When San Mateo wanted to revive its downtown, it didn't wait for a grant or a ballot measure — its merchants voted to tax themselves. Roughly five years after the city closed B Street to cars, the district counts about 600 businesses and a model the rest of the Bay Area keeps admiring from a distance.

An ABC7 News feature this week framed San Mateo's pedestrian-only B Street as a "playbook for other California cities." For San Francisco — 20 miles north and still litigating nearly every street redesign it attempts — the sharper detail sits inside the same report: San Mateo Mayor Adam Loraine says he has never discussed the approach with SF Mayor Daniel Lurie. The playbook exists. San Francisco hasn't asked to read it.

San Mateo made its B Street closure permanent in September 2021 — approximately five years ago, a span ABC7 News rounded to "nearly four years" in its report — after the pandemic-era experiment of shutting the corridor to vehicles proved popular. Rather than reverting, the city kept the street pedestrian-only year-round and bet that foot traffic, not parking, would carry downtown.

By the Downtown San Mateo Association's count, cited by ABC7, 50 new businesses opened in the district in the most recent year, bringing the total to roughly 600. "We're keeping it active, we're keeping it lively, there is always something going on," Mackenzie Jakoubek of the association told the station.

The mechanism behind the turnaround is the part San Francisco might find most instructive — and the least glamorous. In 2023, downtown business owners agreed to raise a portion of their own annual assessment fees to bankroll maintenance, marketing and safety, the kind of self-imposed levy that a business improvement district can pass without a citywide vote. The money paid for programming meant to keep people coming back. "With the increase to the money, we were able to do a lot of pop up events like jazz trios, we had a ukulele jam a couple of months ago and also some larger events. We had boba day at the end of April," Jakoubek told ABC7.

Mayor Loraine cast the result as the product of patience rather than a single decision. "It wasn't a sure thing but I do think it required a bit of collaboration and investment over time. It wasn't going to happen over night," he told the station.

San Francisco's own pedestrian experiments have a rockier record — one The Dissent has documented repeatedly. The city banned private cars from Market Street in 2020 in a bid to reclaim its main corridor for transit and pedestrians, but as this paper has reported, the restriction goes largely unenforced, with drivers routinely rolling through the transit-only stretch years later. Downtown retail, the kind of ground-floor tenancy that makes a walkable district work, has cratered in the same period: the former Westfield San Francisco Centre still sits shuttered and dark on Market Street, the most expensive ghost town in the city.

And San Francisco's street-redesign fights remain bitter and slow. Just this week, The Dissent reported that Ocean Avenue merchants accused the SFMTA of shelving planned transit lanes to avoid stirring opposition before a November ballot measure — a reminder that in San Francisco, even modest changes to a roadway tend to route through City Hall, the ballot box and a fight.

That is the real contrast. San Mateo's revival was financed incrementally, from the bottom up, by businesses choosing to pay more. San Francisco tends to centralize the same decisions — and then watch them stall.

Loraine told ABC7 he meets monthly with San Mateo County's other mayors and would welcome a conversation with Lurie about what worked downtown. As of the report, it simply hadn't happened.

Whether B Street is a genuine "playbook" or a product of a smaller, denser, wealthier downtown that is easier to program is a fair question — one San Mateo's boosters tend to skip past. But the cheapest lesson on offer requires no assessment fee at all: someone in San Francisco could pick up the phone.