By Janelle Wong
So much has been written about the iconic two-mile stretch of land along Ocean Beach in the Outer Sunset, now known as Sunset Dunes park. Throughout the past few years, media coverage has endlessly fixated on traffic volume metrics, safety statistics and granular debates about commute times. Yet, amid the noise of endless technical debates, something fundamental and crucial is missing from the conversation: the immense, transformational and long-term benefit of building a lasting community within Sunset Dunes Park compared to the fleeting, short-term convenience of turning it back into a coastal highway for car traffic.
Sunset Dunes exists today as a vibrant public asset thanks to the passage of Proposition K in 2024. Today, the park’s future hangs in the balance once again with Proposition G, which is on the November ballot and proposes allowing cars back onto the Upper Great Highway during weekdays while restricting access on weekends. We have all heard the familiar arguments from both sides – the passionate pro-park advocates and those favoring the “compromise” – but the true, enduring value of Sunset Dunes lies in keeping it permanently car-free, establishing a world-class urban coastal haven and bringing communities together for future generations.
Having lived in the Sunset District for more than two decades, raised a family here and built our life, my connection to this neighborhood is deeply personal. I love its rich diversity, hard working families, public parks and vibrant small businesses that give our district its soul. My husband and I originally chose this area because it offered affordable housing and excellent transit access. Keeping Sunset Dunes intact gives San Francisco an extraordinary destination that showcases why our part of the City is so remarkable – seamlessly blending urban density, robust transit connectivity and direct access to magnificent natural coastlines.
Sunset Dunes is far more than a recreational area; it is a welcoming coastal sanctuary where residents and visitors can grab a coffee or eat lunch from local cafes and sit peacefully by the ocean waves. It offers a shared, democratic space where neighbors gather, children learn to ride bicycles and strangers exchange friendly greetings. Beyond human connection, nature is actively thriving here – marked by the celebrated return of the threatened Snowy Plover and the restoration of native dune flora. Without constant car exhaust and roaring engines, the surrounding neighborhood has grown noticeably quieter, cleaner and healthier for everyone.
What we gain from preserving this park far outweighs anything lost by re-routing traffic to existing arterial roads. Most importantly, Sunset Dunes fosters genuine, lasting community bonds. Originating from the Latin word for “shared” or “public,” community is an essential ingredient for people’s well-being, proven to reduce stress, reduce loneliness and urban anxiety. Gathering in expansive natural settings deepens these positive psychological effects as well. Furthermore, keeping this park active generates tangible economic momentum for Outer Sunset small businesses along Judah, Noriega and Taraval streets, turning weekend visitors and local strollers into loyal patrons for merchants who are the anchors for our local economy.
Moreover, Sunset Dunes is completely free, equitable and accessible to everyone regardless of socio-economic background or car ownership. People from across San Francisco can easily take Muni lines directly to the coast to walk, jog, bike, skate or push a stroller along the ocean in clean, ocean air. Rather than prioritizing fast car transit through a residential coastline, Sunset Dunes represents a forward-looking, climate-resilient vision that unites our City around high-quality, sustainable public space.
Sunset Dunes is far more than just a repurposed road – it is a vital sanctuary for our local community, our small business ecosystem and our shared coastal environment. Keeping this space permanently open and car-free ensures that current residents and future generations can continue to connect, unwind, and enjoy the majestic beauty of Ocean Beach. Voting “no” on Proposition G will preserve Sunset Dunes and is an investment in a healthier, safer, more prosperous and more connected San Francisco.
Janelle Wong is a dedicated nonprofit professional, freelance writer and long-time Sunset resident in San Francisco. With a deep passion for community development and storytelling, Janelle balances a fulfilling career in the social impact sector with a vibrant creative practice as a freelance writer and student in local adult art classes. As a working mother raising two teenage sons in the City, Janelle brings a grounded, real-world perspective to her life and work. She is an avid advocate for San Francisco, frequently engaging in community discussions around sustainable transportation, dense housing and public schools. Whether she is exploring the local culinary scene or finding the best places to bike across the City, Janelle is constantly inspired by the culture and connection of her neighborhood.
