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Posts from the "Mayor Ed Lee" Category

Wednesday, May 15, 2013 11 Comments

Supervisor Mar: Abysmal Funding for Bicycle Infrastructure “Not Acceptable”

It looks like Supervisor Eric Mar is ready to make some noise about the need to fund the SFMTA’s vision for a major expansion of bike-friendly streets — which Mayor Ed Lee hasn’t prioritized at all since the agency released its Draft Bicycle Strategy earlier this year.

Supervisor Mar speaking at last week's Bike to Work Day rally. Photo: Aaron Bialick

At yesterday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, Mar issued a request to the City Budget and Legislative Analyst and the Controller’s Office for a report on potential opportunities to increase the abysmal amount of funding currently devoted to bicycle infrastructure — 0.46 percent of the city’s capital budget.

“It’s time that the city walks the walk when it comes to funding bike improvements,” said Mar. “Less than a half of one percent is not acceptable.”

While pro-bike talk from elected officials abounded at last week’s Bike to Work Day rally, Mar noted that ”there were no commitments to step up and deliver the funding that our fledgling bicycle network needs.”

In February, when Mar asked Mayor Ed Lee how he planned to help fund the SFMTA’s Bicycle Strategy – a vision for making bicycling a mainstream mode of transportation – the mayor made it clear that he has no plans to back up his pro-bike rhetoric with a commitment to implementation.

With the SFMTA set to approve its next two-year budget a year from now, “Now is the time where we can start planning and working proactively to make these plans a reality,” said Mar.

Mar pointed to SFMTA Director Ed Reiskin’s remarks at last October’s NACTO Conference in New York, reported by Streetsblog, when Reiskin stated that “the most cost effective investment we can make in moving people in our city is in bicycle infrastructure.”

The efficacy of bicycle infrastructure is already evident in neighborhoods like the Inner Richmond, which Mar represents, where bicycle commuting increased by 167 percent from 2000 to 2010. During that time, bike lanes were installed on Arguello Boulevard and Cabrillo Street. Mar also pushed for the recent implementation of the Fell and Oak protected bike lanes, which now provide a safer commuting route for District 1 residents. “I think the improvements to bike lanes, making them safer for families, has had a real impact in the Richmond,” said Mar.

“We know that improving the bicycle network in San Francisco leads to healthier communities, less car congestion, less pressure on Muni lines already at capacity, healthier commuters, and many other economic benefits,” he added.

Thursday, May 9, 2013 26 Comments

Bike to Work Day at City Hall: Lots of Pro-Bike Talk, Few Real Commitments

by Aaron Bialick

Elected officials and thousands of commuters took to two wheels for the 19th annual Bike to Work Day, welcomed by the new protected bike lane on Oak Street and the city’s first bicycle counter on Market Street. As in the past few years, the mayor and city supervisors gathered on the steps of City Hall to give speeches cheering bicycling, with some calling for the implementation of more bike lanes.

Supervisor David Chiu neglected to mention Polk Street in his Bike to Work Day speech. Photo: Aaron Bialick

The event saw record-breaking bike traffic counts, according to manual counts by the SF Municipal Transportation Agency, which found that bikes accounted for 76 percent of eastbound vehicle traffic on Market at Van Ness Avenue between 8:30 and 9:30 a.m. — a three percent increase in bike traffic over last year, and a nearly 30 percent increase since 2009.

By 9 a.m., the new digital bike counter on eastbound Market between Ninth and Tenth Streets displayed a total of 1,300 bicycle commuters. (That may be an underestimate, as riders who didn’t run over sensors in the bike lane appeared to not be counted.)

While city leaders had a few recent improvements to point to, important issues went unaddressed. At the podium, Mayor Ed Lee made no mention of the SFMTA’s Bicycle Strategy, which he has so far refused to fund.

Meanwhile, the Board of Supervisors’ supposed bike champion, David Chiu, said nothing about Polk Street – the vital bicycling corridor on which the rally was held, where the SFMTA has ruled out plans for protected bike lanes on all but six blocks. His omission didn’t seem to sit well with several rally attendees, who, after Chiu’s speech, shouted “Polk Street!”

