As if Geary and Masonic wasn't already hostile enough to pedestrians, here's an example of street dysfunction exacerbated by freight traffic at the newly-opened CityTarget. Winston Parsons happened upon a delivery truck driver setting up shop in a crosswalk and, he said, impeding buses on the 43-Masonic.
In the video he submitted, Parsons confronts the driver, who says he just didn't know where to park and load. Blocking the crosswalk is "illegal, and it's unsafe for everybody else that has to walk out here, like these people, who are going to have to walk into traffic to get around your parked truck," says Parsons, who told us he phoned the violation in to SFPD. The store has loading docks that can be accessed via the shopping center's 650-space parking lot.
This sort of blatant disregard for pedestrians and bus riders is certainly nothing new or exceptional on San Francisco streets, but it's troubling to see that the management at Target, which wooed customers with free parking in its marketing mailers, has failed to communicate how to park and load safely to drivers making deliveries.
Aaron was the editor of Streetsblog San Francisco from January 2012 until October 2015. He joined Streetsblog in 2010 after studying rhetoric and political communication at SF State University and spending a semester in Denmark.
