On a Wednesday morning in the Outer Sunset, the crowd at Sunset Dunes doesn't look like a weekend crowd. A woman walks a dog past the Rivera Street nature area while two kids drop into the skate bowl near Sloat Boulevard, and a cyclist works the bike pump track before turning back toward Judah for the N line. None of them are visiting. They live three blocks away, and this is Tuesday's version of a walk they'd otherwise take on pavement without a view.
That gap between what people assume Sunset Dunes is for and what it's actually being used for turns out to be the whole story this fall. San Francisco voters are about to decide, for a third time, whether to put cars back on the road that became this park. The argument for reopening it rests on the idea that the closure mainly serves weekend leisure at the expense of everyday commuters. The park's own usage numbers say otherwise.
The Weekday Number Nobody Expected
An analysis from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency and the Recreation and Park Department, obtained by Mission Local this year, found that roughly six out of ten visits to Sunset Dunes happen on weekdays. Citywide, the park has logged more than 1.7 million visits since it opened, averaging close to 5,000 people a day, with a single-day peak near 19,000 during this year's San Francisco Half Marathon.
That weekday majority matters because it cuts against the framing that's driven the fight since 2024: that the closed road serves a niche of weekend recreators while everyone else eats the traffic. If most of the foot and bike traffic is happening on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, the park isn't a novelty that empties out once the weekend ends. It's become the route people already use to get to the beach, walk a dog, or let a kid learn to ride a bike before school. Ninety-three-year-old Dorothy Lathan, who lives nearby and was among the first to walk it after the official opening, put it simply: "This new space feels like a beautiful marriage between the ocean and the park."
What's Actually Out There
The park has filled in a lot since its first weeks. What started as a closed road with some lounge chairs now has defined zones and permanent-feeling infrastructure, even though city planners still describe most of it as interim.
- A skate space at Sloat Boulevard, built for $80,000 with a bank, quarter pipe, and island feature shaped from upcycled granite, the first dedicated skate spot on the west side since the old Playland at 43rd Avenue closed in 2022
- A bike pump track and skills course next to the skate area
- A Nature Exploration Area for kids near Rivera Street
- Eleven murals and four sculptures, including Octavius the Octopus, which has become the park's unofficial mascot
After a string of bike and scooter accidents in 2025, the city split the park into a calmer Park Zone on the west side for walking, yoga, and picnics, and a Multi-Use Zone on the east side for cyclists, scooters, and e-bikes, with pavement stencils marking where each begins.
The Corridor That Grew Up Around It
The park didn't create the Outer Sunset's food scene, but it's given the businesses near it a reason to lean into beach traffic instead of treating it as an afterthought. Ruby's opened steps from the dunes in mid-December, built by Nick and Monique Osborne, who spent two decades running Mission Rock Resort before starting their own counter-service spot. They planned on soup and wraps. Customers kept asking for a burger, so the smashburger taco became a fixture, alongside a fisherman's stew built from a family cioppino recipe and a chicken Caesar wrap that went viral enough to put a line out the door.
A few blocks over, Two Pitchers Brewing is bringing Maillards into its taproom, the same smashburger operation that's been running as a pop-up at the Outer Sunset Farmers Market. That market, held Sundays, remains one of the more reliable weekly draws in the neighborhood, alongside occasional Sunset Night Market editions timed to things like Lunar New Year. Longer-standing anchors like Andytown Coffee and Hook Fish keep the daily rhythm going in between.
Friends of Sunset Dunes, the volunteer group that helped push the park through its first year, runs a recurring calendar on top of all that. Their Sundays at the Beach series puts a class or activity on the promenade at Irving every first Sunday at 2pm, with live music at Judah on second Sundays from noon to 2. Monthly beach cleanups have moved to the Taraval lounge. A dog-friendly bike ride runs from Golden Gate Park down to the dunes a few times a year. The Fourth of July brought a full neighborhood parade from the Noriega Sunset Lounge to Judah, complete with a fire truck and apple pie. Great Hauntway, the neighborhood's long-running Halloween event, held its first edition inside the new park last October and is expected back again this fall.
None of this reads like infrastructure built for tourists. It reads like a neighborhood that rearranged its own week around a road that stopped being a road.
"It's such a great resource for us, and it feels like the fight to reopen the Great Highway, it continues on and on and on," said Heidi Hartley, a regular at the park, when the latest ballot measure was filed.
The Third Vote
That fatigue is fair. Voters passed Proposition K in November 2024 by roughly 55 to 45, permanently closing the upper Great Highway between Lincoln Way and Sloat Boulevard. The road went car-free that March, and Sunset Dunes opened officially on April 12, 2025. District 4 voters recalled Supervisor Joel Engardio over his support for the closure, and his successor, Alan Wong, tried and failed to get a reopening measure onto the June 2026 ballot through the Board of Supervisors.
A campaign called Great Highway for Everyone picked up where that attempt stalled, gathering 15,626 signatures, well past the roughly 10,600 required, and the Department of Elections certified the measure for the November 3 ballot in July. If it passes, the road reopens to cars on weekdays while staying a pedestrian park on weekends and holidays. Friends of Sunset Dunes has filed a lawsuit arguing the petition language misrepresents what the measure would actually change, and the same SFMTA and Rec and Park analysis that surfaced the weekday visit numbers also put the cost of tearing out the park's current features at roughly $14 million.
That's the contradiction sitting at the center of this vote. The measure is being sold as a compromise that restores weekday access without touching weekend recreation. But the data collected over the park's first full year shows weekday visits are the majority use case, not the exception. A vote to reopen the road on weekdays is, in practical terms, a vote to hand back the days most people are actually there.
Whatever happens on November 3, the calendar Friends of Sunset Dunes runs isn't waiting on the outcome. The farmers market keeps running Sundays, Ruby's keeps filling smashburger taco orders, and the skate space at Sloat keeps drawing kids who didn't have anywhere on the west side to skate before 2025. If you want to see what's actually driving the debate before you vote on it, walking the two miles between Lincoln Way and Sloat on an ordinary Tuesday will tell you more than either campaign's mailer.
For more on what's happening across San Francisco's neighborhoods this season, including the small businesses and civic changes shaping daily life block by block, Selling San Francisco keeps a running local guide. Reach out anytime. Let's Connect.
