Streetsblog San Francisco

SF District Attorney George Gascón and SFPD Traffic Company Commander Mikail Ali held a press conference last Thursday to bring attention to distracted driving, since April is officially National Distracted Driving Awareness Month.

It’s promising to see law enforcement officials bring attention to this deadly and growing problem on San Francisco streets. What remains to be seen, however, is whether drivers who kill and maim others are being held accountable with thorough police crash investigations and prosecuted by the DA’s office when they’re at fault.

While SF stats on traffic crashes attributed to distracted driving aren’t available, the CA Highway Patrol says that nationally, it was a factor in 3,331 deaths and over 400,000 injuries in 2011. The Centers for Disease Control released a study last month finding that 68.7 percent of U.S. adult drivers (aged 18–64) admitted in surveys to talking on their cell phones while driving at least once in the past 30 days – far more than those in European countries. In the United Kingdom, only 20.5 percent said they had done so.

Gascón explained that data from the SF Municipal Transportation Agency shows that 60 percent of pedestrian injures in San Francisco take place in crosswalks, compared to 45 percent statewide, and 44 percent in New York City.

“Clearly, here, we’re having a much bigger problem. It’s a problem that’s impacting many lives,” said Gascón. “We’re having not only around 20 pedestrians that are being killed every year on our streets, we have well in excess of 700 pedestrians that are injured every year.” (The Department of Public Health puts the number of injuries closer to 900.)

“We need to work together to make sure we reduce the mayhem that is going on on our streets,” added Gascón.

Commander Ali said SFPD officers have beefed up enforcement against distracted driving throughout April, but that stats on violations and ticketing won’t be available until the end of the month.

Walk SF Executive Director Elizabeth Stampe applauded Gascón and the SFPD “for cracking down on people that are endangering others by driving distracted.” Still, she said, “It’s hard to know if everyone’s been held to account for endangering, and in many cases, killing people walking.”

So far this year, seven pedestrians have been killed in San Francisco, and at least three of the drivers in those have been charged because they were either drunk or fleeing police. But in cases in which drivers were sober and stayed on the scene, like the crashes that killed Becky Lee, Tania Madfes, and Melissa Kitson, causes remain less clear, and there’s no word on whether those drivers face charges.

Streetsblog has a request in with the DA’s office for how many of this year’s pedestrian crash cases have been forwarded from the SFPD to the DA, but has yet to hear back. As we’ve reported, drivers rarely face charges for injuring pedestrians unless the victim dies and the driver was intoxicated or fled the scene.

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Officers with the SF Police Department have recently been spotted wagging their fingers at bicycle riders for neglecting to stop at a stop sign on northbound Harrison Street at 15th Street, where the “stop” line doesn’t run through the bike lane like they normally do at intersections.

Since Harrison and 15th is a three-way “T” intersection, the bike lane doesn’t intersect with any cross traffic, and the stop sign is poorly placed for bike riders whose chief concern should be yielding to pedestrians in the crosswalk on the far end of the intersection. The intersection is not known to see many bicycle crashes.

Adrian Maestas, who bike commutes through the intersection, says he always stops at the sign anyway, but that on March 22, he witnessed police threatening to crack down on bike riders for rolling through. “Two cyclists whizzed by me, and were greeted by an officer who was parked on the side of the street. He told them to stop on the side, and gave them a warning, saying “today you get one chance, after this, 100 percent stop sign enforcement!” Maestas said he hasn’t seen such enforcement at the intersection since then.

Here’s what California Vehicle Code 22450 has to say about stop sign requirements:

The driver of any vehicle approaching a stop sign at the entrance to, or within, an intersection shall stop at a limit line, if marked, otherwise before entering the crosswalk on the near side of the intersection.

If there is no limit line or crosswalk, the driver shall stop at the entrance to the intersecting roadway.

Jeff Wozniak, a San Francisco attorney who represents bicycle riders in crashes said he thinks “technically, they’re probably right” in that the bike lane is entering “an intersecting roadway.” However, “My opinion would be that it’s a very confusing intersection, the way that it’s painted, in that you’re not crossing a crosswalk, except when you get to the other side of the intersection.”

