Streetsblog San Francisco

A Pedestrian Safety Task Force charged with coordinating and implementing actions to reduce pedestrian injuries and fatalities in San Francisco met for the first time Tuesday, bringing together a large group of representatives from different city departments who rarely sit down at the same table to talk about pedestrian safety.

“I do think that having this many agencies talking about this topic together is a big step forward for the city,” said Elizabeth Stampe, the executive director of Walk San Francisco, who attended the meeting.

The task force is the result of an executive directive issued by the Mayor’s Office [pdf] in late December that, for the first time, sets specific targets and dates for reducing pedestrian injuries and deaths. The 25-member group must develop a Pedestrian Action Plan that will meet the directive’s goals of reducing serious and fatal pedestrian injuries by 25 percent by 2016, and 50 percent by 2021.

Its mission also includes promoting and increasing walking along with “measurable goals and benchmarks” to address “existing disparities in injuries, deaths and walking conditions in San Francisco neighborhoods.” The directive was partly modeled after New York’s Pedestrian Safety Study and Action Plan, and preceded criticism from advocates that the city was failing to act to improve conditions for pedestrians.

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Chinatown’s crowded sidewalks, unsafe crosswalks and poor pedestrian signage are not likely to be among the endearing physical characteristic featured in any tourist brochure. Yet in a recent study — the San Francisco Chinatown Pedestrian Safety Needs Assessment [pdf] and Safety Plan [pdf] conducted by the Chinatown Community Development Center (CCDC) — those issues were identified as several of the highest priority concerns for tenants, merchants and visitors to the popular area.

Chinatown is the densest neighborhood in San Francisco, according to the study, and has the lowest rate of automobile ownership, at 17 percent. The neighborhood is made up of a large percentage of transit users and pedestrians, many of them seniors. From the report:

The 2000 Census reported the median income for the neighborhood as $18,339, with a median age of 50. The proportion of the population living below the poverty level in 2000 was 21 percent versus 11 percent citywide.

Although Chinatown has the lowest rate of car ownership, it has the highest volume of traffic of any San Francisco neighborhood. Seventy eight percent of households live within 150 meters of a truck route. The proportion of Chinatown households living with traffic-related air quality hazards is 100 percent compared to 68 percent citywide.

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I often write stories for Streetsblog as objectively as I can, but after talking with the SFMTA about their pedestrian safety report, I got a little too upset to write dispassionately. Therefore, I’ll call this a “commentary” and you can take it for what it’s worth.

If the footage of 65-year-old Nu Ha Dam getting mowed down in a crosswalk at Leavenworth and Geary by a UCSF shuttle on Wednesday didn’t appall you, the continued failure of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) to improve pedestrian safety should.

San Francisco has the highest rate of pedestrian injuries of any sizeable city in California and is one of the highest in the nation. Pedestrian injuries have stayed steady over the past few years at more than 800. Of total fatal collisions in San Francisco over the past ten years, pedestrians have consistently accounted for 50-60 percent.

So when the city comes out with a report [pdf] modeled on the New York City Department of Transportation’s much heralded Pedestrian Safety Study and Action Plan, you could excuse me for getting excited. The 55-page document is chock full of great data on existing conditions, and at a minimum helps lend some visibility to pedestrians on paper.

Unfortunately, the report has no collision reduction targets, work plans or evaluation metrics that will result in safer streets. All it offers is this bit of drivel:

[While the SFMTA has] an important role to play in improving pedestrian conditions, specific collision trends can be also influenced by demographic, cultural, and economic changes that affect the amount and type of traveling people engage in. For these reasons the SFMTA has in the past not set an exact percentage goal for the reduction of fatal collisions in future decades, though of course it remains our mission to improve roadway safety as rapidly as possible. It is the general goal of the SFMTA both to see reductions in pedestrian injuries every year and to increase the number of pedestrian trips in the City.

Important role? You have a charter mandate to improve pedestrian conditions as part of the Transit First policy (“5. Pedestrian areas shall be enhanced wherever possible to improve the safety and comfort of pedestrians and to encourage travel by foot”).