Categories: Commentary
Gotta burst your pithy bubble, but my outer sunset neighborhood has a lot more noise and traffic because of the closure, my neighbors and my family’s commutes are an hour longer daily meaning less time with our kids, the dunes are more trampled than ever before with more trash we neighbors pick up, and the plovers were already doing better due to protections put in place years before. Many, many businesses have reported not having greater sales. All the things you mention can happen and were happening with the far more equitable compromise. Please vote YES on G and give our neighborhood a break from unsafe traffic relentlessly coming down our streets! Thank you.
Thank you for sharing what Westside families are actually experiencing every day on the ground!
Losing an hour of family time every single day to diverted gridlock isn’t “granular noise”—it’s a real-world tax on working parents. Dismissing neighbors while quiet residential streets get flooded with spillover traffic is the exact opposite of community building.
You are also spot on about the small business myth. Claims that the highway closure “boosted local business revenue” are pure storytelling, not evidence:
The dunes were thriving long before this closure, and Snowy Plovers were already protected under long-standing habitat rules. Prop G is the true compromise: dedicated park space on weekends when families use it most, and restored weekday sanity so parents can actually get home to their kids. Yes on G!
I’m sorry, you have world class recreational spaces minutes away in the form of Golden Gate Park and a true National Recreation Area – Ocean Beach itself immediately adjacent to this so called park. Sunset Dunes is a closed traffic artery that has created major inconvenience to four times as many people that used it as a safe efficient way to connect the Peninsula to SF as use the space for recreation. In a city that prides itself that no resident is more than 10 minutes away from a park why do we need two miles of a closed highway to make a substandard recreational space where users get run over by speeding bicycles/unicyclists who have sent a child and senior to the hospital? When you close 30% of the capacity of north south transit (like closing the GH did), you overload the remaining two arteries which leads to major gridlock at times. A baby was born on Crossover because of that gridlock. North south transit in the western part of SF is further impaired when roads in Golden Gate Park are closed so you can’t easily even access one of the remaining routes (Sunset Blvd). Outside Lands, the extra concert and the Grateful Dead festival closed access for nearly all of August in 2025. Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, SF Marathon, Bay to Breakers, Escape from Alcatraz, etc etc also close the access. Five minutes longer? Try telling that to my neighbor in the Outer Richmond who took TWO hours to get to SFO instead of the usual 30 minutes before the GH was closed during Outside Lands and 19th Avenue was undergoing maintenance. It took 45 minutes to go ONE block along 19th Avenue. Sunset Dunes ignores the needs of people trying to go to work or do tasks IN THEIR VEHICLES (repair people, carpet cleaners, health care workers, parents taking children to school and afterschool activities, medical appointments) because everyone doesn’t have the luxury of working from home or being able to bring their tools on bicycles. Why do you think Prop K was supported between 65 and 70% of the Sunset and Richmond Districts? Because we needed the GH and we didn’t need another recreational space because the western part of SF is NOT a recreation desert but is underserved by public transit.
Another essential missing piece that is never mentioned by the Sunset Dunes group is exactly how much billionaire and special-interest money powers their group. One has only to look at the sheer amount of money that went into the effort to keep former Supervisor Joel Engardio — who wrote up Prop K and put it on the city ballot — in office to see the difference in audience and demographics.
https://sfethics.org/ethics/2025/06/campaign-finance-dashboards-september-16-2025.html
On the Recall Engardio — aka Open The Great Highway — side, you have neighborhood businesses and city residents contributing out-of-pocket amounts that range from a hundred to a couple thousand dollars.
And on the Stop The Recall side — aka the Sunset Dunes side — you have CEOs, corporate property developers, private equity, venture capitalists, corporations, construction worker unions, the San Francisco Police Officers Association lobbying group, a Scott Wiener shell company, and many more making large political contributions that only private interests can afford to make. It is truly mind-boggling.
Just from reading the promotional flyers during the recall effort, Joel Engardio’s ongoing financial supporters included Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, crypto billionaire Chris Larsen of Ripple, and former journalist-turned-venture-capitalist billionaire Michael Moritz. These are all the same entities that support Sunset Dunes to this day.
In this town, money can buy you all the top public relations, communications, and political consultants in the book. And all of them can smooth words out and turn them around and around until it’s hard to tell which end is up. . . much like this letter, which contains all the warm, affirming keywords (“iconic”, “vibrant”, “small businesses”, “healthier”, “safer”) and smooth, uniform structure of AI-generated content.
