquake.
The Tenderloin and SOMA residents who wrote Mission Local’s Joe Eskenazi to tell him that they have spent the last 20+ years filing the city paperwork to get a park in their districts — with *no results — can explain what it’s like to see a beachfront park for predominantly young, white AI families and tech employees fast-tracked and built right in front of their eyes.
And Selena Chu is a Richmond District resident who can very clearly explain the effect that closing the Great Highway has on the Chinese American community, which is a major business engine within the entire West Side. She can also explain what it was like to help former Sunset District Supervisor Joel Engardio get elected due to his supposed support for upholding the Great Highway compromise, and then watch him work with Lucas Lux to turn the Great Highway into a permanent park — with no public input — as soon as he got elected.
The Sunset Beacon’s Michael Durand was a wonderful editor who cared about giving his entire community a voice, and representing everyone’s voices fairly. I hope you will balance out this article by giving equal coverage to the people who are here referred to as “opponents”, but who are actually people who understand the word “compromise”.
The Open The Great Highway supporters have strong opinions and are willing to voice them. Trying to silence them equals trying to silence the very same people — OK, Boomers — whose protesting gave us the Civil Rights Movement and all the civil rights we have today. This isn’t about a bunch of people who can’t take no for an answer. This is about people who know firsthand what real democracy looks like.
Some great points! There is So Much More to hear, beside the Official Version!
What’s striking about this article is how casually the snowy plover gets used as a feel‑good symbol for Sunset Dunes, even as the text itself admits that human activity has moved closer to federally protected habitat since the closure. That’s not conservation that’s PR.
Anyone who actually walks the dunes can see what’s happening: the “barriers” are thin metal stakes with a single wire between them. They don’t stop anyone. People and off‑leash dogs step right through them without realizing they’re entering habitat. Events like PloverFest bring even more foot traffic into the exact areas the species depends on. The result is predictable: disturbance, trampling, and increased predator presence: all well‑documented threats to plovers.
This isn’t just local observation. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and long‑term monitoring groups like SFBBO have been clear for years: human disturbance is one of the primary causes of nest failure and habitat abandonment for coastal plovers. They need open, quiet, actively managed habitat… NOT a heavily used recreation corridor with symbolic fencing and no real enforcement.
Before the closure, the Upper Great Highway acted as a buffer.People stayed on designated pedestrian trails, keeping the dunes undisturbed and protecting this fragile habitat from intrusion. Now, with the roadway closed and the area marketed as a “park,” foot traffic has been funneled directly into fragile environments.
Calling this “PloverFest” doesn’t change the ecological reality; it just turns a threatened species into a mascot for a project that increases the very pressures the bird is supposed to be protected from. Reopening the roadway on weekdays would restore that protective separation, reduce human intrusion during the critical nesting season, and give the plovers the quiet, open space they actually require. If we truly care about this threatened species, we should protect its habitat the right way by guiding people back onto established trails, curbing overwhelming crowds, and giving the dunes back to the birds.
If we’re going to invoke the snowy plover, then we owe it honesty. Real stewardship means managing access, enforcing dog rules, and designing habitat around the species’ needs — not using the bird as a shield while its habitat gets trampled under the weight of false intentions and weekend festivals.
Excellent Points, and very well said, thank you!
I worked for the Sierra Club for 5 years, and I was greatly disappointed when they blindly fell in with the likes of Lux. The Snowy Plover’s Habitat is being Trampled, now that people access Every Square Foot of their precious Habitat. It this misbegotten fake ‘park’ actually Green and Environmental? Heck NO!
“I’m mad that the Sierra Club supports a coastal park instead of me going vroom vroom by the beach” is the sort of strange position that makes one wonder just what you think the Sierra Club even is.
The aim of the Sierra Club is to Conserve Nature, Not to Trample Habitat of a Protected Species to Extinction. The automobiles on the Great Highway Actually PROTECTED the Snowy Plover Habitat by Preventing the Free-for-All, Tramp Everywhere, and ‘Disregard the Nesting Birds’ activity along the Entire Two Mile Length of this fake, stolen, Asphalt ‘Park’. Instead, walkers had to cross Only at the 4 or so intersections, and were funneled across to the Beach, (an Actual Park). This protection worked for years.. until the fake ‘Park’ upended any protections the poor Birds had. Beyond regrettable. This destruction is a Violation of the Endangered Species Act. .. but I’m sure you don’t care about That.
Exactly, it’s greenwashing by yuppies who don’t care about the environment nor are they even 0.001% helping it. They are liars. Plain, simple liars. They could care less about the snowy plover or any other REAL environmental concerns.
The Sierra Club is not the 60’s institution it used to be, it’s a clearinghouse.