A measure to reopen Sunset Dunes to weekday car traffic officially qualified for San Francisco's November ballot this week after the SF Department of Elections certified more than 15,000 signatures — setting up the third citywide Great Highway vote in four years and a fight over a roughly $14 million price tag.

The certification comes after Friends of Sunset Dunes sued in June to block the petition drive, alleging it contained factual misrepresentations about park hours and emergency vehicle access. That challenge did not stop the measure. Now it heads to November carrying an SFMTA cost estimate of approximately $14 million — mostly to restore traffic signals that have sat dormant since Sunset Dunes opened — and facing opposition from a majority of the Board of Supervisors.

The measure, backed by District 4 Supervisor Alan Wong and recall organizer Albert Chow, would restore car access to the two-mile upper stretch of the Great Highway on weekdays while keeping it as parkland on weekends. To get here, proponents gathered just over 15,000 signatures; the threshold to qualify was 10,610, according to the SF Department of Elections.

"Now that San Franciscans have experienced both the compromise and the 24/7 closure, I believe that voters can fully weigh the pros and cons at the ballot box," Wong told KQED. "At the end of the day, I have to prioritize those commuting to work, home or school over weekday recreational use of the highway."

Chow, a Sunset small business owner who organized the recall of former D4 Supervisor Joel Engardio — ousted in 2025 largely over his support for Sunset Dunes — and who ran unsuccessfully for the seat himself, made the grievance plain. "The anger is still out there. The unrest is still out there," he told KQED. "There's going to be more development here. There's going to be more density here. Our public transit is not keeping up, yet we are losing roads."

The proponents face substantial obstacles. Proposition K, which permanently converted the highway to parkland, passed in November 2024 by nearly 10 percentage points. Earlier this year, Wong failed to secure enough Board of Supervisors votes to place a similar measure on the ballot; only Supervisors Connie Chan and Chyanne Chen backed him. The current measure reached the ballot the harder way — by petition.

Supervisor Myrna Melgar did not soften her opposition. "This cynical and expensive attempt to destroy a beautiful park will fail," she said in a statement.

The cost argument could be decisive. SFMTA analysis puts the total tab for reopening at roughly $14 million, primarily to replace traffic signals that the agency says had already exceeded their useful lives when Prop K passed in 2024. SF Rec & Parks separately estimates $750,000 to remove park amenities, according to SFist.

Lucas Lux, president of Friends of Sunset Dunes, said the expenditure is hard to justify. "There's not a major traffic difference, despite the fact that we have created one of the city's most visited park spaces," he told KQED. "Converting this space into a park has been a huge success."

An SFMTA report backs that up, finding that changes to commuter traffic since the closure have been minimal and that the city has since adjusted signal timing on parallel avenues to improve car flow.

Jason McDaniel, a political science professor at SF State, told the San Francisco Chronicle that proponents of reopening face an "uphill battle." But he framed the conflict as something deeper than commute times. "It's about a sense of identity, who their community is and feeling like [the park] was imposed on them [by others outside the neighborhood]," McDaniel said. "It's about whether politicians understand people like them."

November will give them a third answer.