Streetsblog San Francisco

The Wiggle — the growingly popular, mostly-flat bicycling route connecting SF’s eastern and western neighborhoods — should become more bike-friendly in the next year. After consulting with Dutch bicycle planners, the SFMTA is planning new upgrades to increase the safety and comfort of bicycle riders and pedestrians on the route, including “green-backed” sharrows, zebra-striped crosswalks, and bikeways on Fell and Oak Streets, which planners now say are coming next winter.

San Francisco's first green bike box installed along with a left-turn bike lane on Scott Street two years ago. Photo: SFBC/Flickr

As bicycle traffic increases along the Wiggle, improved crosswalks and other potential traffic-calming measures could help assuage complaints police say they’ve heard from some residents that stop sign violators are making it a less comfortable place to walk. Though no significant bike-pedestrian crashes are known to have been reported, police have begun stepping up enforcement in the area against bike riders (and drivers, they say) who officers determine to be running stop signs and red lights.

“That’s not going to solve the problem,” says Morgan Fitzgibbons, co-founder of the Wigg Party, a group focused on promoting environmental sustainability in the neighborhoods around the Wiggle. He said rude or dangerous behavior is limited to a minority of bicycle riders, and while an education and outreach initiative on the streets would be a good idea, the root of the problem is that “these streets are simply designed for cars.”

Current stop sign laws, pointed out Fizgibbons, are tailored for car movement. While Idaho has allowed bicycle riders in that state to treat stop signs as yield signs with positive results for nearly 30 years, California requires both bicyclists and drivers to come to a full stop. Advocates say the Idaho approach — which still requires bicyclists to slow down and yield to others who have the right-of-way — simply legitimizes common practice, since bicycle riders can safely negotiate smaller intersections like those on the Wiggle without the need for a full stop, while also clarifying expectations between different users.

“If you start designing the streets for the use that it actually receives, then you’re going to engender an attitude of respect from cyclists,” said Fitzgibbons. “I think when you start making the Wiggle a known place [for bicycles], and create that identity around the Wiggle, then you can start holding the cyclists who use it to a higher standard.”

Last September, SFMTA planners looking to transform the Wiggle into a more walkable, liveable, and bikeable place sought inspiration from Dutch planners, who in recent decades have pioneered and refined street designs to safely accommodate people on foot, on bikes, and in cars.

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Widening sidewalks in San Francisco is a time-consuming task — it’s the only city in California where even minor changes to a sidewalk’s width require legislative approval. But a new proposal headed to the SF Board of Supervisors would cut some of the red tape standing in the way of implementing such street improvements.

"Bulb-outs", or curb extensions, like this one at 7th Avenue and Irving Street could be installed more easily under a new proposal. Image: Google Maps

The proposal, sponsored by Supervisor Scott Weiner and Mayor Ed Lee, was moved forward by the SF Board of Supervisors Land Use and Economic Development Committee today. It would streamline the bureaucratic process for building sidewalk extensions (a.k.a. “bulb-outs”) — a street design tool often used by planners to calm motor traffic, improve pedestrian visibility and comfort, and ease transit boardings at stops — by eliminating an outdated requirement for changes to sidewalk widths less than one block long to be approved by the Board of Supervisors.

“This will be a significant improvement in our process in terms of making our city more pedestrian-friendly and safer for pedestrians, improving the vibrancy of our commercial districts, and creating more public space that is not for cars, but rather for people,” said Wiener.

“Upon adoption of the Better Streets Plan, we’ve seen more and more projects come through for minor sidewalk changes such as corner bulb-outs for individual projects that don’t exceed one linear block,” said Nick Elsner of the SF Department of Public Works (DPW), the primary agency responsible for implementing sidewalk extensions. ”This would greatly expedite and make the process much more efficient.”

According to legislative documents [PDF], the proposal would amend an ordinance passed in 1910 requiring project approval from supervisors, which “result[s] in a very lengthy process and often lead[s] to project delays.” It would also establish a speedier approval process for the SF Planning Department, but projects would still need to be approved by other affected agencies like the SFMTA. The change would save the DPW an estimated $2,500 in processing costs for a block of construction, said spokesperson Gloria Chan, and the SF Planning Department would save about $1,375 in reviews.

Bulb-outs, the documents note, are an important tool in pursuing the city’s goals of improving the pedestrian environment. Stephen Shotland of the Planning Department said the proposal is intended “to be able to move projects forward that really are consistent with the General Plan and consistent with the adopted Better Streets Plan,” which, along with several neighborhood plans cited in the documents, call for improvements like widening congested sidewalks, minimizing crossing distances, and discouraging high-speed car traffic on local streets. “Staff would be able to review projects to make sure that, in fact, is the case,” said Shotland.

