Streetsblog San Francisco

While there’s no concrete Pedestrian Action Strategy (formerly the “Action Plan”) for San Franciscans to read over yet, city officials went ahead and held a press conference today to tell the public the document is coming next month.

Mayor Ed Lee, SFMTA Director of Transportation Ed Reiskin, and other officials gathered on the Powell Street Promenade (a.k.a. the “mega-parklet”) to tout the importance of street safety improvements and targeted enforcement efforts to reduce pedestrian injuries by 25 percent by 2016, and 50 percent by 2020, as set out in former Mayor Gavin Newsom’s Executive Directive on Pedestrian Safety.

The press event was unusual in that the officials didn’t have much substance to make public at this time. They previewed the pedestrian safety plan but that was about it. Lee said the plan will help ”lessen the inequality that exists that we know today between neighborhoods, where people literally fear walking on our streets.”

The main piece of actual news to surface today is that SFPD is using a new data-driven enforcement tactic called “Focus on the Five.” SFPD Deputy Chief of Special Operations Denise Schmitt said that under this strategy, each police district is targeting enforcement at its top five most dangerous intersections or areas, as well as focusing on the top five most dangerous traffic violations: drivers running red lights, running stop signs, violating pedestrian right-of-way, committing turning violations, and speeding.

Schmitt said police are targeting corridors like Market Street, Van Ness Avenue, and 19th Avenue, where a disproportionately high number of the 800-900 vehicle-pedestrian collisions occur every year. ”We’ve got to bring these incidents down,” said Schmitt. “Really, what this is all about is saving lives and letting people enjoy this city.”

“The need for action is clear,” said Walk SF Executive Director Elizabeth Stampe, who called “Focus on the Five” and the developing Pedestrian Action Strategy “promising” ways to “use data to prevent traffic crimes just as we do to prevent other crimes.”

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A man his 40s was killed by a pickup truck driver in a crosswalk at Market and Beale Streets yesterday at about 2:30 p.m, as reported by ABC 7. Police say they’re investigating the crash to determine whether the driver will be cited or charged. The victim has not been identified yet by police.

The story is all too common in San Francisco — the victim is the 18th pedestrian killed this year so far, surpassing last year’s 17, and 14 in 2010.

The SF Municipal Transportation Agency expects to finalize its Pedestrian Action Plan in January, though it was originally expected by late summer, to reduce pedestrian crashes and injuries with targeted street improvements, education and enforcement efforts. The plan is intended to reduce pedestrian injuries by 25 percent by 2016, and 50 percent by 2020, as set out in former Mayor Gavin Newsom’s Executive Directive on Pedestrian Safety.

“We want to see a plan that will actually meet the goals that the mayor set out to reduce injuries, reduce inequities in pedestrian safety, and increase walking,” said Walk SF Executive Director Elizabeth Stampe. “Having clear metrics and timelines in the plan is critical.”

Ambitious pedestrian safety plans have recently been adopted in Chicago and New York City, which set out to re-engineer 60 miles of streets each year, including 20 miles of “intensive safety redesign.” Chicago, which sees an average of 50 pedestrian deaths per year, aims to bring that number down to zero by 2022.

Stampe, who sits on the task force for San Francisco’s developing plan, said the draft plan does lay out mileage targets, but that its goals are somewhat muddled in technical language that could be made clearer to the public. Some community groups who have reviewed the draft plan have complained that it’s difficult to understand, she said.

“I think if it’s unclear what it it’s saying it will do, then it’s hard to have accountability,” said Stampe. “It’s really important to have something that clearly states exactly what the city will do when, and why, and how that will meet the goals.”

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For a district attorney who wants to save lives on the streets, using data to target the most dangerous traffic behaviors should be a no-brainer.

But the new traffic safety ad campaign announced today by San Francisco DA George Gascón seems to use little application of crash data collected by his own former police department. The three versions of the ad, which feature the tagline “What’s the Rush?,” list fines for respective traffic violations and plead, “Let’s all work together to make our streets safe.”

It’s encouraging that the DA is bringing attention to the need for safer streets: As a press release from his office noted, “Among California cities, San Francisco has historically had the highest per capita vehicle-pedestrian injury collision rate.” In 2011, 28 people were killed on San Francisco streets: 17 pedestrians, three bicyclists, and eight people in motor vehicles.

