Streetsblog San Francisco

Mayor Ed Lee walks to school with students from Marshall Elementary in the Inner Mission. Photo: Marianne Szeto

Yesterday marked the first Walk to School Day since San Francisco began installing 15 mph speed limit signs near dozens of schools, and thousands of students were a little safer from speeding cars as they made their way to class.

“The new safer speed zones will calm traffic in neighborhoods throughout the city and help more people enjoy walking,” said Walk SF director Elizabeth Stampe, who joined students from Marshall Elementary in the Inner Mission on a “walking bus” along with Mayor Ed Lee, D6 Supervisor Jane Kim, Recreation and Parks General Manager Phil Ginsburg, and SFMTA Director Ed Reiskin.

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William Cox was walking in this crosswalk Tuesday morning, just like this man, when he was run over and killed by an SUV driver. Residents say the intersection of 14th Street and Noe has long been a trouble spot. Photo: Bryan Goebel

On most recent mornings, 59-year-old William Cox walked several blocks from his Mission District apartment to the bustling Peet’s store on Market Street in the Castro for his daily dose of coffee, crossword puzzles and conversation. He had given up his Jeep Cherokee shortly after moving to San Francisco from San Rafael two-and-half years ago and got around mostly on foot and transit. On Tuesday morning, he paid a visit to his best friend, David Douma, who lives across the street from Peet’s.

“Around 9 a.m. he would usually ring my phone to announce he was at my front door, and then he would hang out in my apartment for awhile, every day,” said Douma.

On this day, Cox — known to his friends as Bill — arrived early, around 8:24 a.m., because he was scheduled to help a friend who lives near Ocean Beach move some large musical equipment. It was in his nature, said Douma, to always offer help when a friend needed it. He didn’t stay as long as he usually did, and left a half-cup of coffee behind. Cox then stopped at nearby Rosenberg Deli, Douma later confirmed, before embarking on the four-block walk up Noe Street to catch the N-Judah train.

Sadly, he never made it.

According to San Francisco police, Cox was in the crosswalk on 14th Street at Noe around 10:39 a.m. when he was run over by an unidentified driver behind the wheel of a Ford SUV who had been southbound on Noe, and was making a left turn onto 14th. Cox underwent two operations and despite the best efforts of trauma surgeons at San Francisco General Hospital was pronounced dead at 5:36 p.m., becoming the 10th pedestrian to be killed on the streets of San Francisco this year.

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Drivers ignore the signs and routinely block the crosswalk and speed at the intersection of Harrison and Main streets. Photos by Bryan Goebel.

On December 10, 2004, Katy Liddell had just stepped off the N-Judah with a sack of cleaning supplies and was walking to her Portside apartment at Harrison and Main in Rincon Hill, when she noticed a cadre of emergency vehicles surrounding the intersection. As Liddell drew closer, she saw something that horrified her.

“I saw a tarp covering a body in the middle of the street,” Liddell recalled. “I found out that one of my neighbors had been hit and killed.”

The violent force of a big rig truck had thrown 63-year-old Beverly Kees out of the crosswalk, killing her. Kees, a popular SF State journalism professor who had recently retired, lived across the street from Liddell in the BayCrest Towers. The dog she had been walking was also hit and injured.

“Beverly saved his life. She saw the truck coming and she picked him up,” said Debi Gould, Kees’ friend and neighbor and owner of the dog who was with her when she died, a rat terrier mix named Harp. As Gould tells it, Kees, who lived two doors down, had been told by her doctor that she needed to walk more. She asked Gould if she could walk Harp one day, and the two formed a close bond.

“She started walking him to the point where he loved being with her, and instead of a couple of times a week, it ended up being every day that I went to work,” said Gould, a retired flight attendant who also walks a lot and feels like pedestrians in San Francisco “are considered an inconvenience.”

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Supervisor Kim, on the right, with WalkSF's Elizabeth Stampe and Michael Radetsky, on their way to City Hall on Walk to Work Day. The weather was gorgeous for walking today. Photo: Manish Champsee

You may not have known it, but today is National Walk to Work Day, and pedestrian advocates from Walk San Francisco marked the occasion by walking to work with Supervisor Jane Kim and reminding residents about two important City Hall hearings coming up on pedestrian safety.

Kim will hold a hearing on pedestrian safety at a Public Safety Committee meeting next Thursday, April 7 at 10:30 am in City Hall, Room 250. The following Monday, April 11 at 10 am, D1 Supervisor Eric Mar will hold another hearing to address citywide pedestrian issues.

“Walk SF will be calling for safe-speed school zones, a Pedestrian Action Plan with clear commitments, more funding for street improvements, and police enforcement of laws that protect pedestrians,” the organization said in its newsletter.

Kim, whose District 6 includes the Tenderloin and SoMa — which has the highest rates of pedestrian injuries and fatalities (see graph below the break) — has made pedestrian safety a top priority.

“When she looked at the public safety issues in her her district, she found that injuries to pedestrians was the biggest issue that affected all her constituents,” said Elizabeth Stampe, Walk SF Executive Director. “They found that a lot of people knew people who’d been hit by cars, especially kids.”

As we’ve written on Streetsblog, there is growing momentum around pedestrian safety in San Francisco. A task force is currently developing a Pedestrian Action Plan to meet the goals of an executive directive issued by the Mayor’s Office late last year, which calls for reducing serious and fatal pedestrian injuries 25 percent by 2016, and 50 percent by 2021.

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Photo: Myleen Hollero/Orange Photography

Despite a growing political focus on pedestrian safety, a thick layer of city bureaucracy and lack of funding are stalling real change to prevent pedestrian injuries and fatalities on San Francisco streets, including three deaths in just the last week.

The red tape and dysfunction became abundantly clear at a presentation and discussion at City Hall this morning on San Francisco’s efforts to improve pedestrian safety, which was centered more on the challenges than the solutions.

“We are experiencing a little bit of paralysis by analysis,” said Board of Supervisors President David Chiu. “I do think we have solutions and it’s a matter of putting them together and having the will to execute them.”

A report on the city’s pedestrian safety efforts [pdf], requested by Chiu, was presented to the San Francisco County Transportation Authority (SFCTA) Board’s plans and programs committee.

Tilly Chang, the SFCTA deputy director of planning who prepared the report, responded to Chiu: “We do know that there is a demand, a justified demand, for capital improvements that have already been effective: the countdowns, the bulbouts, the crosswalks. To some extent the MTA is working on them. We do need more funding.”

Chang said even though there has been “fragmented responsibility” on pedestrian issues, something that’s not unique to San Francisco, the SFMTA is “arguably” the lead agency on pedestrian safety, as it is in charge of managing the city’s streets. However, for many advocates, that agency is not moving fast enough.

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