The proposal passed the committee today without objection and is expected to go before the full board in the coming weeks.

With Mayor Ed Lee inaugurated to his first full term, Streetsblog is asking leading advocates and experts to lay out their ideas for how the mayor can move San Francisco’s transportation policy forward. We continue our series with today’s installment from Elizabeth Stampe, executive director of Walk San Francisco.

At Walk San Francisco’s big member bash last month, Mayor Ed Lee celebrated San Francisco becoming the first big city in the state to take swift action to make neighborhoods safer for kids to walk to school by implementing 15 mile per hour zones at 60 schools out of 180 to come.

Mayor Lee speaks at a Walk to School Day press conference in October. Photo: Marianne Szeto

“We will, in our lifetimes, get to zero” pedestrian deaths, declared the Mayor, calling for “experimenting out of the box with every possible idea to make streets safer.”

The mayor set a bold vision for San Francisco, and an “out of the box” approach may be just what we need to reach it. But to stand by his commitment, Mayor Lee must provide the leadership our city needs to make smart, immediate investments to improve pedestrian safety in 2012.

Over half of the city’s serious and fatal pedestrian crashes occur on just 7 percent of the city’s streets, according to the Mayor’s Pedestrian Safety Task Force, which started work last year on former Mayor Gavin Newsom’s December 2010 Executive Directive on Pedestrian Safety [PDF].

That finding can provide critical guidance for the city to effectively direct its resources — from traffic enforcement to street redesigns — to save the most lives. Streets that are safer and more pleasant to walk on, research has shown, also tend to increase home values and benefit the bottom line for local businesses and city coffers.

We have the funds available to invest in safer streets. San Francisco voters in 2010 approved Prop AA, a vehicle license fee that helps fund pedestrian safety improvements, as well as last fall’s Prop B, which provides $50 million in bonds for both walking and biking.

As Mayor Lee begins his first full term in 2012, here are a few key initiatives he can take to save lives and help boost the economy:

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A raised crosswalk and landscaped sidewalk bulb-outs now grace the entrance of this block of Newcomb Avenue. Photo: SFDPW/Flickr

After a six-year-long process, residents of Newcomb Avenue in the Bayview joined city staffers yesterday to mark the completion of the “Model Block” project, a prototype for street design that’s better for the environment and more conducive to neighborhood life.

The block had been characterized by speeding traffic and illegal dumping. With this redesign it should be a safer, more sociable street thanks to the addition of landscaped chicanes, sidewalk bulb-outs, 20 new street trees, raised crosswalks, and other traffic calming improvements. The new landscaped surfaces will absorb rainfall and prevent stormwater from overloading the sewer system.

“To see the finished project, something this great in the Bayview, is unbelievable!” said Newcomb resident Mardina Graham in a press release from the Department of Public Works. “I have lived in the neighborhood all my life and have never seen anything like this before, perhaps in other neighborhoods yes, but not here.”

Residents will organize community cleanup days to keep the street “clean and green,” according to DPW, while the performance of the new stormwater treatment facilities — projected to reduce runoff by half — will be monitored by the city.

Landscaped chicanes along the curbs are designed to slow drivers. Photo: SFDPW/Flickr

See more photos after the break.

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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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The pedestrian environment on eastern Cesar Chavez Street is in desperate need of improvement. Photo: SF Planning Department

New designs have been drawn up for eastern Cesar Chavez Street and will be presented to the community next week, nearly two months after a contentious meeting in which attendees were told, just days before the striping of new bike lanes, that plans for a road diet were being scrapped by the Mayor’s Office and Port of San Francisco because of concerns from industrial businesses about reducing road capacity for trucks hauling goods.

The new designs will not be made public until the August 24 meeting, where options for short-term and long-term plans will be presented. Sources who have seen the designs say the short-term plan does not remove a travel lane like the original plan. Instead, it would remove parking to add one-way protected bike lanes on both the north and south sides. The short-term plan is part of an air quality grant to improve biking and would not change the sidewalks.

“The plan that was going to go out in July was going to put a bike lane between a parking lane and a bunch of trucks,” said Peter Albert, the manager of urban planning initiatives at the SFMTA. “It seems like the low hanging fruit in that whole thing was the on-street parking, so why was on-street parking for basically two dozen spaces so sacrosanct that it was forcing bicyclists to pit themselves against trucks and buses?”

Under the new designs, he said, “the bike experience is much better because you’ve got no parked cars or dooring to the right, you’ve got complete clarity on your path and the trucks don’t have to intersect with you in any way.”

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