But not only do but the ads fail to target the most common causes of injuries and deaths on San Francisco streets — by seeming to equate plowing through pedestrians in a crosswalk with crossing against a light on bike or foot, they downplay the disproportionately greater risk inherent in driving a motor vehicle.

Rather than emphasize fines, a more effective approach for the campaign might be to list the number of people injured or killed by such violations each year. Fortunately, that data is summarized in the SF Municipal Transportation Agency’s 2010-2011 Traffic Collision Report [PDF], the most recent one available.

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Swamped by demand for safer streets, the SF Municipal Transportation Agency has been working to overhaul the way it delivers speed humps, sidewalk bulb-outs, chicanes, and other measures proven to tame traffic speeds and save lives.

By next spring, the SFMTA intends to implement its revamped traffic calming program, which was put on hold this year while planners streamlined the implementation process. The change was necessary to address a massive backlog of traffic calming requests that were often left unaddressed for a decade or more.

SFMTA planners say the new traffic calming prioritization program would be more efficient at targeting the neighborhoods with the most severe speeding problems and deliver low-cost improvements like speed humps and traffic islands with as little as a year from when it accepts an application to implementation. Miriam Sorell of the SFMTA’s Livable Streets Subdivision outlined [PDF] the new process to a committee of the SF County Transportation Authority Board (comprised of the Board of Supervisors) on Tuesday.

Under the past approach, a resident’s application for traffic calming, if accepted, was placed on a waiting list and ranked based on the severity of the speeding problem in a neighborhood. When an application reached the top of the list — which was hard to predict, since a new, higher-ranking application could always displace an older request — it would be grouped with other applications from neighbors to form an area-wide plan, and the SFMTA would hold community meetings to ask neighbors which type of traffic calming measures they preferred. As more requests were lumped in with others, Sorell said, small projects grew larger, delaying implementation. Meanwhile, improvements like speed humps, which should be quick and cheap to implement, would go through excessive traffic studies and community meetings.

Constrained by limited funding and staff, the SFMTA can only implement 20 to 35 traffic calming “devices” per year, with a current backlog of $9 million in plans ready to hit the ground in the next five years. Sorell said planners hope the new process will allow them to better prioritize improvements for the areas where they’re needed most.

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Construction will begin this month on physically separated bike lanes and pedestrian safety improvements on three critical blocks of Fell and Oak Streets after the project was approved unanimously yesterday by the SF Municipal Transportation Agency Board of Directors.

“This is such a game-changer,” said SF Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Leah Shahum. “I think when we make this small but critical gap more welcoming and bike-friendly, we really are going to see more people biking to work, to parks, to school.”

SFMTA crews plan to begin work in October on striping the Fell Street bike lane, re-striping parking spaces on nearby streets, and upgrading continental crosswalks, said SFMTA project manager Luis Montoya. Striping the Oak bike lane will require more work than the Fell lane, since the Oak lane will require a slight re-alignment of the three traffic lanes. The completion dates for each piece of the project will depend on the schedule of the agency’s paint shop, but agency staff hopes to have both bike lanes finished by winter on the three blocks between Scott and Baker Streets, he said.

Work on the 12 sidewalk corner bulb-outs and planted concrete bike lane barriers would be finished by next spring or summer. Although the SFMTA said earlier this month that the bike lanes may not be rideable during concrete construction, Montoya said crews would be sure to maintain temporary bike lane access. The project will also add bicycle traffic signals to give bicyclists and pedestrians a head start in the traffic cycle.

Walk SF Executive Director Elizabeth Stampe cheered the pedestrian upgrades included in the plan, which initially included only bike lanes. “The project will widen sidewalks at corners with 13 [originally proposed] bulb-outs, which is really quite a lot. I’d like to get to a point where it’s not a lot, but right now it’s a lot.”

As part of the project, the traffic signals on Oak and Fell would be adjusted to lower synchronized vehicle speeds from 25 MPH to 20 MPH, which will “help to start addressing the [traffic] speeds … that basically make it feel like we’ve got freeways running right through our city,” said Stampe. “For too long, Golden Gate Park and the Panhandle have been like islands in the middle of these freeway-like traffic conditions.”

