Red Lanes, Steel Rails and Boarding Islands

San Francisco streets carry buses, historic streetcars, light rail and cable cars in the same space cars use, and each of those brings its own painted markings, its own hardware in the pavement and its own rule. Getting them wrong is the source of a whole category of city driving mistakes.

The red lanes are enforceable

The red-painted lanes are transit-only lanes, and Vehicle Code section 21655.1 is the authority behind them. Local authorities and Caltrans may designate transit-only traffic lanes, and a person shall not operate a motor vehicle on a portion of highway designated as one, except as directed by an officer or a traffic control device.

There is a real exception, and it is the one drivers need: the section does not apply to a driver required to enter a transit-only lane in order to make a right turn, or a left turn where no left-turn lane exists, or to enter or exit the highway — unless signs or a physical barrier prohibit it. So crossing a red lane to reach a right turn is contemplated. Driving down one for three blocks because it is empty is not.

Enforcement of transit lanes increasingly happens by camera rather than by a patrol car pulling you over, which means the first you hear of it is an envelope. Treat the red paint as a wall you may cross at a turn, not a lane you may use.

Steel rails behave differently from asphalt

Embedded rail runs down the middle of a number of city streets, and it does two things worth respecting. Wet steel offers far less grip than wet asphalt, so braking or turning with a wheel on a rail is a different proposition. And the flangeway — the groove beside the rail — is almost exactly the width to catch a narrow tire.

For a car, the practical result is a slip rather than a crash. For anyone on two wheels, and San Francisco has a lot of people on two wheels, a wheel dropping into a flangeway is a fall directly into a traffic lane. Cross tracks at as close to a right angle as you can manage, and give riders around you room to do the same, because you will see them take an unexpected line to get their angle right.

Boarding islands and the stop that catches people

Where passengers board from an island in the roadway, the traffic rules around that island are not the same as a normal lane. Where riders board from the curb with no island, traffic behind the transit vehicle is required to stop and let people cross to the sidewalk. This is the situation that produces the worst outcomes in the whole category, because a passenger stepping out from in front of a stopped streetcar cannot see you and you cannot see them.

If a transit vehicle ahead of you is stopped and people are moving around it, stop. Do not thread past it. That single habit prevents the most serious collision on this page.

Cable cars do not steer and cannot stop quickly

A cable car is gripping a moving cable under the street. It has no steering, it cannot swerve, and its stopping distance is long. On the routes where cable cars share the roadway, the assumption should be that the cable car will do exactly what it is doing now and that avoiding a conflict is entirely your job.

Where the insurance part comes in

A collision with a public transit vehicle, or an injury to a transit passenger, brings a public entity into the claim, and claims against public entities in California run on their own procedures and their own timelines, which are notably shorter than the deadlines people assume. If you are ever involved in one, do not wait to see how you feel before reporting it — report it to your carrier promptly and let them handle the process, because missing a procedural deadline can end a claim regardless of its merits.

This is also a reasonable moment to look at your liability limits. A city bus or streetcar carries passengers, which means a single incident can involve multiple injured people, and California's minimums of $30,000 per person and $60,000 per accident under Vehicle Code section 16056(a) are not a large cushion against that.

Ask us to price higher limits alongside your current ones.