The issue I’ve always had with the Sunset Dunes approach is how it instantly glosses over facts while simultaneously being denigrating, such as the terms used in the opening paragraphs: “endlessly fixated”, “fleeting, short-term convenience”, and “amid the noise of endless technical debates”.
This is the same type of language that Scott Wiener and his California YIMBY lobbying group — which, it should be clear, is the lobbying organization for a group of corporate property developers — have been blanketing the media with since at least 2010. The problem is we have hardly any real journalists left to document how a global lobbying campaign works.
San Francisco is under a serious onslaught of billionaire money and has been ever since 2020, when The Guardian reported on Moritz’s “hostile takeover” of San Francisco politics. (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/12/san-francisco-tech-billionaires-political-influence) One of Mayor Lurie’s most recent political flyers notes contributions from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Visa. And those are just the top three donors that the flyer had room for.
The Great Highway is starting to look more and more like a billionaire experiment in how you can pull off a land transfer in plain view of the public — in our case, a transfer to San Francisco Recreation & Parks, one of the most corrupted, pay-to-play institutions in this city.
All you need to do is drop a lot of eco-washing, “park”-washing, and green-washing on top, from a few endlessly funded lobbying organizations. Kudos to Daly City and Westlake Park for managing to fight off their billionaire land grab. (https://savewestlakepark.com/)
So grateful to have a sane take from someone who actually lives in our neighborhood and cares about our community and future. Even though the bean counting about commute minutes and foot versus car traffic still favors Sunset Dunes, it misses the most important part of the discussion: how do we create a better future for our kids and community. Any adult who puts their own (perceived) convenience ahead of our children should reconsider their priorities.
Thank you for writing this Janelle. The data proves traffic delays are minimal, exposing the obsession with commute times as a red herring. Sunset Dunes is an amazing public asset. I hope others read this and also join me in voting no on G.
Thank you for this! The increased opportunity for community has been so wonderful since the park opened full time! Every morning when I walk or run in the park, I get the opportunity to engage with my neighbors that I never found when it was a road. I’ve found new friends through our ritual walking commutes and through the efforts to restore the dune grasses, enabled by grants given when the space was turned into a park. I see increased foot traffic at all the restaurants and stores just a block away from my house every day of the week, and am amazed how the trend continues even on the foggiest of days. And none of the traffic woes have materialized. I leave my house at rush hour multiple days a week and see no additional traffic on the neighborhood streets, no backups happening on Sunset, and the traffic on Skyline moves better than ever before with the new light at Sloat. Better than my personal experience, the traffic numbers have been confirmed by the city and multiple private studies.
You lost me at “vibrant”. It’s a vastly underutilized stretch of asphalt that only sees significant activity when there is some organized event happening. This is an additional step for those with the anti car agenda…and, quite likely, financial interests in beachfront development.
We had all of this community with the 1993 creation of the Upper great Highway built with access to all. Closing the highway to cars in my experience has made the community worse and endangered me riding my bike on the streets. It is also harder and more dangerous to cross the highway to the beach,
There is one fundamental truth we certainly agree on and a crucial element has been completely missing from this conversation. We are failing to talk about the long-term benefits of choosing a fair and equitable compromise for this highly contested thoroughfare. Choosing the compromise demonstrates genuine compassion for the diverse needs of our fellow citizens and city visitors, rather than prioritizing it for mostly micro-locals using this vital highway as a personal recreation space.
Keeping the Upper Great Highway open to vehicle traffic during the week serves the entire city as well as a necessary release valve for a critical north-south artery for thousands of daily commuters heading to work, school, medical appointments, airports and more. Crucially, it also maintains a vital evacuation route open for a fast exit in the event of a major disaster.
Arguments suggesting that closing the highway is necessary to alleviate “stress, loneliness, and urban anxiety” for Sunset District residents overlook the abundance of green space already available. The Sunset is literally surrounded by world-class public options: Golden Gate Park to the north, Lake Merced’s extensive biking and walking paths to the south, and miles of open beach and dunes immediately to the west. Furthermore, the Great Highway already features a dedicated bike lane and an adjacent, raised walking meridian for anyone wishing to enjoy the ocean view. These existing parks and features offer spectacular settings without forcing a major transportation artery to double as a playground and roller rink.