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How dangerous is it to cross the street outside your door? A new interactive, corner-by-corner map created by the SF Department of Public Health shows the location of all pedestrian injuries and deaths from 2005 to 2010, highlighting the corridors that see the bulk of the city’s crashes.

By providing better access to data, SFDPH hopes the map will help city agencies understand where to target physical street safety improvements and traffic enforcement to reduce injuries, said Rajiv Bhatia, SFDPH’s director of occupational and environmental health.

“The interactive site simply allows users to get the data they need directly,” said Bhatia. “We’ve also made the underlying data available to anyone in the public sphere who wants to do further analysis or use the data for another application. User-friendly government data should help to get people talking about important problems like pedestrian safety and hopefully will contribute to more informed solutions.”

The map is based on data from the California Highway Patrol’s Statewide Integrated Traffic Reporting System (SWITRS). It compiles information on each pedestrian injury over the five-year period, including markers that differentiate between crashes in which the victim suffered minor injuries, severe injuries, or was killed.

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A continuous “walking bus” of school children spanned several sunny blocks of the Mission this morning as the kids made their way to Buena Vista Horace Mann School.

“Drivers just waited and smiled, and everybody had a great morning,” said Elizabeth Stampe, executive director of Walk San Francisco.

San Francisco broke records for Walk to School Day today, with an estimated 55 schools and 8,500 students taking part, many of them in walking buses, which provide kids a safe and healthy commute option. In fact, BVHM Principal Jennifer Steiner announced that the school would begin scheduling a weekly walking bus heading out from Parque Niños Unidos, where parents can drop their kids off five blocks away.

Walking in groups provides a presence on the street that not only makes students and parents more visible to drivers, but also sends the signal to slow down perhaps more effectively than any speed limit sign.

Advocates and city officials celebrated the SF Municipal Transportation Agency’s implementation of 181 15 MPH school zones. The project, which had just gotten underway by last year’s Walk to School Day, was the first of its scale in the state.

But while the city has set a strong example for others to follow, “We’re also looking for ways to tame speeds in San Francisco,” said Stampe. The danger of streets with high-speed car traffic is one of the main barriers discouraging parents from letting their kids walk to school, she said. “When kids have to cross a street with fast traffic, or cross where cars don’t yield like on Monterey Boulevard, that’s a real issue for parents.”

According to the Department of Public Health, 42 percent of students citywide live within a mile of their school, but only 25 percent walk, said Stampe. Those numbers do vary — for Buena Vista Horace Mann, located in the walkable Mission District, 23 percent of the students live within a mile, and 19 percent walk.

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Police are still looking into whether charges could be filed against the taxi driver who allegedly ran a red light at Eddy and Larkin Streets Saturday, causing a car crash that killed pedestrian Edmund Capalla, the SF Examiner reports. The driver has reportedly yet to be arrested or cited.

“We have to see if he was negligent,” SFPD spokesperson Albie Esparza told the Examiner. “He may have had a medical emergency, I don’t know.” Esparza called the crash a “heartbreaking accident,” adding that it “could have been prevented if laws had been obeyed.”

Walk SF Executive Director Elizabeth Stampe said “the police should be telling us what actually happened, not speculating on excuses for the driver.”

“We know there was a medical emergency: Edmund Capalla was hit and killed while walking,” she said. “We expect solid information from the police about how this occurred. Walk SF and its members want to see swift action on this case from the police and, if appropriate, from the District Attorney’s office.”

Christina Siadat and Sally Khim were at a store on Larkin when they heard the crash. “We ran outside and saw the red car on the pole,” Siadat told Streetsblog. “We walked around the corner and there was the man lying face down with shattered glass.”

Siadat said a clerk at a corner store confirmed reports that the taxi driver ran a red light when the driver of the red car, who had a green light, hit the taxi, causing it to slam into Capalla, who was crossing the street. “The clerk said that the cab driver was sitting on the curb with his head in his hands,” she said.

The crash occurred just before 7 p.m., during daylight hours. Capalla, who died at San Francisco General Hospital, was the eleventh known pedestrian killed in the city this year.