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BART police had some welcome news for Bay Area cyclists this week: An undercover sting led to the arrest of an alleged thief in possession of ten bikes and more than 100 bike parts. It’s a nice follow-up to the SFPD’s arrest last July of a thief who had 114 stolen bicycles.

Stories of successful bike theft crackdowns in San Francisco aren’t common, but it’s promising to hear that local law enforcement officials are directing resources to address the problem, since the perceived low risk of stealing bikes is what makes bicycles such an appealing target for thieves.

As Streetsblog New York City relayed last August, the Priceonomics Blog looked at why bike theft is so prevalent, even when “it seems as if stealing bikes shouldn’t be a lucrative form of criminal activity.” The conclusion? Bike thieves are rarely caught, and even if they are, they rarely face jail time, and that’s what draws them to the business.

A 2007 estimate of SF bike theft put the citywide number at 2,000 to 3,000 bikes per year. In the Mission, an average of 60 bikes are stolen every month, officers said at a workshop on bike theft prevention held by the SFPD last week, according to SF Weekly.

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Video via SFist.A video of an off-duty SF police officer allegedly speeding through the Broadway Tunnel at 100 mph, possibly drunk, has sparked an outcry from street safety advocates.

SFPD Sergeant Carl T (that’s his full legal name) posted the video on his Facebook page in September, eliciting comments from fellow officers who joked and reminisced about a past gory traffic incident in the tunnel, according to SFist, which broke the story.

In response to an email from Walk SF Executive Director Elizabeth Stampe, SFPD Chief Greg Suhr said officer T has been placed on administrative duty while the incident is being investigated, and that “I can assure you that no one is more ‘taken aback and concerned’ that one my officers would potentially disregard basic street safety and put people in danger this way — or would even joke about it, than I am.”

“In the event that this event proves to have happened as reported,” he said, “I can assure you that the discipline dispensed will be swift and severe.”

T told SF Weekly that he was joking when he posted on Facebook that “we were all drunk,” and that he was neither driving nor filming the video.

The comment thread on Facebook, captured by SFist (the initial post and T’s account have since been deleted), provides a chilling glimpse of the attitude some SFPD officers display when it comes to reckless behavior on the streets:

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Reader Sean Rea witnessed a pretty brazen act of dangerous and petty driving behavior last Thursday on downtown Mission Street: Another hit-and-run on a vulnerable street user. But it wasn’t just any ordinary victim this driver knicked and fled from. It was an officer of the SF Police Department:

I was riding down Mission (due to closure of Howard that is the Dreamforce fiasco) and just before Fourth came upon a bike cop. A car came up on our left, clipped his radio and handlebar, and then sped through a yellow as the officer yelled and took chase. At the next green I took off and stuck around to give a statement.

Rea said the officer thought the driver may not face serious penalties, but Rea “took solace in the fact that the driver had to sit there on the curb in embarrassment for a half hour, at least.”

It’s hard to imagine why this driver shouldn’t face charges similar to those of assaulting a police officer. But we can add one more to the list of benefits of having police patrol by foot, bike and transit (not just cruisers). Cavalier drivers might be a little more cautious if they know they could potentially maim or kill a cop. Unfortunately, the risk of running over everyday people doesn’t seem to be enough of a deterrent.

Just as one problem improves for bike commuters on Market Street, another arises. Some San Francisco police officers have apparently grown fond of parking their cruisers in the westbound protected bike lane on Market at Polk/Tenth Street, next to Fox Plaza.

Back in May I snapped the above photo of a cruiser forcing a platoon of bike commuters to stop and squeeze by. I peered into the adjacent Starbucks for any officers, but seeing none, I gave them the benefit of the doubt, presuming it may have been a fluke. I don’t regularly commute on Market, so it was hard for me to tell if this was a recurring problem.

But this morning, bike commuter Stephanie May sent in photos of a cruiser parked in the same spot, and she said she sees it all the time. In fact, she returned this afternoon and snapped more photos, saying the same police car seems to have been parked there all day.

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