You’ve had that mandate since the 1970s.

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With childhood obesity a growing national epidemic, it is surprising that more parents don’t walk to school with their kids or organize amongst neighbors to encourage physical activity as part of the daily routine. Though San Francisco has extensive public transit and is quite walkable, the current school assignment policy results in longer school commutes, a problem city officials and advocates for increased walking blame in part for children not getting enough daily exercise.

Coinciding with yesterday’s International Walk to School Day, the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) and the Department of Public Health (SFDPH) discussed a study they have undertaken to collect baseline data on school commute patterns in an effort to encourage more walking. This initiative is especially important now, say officials, because the city will change the way it assigns children to schools starting in fall 2011 and they will have the opportunity to measure the impact local assignments will have on travel choice.

Officials plan to collect data at the fifteen schools participating in the Safe Routes to School program, as well as others that are not, and they hope the resulting information will demonstrate how effective improved traffic engineering, enforcement and eduction can be.

Ana Validzic, a SFDPH pedestrian safety coordinator, was at Fairmount Elementary School in Noe Valley yesterday to raise awareness for Walk to School Day. Fairmount and nine other schools were added to the city’s Safe Routes to School (SRTS) program this year, in addition to the five from last year. These schools are at the top of the city’s priority list for traffic calming treatments and better enforcement of traffic safety violations.

“One of the biggest obstacles right now is the way students are assigned to their schools,” said Validzic. With the change in the SFUSD assignment policy, she said, children will live much closer to their schools and parents won’t have as much of an impetus to drive. “It’s going to make programs like Safe Routes to School much more realistic.”

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Pedestrian advocates, public health professionals and transportation planners and engineers will gather in Berkeley from Sunday through Tuesday to discuss how to improve pedestrian trip and injury data collection, both to inform pedestrian safety campaigns and influence the targets for walkable communities under California’s SB 375.

The conference, Pedestrians Count!, is being organized by California Walks and will include representatives from a number of advocacy groups, Caltrans, UCSF, the San Francisco Department of Public Health and the California Strategic Growth Council.

As California Walks executive director Wendy Alfsen argued, transportation engineers know every last detail about how Americans drive, but they don’t keep good data on pedestrians, beyond how many are killed and injured by cars. Without improving pedestrian data collection, she insisted, pedestrians will continue to be under-served when it comes to federal, state, and local transportation funding.

“Pedestrians are significantly and substantially underrepresented in large part because they’re under-counted. Pedestrian trips for a long time have been seen as pedestrian, ho-hum, invisible,” she said “As we’re moving to a multi-modal transportation system, all of the other modes have to be counted.”

Alfsen said that pedestrian fatalities count for 18 percent of all traffic deaths in California and the state’s fatality rate is 50 percent higher than the national average. “Overall traffic fatalities have been going down, but our percentage of the total in California is growing,” she said.

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The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) and the Department of Public Health (DPH) recently announced a pedestrian safety program funded by a grant from the California Office of Traffic Safety (OTS, tag: "Toward Zero Deaths, Every 1 Counts"), a joint initiative that aims to increase enforcement of dangerous and illegal driver behavior, coupled with education campaigns to seniors and other vulnerable pedestrians.

The SFPD and DPH will share the grant worth $302,189. SFPD will focus its enforcement on the following citations at or near intersections with disproportionate collisions involving pedestrians:

• Motorists violating pedestrian right-of-way
• Violations by pedestrians
• Vehicles violating the posted speed limits
• Right turn violations at intersections
• Red light violations

Ana Validzic of the DPH said the grant will be used to improve their comprehensive pedestrian injury maps [PDF], to update their pedestrian safety material, and to provide four mini-grants to advocacy groups that have been involved in pedestrian safety campaigns. She said previous recipients of DPH grants were Walk SF, Senior Action Network, and Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired.

Validzic was upbeat about sharing the grant with SFPD and said it was an encouraging sign that OTS would give the money this way. "This funding from OTS represents a dramatic shift for them. In the past 8 years, they have been interested in other traffic safety initiatives and now they are really focused on pedestrian safety initiatives like Safe Routes to School."

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