My perspective comes from a deep affection for public spaces. I have lived in the Richmond District for most of my adult life, choosing our home specifically for its proximity to Golden Gate Park. I also spent a good portion of my career as a professional and volunteer advocate for public and federal parks. Because of this background, I find the narrative that being pro-compromise equates to being “anti-park” to be entirely disingenuous.
The true debate is not between those who love parks and those who do not. It is between those who support a total closure for so the mostly geographically few who will benefit, versus those who support an equitable compromise that serves the greater community.
Our transit infrastructure on the western side of S.F. is pushed to the limit as San Francisco continues to host heavily attended, internationally acclaimed events in Golden Gate Park and oversold concerts at Stern Grove. With the Great Highway closed, 19th Avenue is left as the only viable north-south route across the western side of the city, leaving it frequently gridlocked. Sunset Boulevard presented as an alternative is incredibly difficult because it forces frustrated commuters onto local residential side streets to reach it.
This all has a real economic cost; as a former frequent patrons of restaurants, grocery stores, shops, and coffee spots in the Outer Sunset, I for one have simply stopped visiting because traffic makes it too difficult to get there. We are not alone.
The Sunset District is already awash in magnificent recreational opportunities. Let’s keep this essential transportation highway – The Upper Great Highway , open during the week for the rest of San Francisco.
Vote YES on G for a fair and balanced solution.
Don’t forget that these majority SF transplants also want to close Marina Blvd., the flat part of Lombard that takes you to the Golden Gate Bridge, and some are even conspiring to close General Hospital and turn it into another branch of the public library!
Fiction and fantastic? That’s what they once said about the Great Highway. They’re beyond out of control and a bunch of fringe, radical zealots. This truth is more disastrous than fiction!
Taking back our Great Highway for San Francisco and beyond. Yes on G!
I’m an almost 40 year San Franciscan and 20 year Mission District resident who voted for Sunset Dunes in 2024. People say that the closure of the Great Highway doesn’t impact me and my community, but indeed it does. Harmful emissions caused by cars certainly reduces the quality in the air that we breathe, and we share that same air regardless of where we live. Janelle’s commentary is heartfelt and really focuses on the well-being of humanity today and into the future. I like and appreciate this forward-thinking.
The cars didn’t go away. They were dumped onto neighborhood streets where they experienced even worse stop and go traffic which increased pollution.
Appreciate your perspective from the Mission, but diverting 14,000 daily vehicles into stop-and-go neighborhood traffic right next to Westside elementary schools doesn’t reduce emissions it just shifts pollution onto residential avenues.
True environmental justice isn’t dumping regional commute traffic onto working families in District 4 while claiming a citywide win. Prop G offers a real, equitable compromise: 100% car-free park space on weekends, and restored weekday traffic flow to protect residential air quality. Yes on Prop G!
Even UC Riverside who did a study on carbon emissions during and post COVID showed INCREASED carbon emissions along 19th Avenue and postulated it was due to the closure of the GH. So you’re not decreasing emissions, you’re just moving it to different parts of the city.
Very well written, and agree wholeheartedly with everything you say.
Another point worth noting is that removing cars from the Upper Great Highway is protective of the Sunset District itself.
SPUR and San Francisco’s coastal planners have been studying how to adapt Ocean Beach to rising seas, erosion, and increasingly severe storms. Restoring natural dunes and native vegetation is part of that vision. Healthy dunes provide a natural protective barrier for the neighborhood behind them.
Suggestions that Sunset Dunes is merely about providing recreation misses a larger point. Importantly, it’s also about helping ensure that the homes, streets, businesses and neighborhood remain intact for generations to come.
You’re confusing the Ocean Beach Managed Retreat project (south of Sloat) with the Upper Great Highway (Lincoln to Sloat).
The coastal erosion and dune adaptation plans SPUR developed apply to the southern bluffs near Sloat where erosion threatened wastewater infrastructure. The Upper Great Highway sits directly above a massive, permanent SFPUC wastewater box, with a road elevation of 30+ feet even with King Tides and heavy winter storms, in its 100+ years of existence it has never flooded.
Furthermore, claiming the full closure “protects” the environment ignores basic ecology:
Reopening weekday lanes doesn’t alter coastal protection. It protects native dunes from heavy over-use while keeping thousands of commuter cars off residential side streets. Prop G preserves weekend park access while restoring weekday sanity! Yes on Prop G!