Once again, one of San Francisco's major arterial roads is snarled, with northbound traffic backed up and commuters left white-knuckling their steering wheels or staring blankly out Muni windows wondering where it all went wrong. The advice from those in the know? Take an alternate route.

Of course, for anyone who's lived in this city for the past decade, "avoid Van Ness" might as well be tattooed on our foreheads. The corridor has been a construction zone, a traffic nightmare, and a punchline rolled into one ever since the city embarked on its ambitious — and endlessly delayed — Bus Rapid Transit project. What was originally promised as a transformative infrastructure upgrade became a years-long saga of blown deadlines, ballooning costs, and jackhammered patience.

The BRT project was supposed to be done by 2019. Then 2021. It finally limped to completion, but the legacy it left behind is a corridor that still can't seem to function smoothly. Businesses along Van Ness suffered enormously during construction, some closing permanently. And taxpayers footed a bill that swelled well past its original estimates.

This is the fundamental problem with how San Francisco handles infrastructure. The city treats major projects like open-ended art installations — no firm deadlines, no real accountability, and always someone else's money to spend. Meanwhile, actual humans are trying to get to work, pick up their kids, or keep their businesses alive.

Nobody's arguing against improving transit. Better bus service is a genuinely good idea. But execution matters. Timelines matter. Budgets matter. And when a city consistently fails on all three, residents stop trusting that the next big project will be any different.

So if you're rerouting around Van Ness today, just know: you're not avoiding a road. You're avoiding a monument to municipal mismanagement.