Streetsblog San Francisco

The Ingleside Police Station has a new captain and he's out of the blocks with a very progressive pedestrian safety agenda.  Captain David Lazar, who just assumed his post at the Ingleside Station on April 18th, will conduct a sting on motorists who fail to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks at five locations today from 2:30-8:00 pm. 

Asked to explain the sting, Lazar said, "I'm the new Captain here and this is one of the enforcement strategies that has proven successful; people get the idea when they see a sting like this."

When asked whether there was a particular incident motivating the sting, Captain Lazar said, "Our traffic collisions have been low and our pedestrian fatalities have been low and I want to keep it that way.  We want to make sure it's not acceptable for people to just blow through intersections."

"A lot of the police captains are getting religion on this," said Walk SF President Manish Champsee. "The traffic company does it when they have time, but it's great to see captains using their personnel to contribute to it."

Champsee added that when captains conduct these stings they get a lot of tickets and that's a good thing "or a bad thing, depending on how you look at it." Captain Lazar echoed Champsee's sentiment and said even if with advance publicity on our blog or otherwise, they would have ample scofflaws to choose from.

"You could do a big announcement right now and we're still going to write a hundred citations. People are not stopping for pedestrians, it's dangerous."

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Anthropologists and transit advocates have long bemoaned the rise of The Sacred Rac, its subsequent worship by the majority of the people of the Asu tribe, and the attendant demise of bipedus norteamericanus, or the common pedestrian.  But new evidence appears every day that the once-endangered pedestrian may be seeing a resurgence in urban habitats throughout the nation.  

Cities around the country have committed to recovering habitat for the pedestrian, with reduced Rac speed limits, bans on Racs in certain tracts of metropolis, extensive traffic calming, zebra crosswalks, and pedestrian countdown signals.

Last week billionaire conservationist Michael Bloomberg vowed to open a large swath of former Rac territory to the pedestrian in New York City, a move not without its detractors.  Following on the heels of his Summer Streets initiative, there is great hope this pilot reclamation will be a success.

Though it celebrated a temporary habitat recovery last summer for Sunday Streets, San Francisco lags far behind other cities in restoring the delicate biomes that support the safety and health of the pedestrian.  According to a report from an agency that monitors Rac safety, San Francisco ranks in the top-five most dangerous large cities for pedestrians.

Though San Francisco has plans for pedestrian priority and complete streets, clearly much work remains to be done to ensure the survival of bipedus norteamericanus.  We look forward to San Francisco's announcement of the new Sunday Streets schedule for this year, which we hope will rival Seattle's own Summer Streets program.

Last September, San Francisco's city attorney asked Judge Peter Busch to allow an exemption to the long-standing bicycle injunction so the MTA could improve the city’s second most dangerous intersection for cyclists, where Fell Street meets Masonic Street.  Even after the MTA adjusted signalization and gave cyclists a separate green light, cars are running the red light and hitting cyclists.

The latest collision happened Saturday, around 4pm, to Cindy Asrir, as she was riding bicycles with her 10-year-old daughter on the Panhandle Greenway after spending the afternoon in Golden Gate Park.  At Fell and Masonic, they waited for the bicycle light to turn green and then started across the street.  

In an interview, Asrir described what happened as she and her daughter entered the crosswalk. She said there were also several pedestrians crossing when a white SUV pulled through the red light, but stopped short of them.  A second car ignored the red signal and darted around the SUV, slamming into Asrir, knocking her up on the hood of the vehicle, and launching her to the pavement.  Asrir hit her head hard, though she credits her helmet with preventing further injury.  

According to witnesses, the driver had been talking on her cell phone. Later, she was not allowed to leave in her car.

A police report has yet to be filed in the case and Park Station police would not release any details about the crash, including possible citations and charges.

Though obviously shaken from the event and upset that the new light hasn’t improved things, Asrir was grateful that her daughter, who trailed behind her by a foot, had not been the one struck, nor a mother with a child in a stroller who was just behind them.

“I used to always be scared of that intersection,” said Asrir. “But I was so happy when they put in the light.  Now I’m scared of the intersection again.”

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The SF Examiner published an excellent editorial from Walk San Francisco Director Manish Champsee today that calls on the city and the media to improve conditions for pedestrians and not immediately blame the victim in crashes.  When a vehicle killed 87-year-old Victor Cinti in mid-December, the Examiner ran a front-page headline "Jaywalker Killed."  Sells papers, sure, but the headline and the article missed the details of the story and found culpability where they shouldn't, argues Champsee.

The solution to avoid this kind of tragedy at intersections with a pedestrian bridge is not to crack down on “jaywalkers,” but rather to allow people to cross at street level. We also need to calm the traffic in this area and make it more inviting to people walking at street level, rather than trying to separate people from the street.

Though papers like the Examiner aren't likely to be sensitive to subtleties, it added insult to death by running an online poll with the article asking readers whether the police should crack down on jaywalkers. 

The jaywalker in question was an elderly man who used a walker, both of which were strewn in the middle of the street in the original grisly photo run by the paper.  No attention was paid to why Cinti would have calculated that the risk of crossing the busy street was preferable to using the pedestrian bridge over Geary Boulevard at the scene of the crash.

Cinti was killed on the west side of the street, while the bridge is on east side. This means that in order for Cinti to have used the bridge he would have had to cross Webster Street twice just to cross Geary Boulevard on the bridge, in addition to climbing up to cross. That’s a lot of extra effort for someone using a walker.

If the intersection of Geary and Webster allowed crossing at the street level, city standards would dictate more time to cross than what is currently the case. They would also dictate pedestrian countdown signals, along with pedestrian refuge islands in the medians, so someone who couldn’t cross the entire length of the street in one light cycle could continue at the next cycle.

Flickr photo: awcole72

On a recent Tuesday morning, at Folsom and 25th streets in The Mission, I watched one of the more bizarre street-cleaning rituals I've ever seen in any city. I know San Francisco drivers get a free parking pass in front of numerous churches on Sundays (just check out Valencia Street), but I had never seen car owners squat on the sidewalk for street cleaning.

A local business owner who didn't want to be identified approached me as I was taking photos and growled, "One guy owns at least nine of those vehicles." 

When I explained they would be published on a blog to encourage people to call the abuse into the MTA he was elated.  "More power to you," he said, "somebody needs to do something.  They make it very hard to get my deliveries some days."

Moments before snapping these photos an enforcement vehicle drove down Folsom ticketing vehicles that hadn't cleared out of the street, ignoring the countless violators of California Vehicle Code (CVC) 22500f, which explicitly states:

No person shall stop, park or leave standing any vehicle whether attended or unattended, except when necessary to avoid conflict with other traffic or in compliance with the directions of a peace officer or official traffic control device... on a sidewalk, except electric carts when authorized by local ordinance, as specified in Section 21114.5

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