Mayor Ed Lee made no mention of the need to increase funding for bicycle infrastructure on the 19th annual Bike to Work Day. Meanwhile, Morgan Fitzgibbons (out of the frame) holds a sign in the back reading, "19th Annual Photo Op & Empty Promises Day.” Photo: Aaron Bialick

After the rally, when Chiu was asked if he planned to take a stand for protected bike lanes on Polk, he declined to do so, instead characterizing himself as a mediator between street safety advocates and parking-obsessed merchants. “I think there has not been enough dialogue between the various sides of this perspective,” he said. “On the one hand, we’ve had significant safety issues for pedestrians and cyclists on a thoroughfare that is used every single day by thousands of folks. On the other hand, the plight of our small businesses is very, very real.”

“I do hope we will have more protected bikeways around the city,” he said. “The question is if that should be for all of Polk Street.”

Chiu, along with Supervisors Scott Wiener and David Campos — who represent San Francisco on the Metropolitan Transportation Commission – did call for an increase in the city’s abysmal level of investment in bicycling, currently 0.46 percent of the capital budget.

“We’ve got to get real here,” said Wiener. “If we don’t put our money where our mouth is and start investing in bike infrastructure, in Muni, it’s not going to happen as fast as we need it to happen. I want to move fast, and I want us to invest and transform our city into a city where we can get around in all sorts of different ways, including biking.”

Tuesday, April 16, 2013 40 Comments

Is SFPD Serious About Cracking Down on Distracted Driving?

by Aaron Bialick

SFPD Traffic Company Commander Mikail Ali (right) and SF District Attorney George Gascón. Photo: Aaron Bialick

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.

Friday, April 12, 2013 15 Comments

Mayor Lee on Walk to Work Day: We Won’t Let Ped Strategy Sit on the Shelf

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by Aaron Bialick

Photo: Aaron Bialick

On Walk to Work Day, touted as the first official event of its kind in the nation, city officials strolled to a press conference on the steps of City Hall, where Mayor Ed Lee promised to implement the city’s Pedestrian Strategy [PDF].

Since the Draft Pedestrian Strategy was released in January, providing a rough guide for how the city can re-engineer streets and target traffic enforcement to make walking safer in the coming years, street safety advocates have praised the city’s vision, but have been concerned as to whether city leaders will take action to fund it.

“I’m going to see to it that we not have a [delay] where this stays on the shelf,” Lee told a crowd of dozens of Walk to Work Day participants. “We’re going to fund this thing.”

Lee said one-third of the estimated funding needed has already been identified, and that he’s confident the city will find the rest in the coming years. He also said the city plans to launch a website within the next two weeks where residents will be able to track the progress of implementation and “hold us accountable.”

Walk SF is “excited to see” a revised section of the Pedestrian Strategy which more specifically lays out the amount of funding needed and potential sources the city could use to procure it, said Executive Director Elizabeth Stampe. Of the estimated $363 million needed to implement safety upgrades on priority streets by 2021, the city has a $215 million shortfall, according to the plan. In the coming months, a steering committee is expected to develop criteria for how to prioritize safety projects where they’re needed most.

“It’s up to the mayor and the supervisors to help direct funding to fixing the streets and saving lives,” Stampe said.

So far, seven people have been killed by drivers on San Francisco streets this year. The latest victim was 60-year-old Becky Lee, who was hit and killed by a pickup truck driver Wednesday in a crosswalk at Judson Avenue and Edna Street, just east of City College’s Ocean Campus, and about a block from the 280 freeway. Last year, 20 pedestrians were killed, according to SFPD.

“We shouldn’t be losing 20 people a year. We shouldn’t be losing anybody just to walk in the streets of San Francisco,” said SFMTA Director of Transportation Ed Reiskin. “We should also be working to make it more enjoyable so that we can attract more people out of their cars and on to their feet, which will make San Francisco an even better place.”

Tuesday, April 2, 2013 9 Comments

After 6 Ped Deaths in 3 Months, SF Needs City Hall Action on Street Safety

by Aaron Bialick

In the first three months of 2013, six pedestrians have been killed on San Francisco streets. At that rate, the city is on course for pedestrian deaths to rise for the third year in a row.

Walk SF Executive Director Elizabeth Stampe tells KTVU today, "We know what we need to do" to save lives. "We need action from our leadership."

The trend is striking: Since 2010, when 14 pedestrians were killed on San Francisco streets, more have died each year since. There were 17 deaths reported in 2011, and at least 19 deaths in 2012. (The Examiner reports that police data shows 20 deaths that year, and five this year. By our count, it appears one of those deaths may have been mistakenly counted in 2012. We’ve reported on six deaths this year, with the first occurring on the morning of New Year’s Day.)

From 2000 to 2008, pedestrian fatalities were on a downward trajectory: 2000 saw 32 pedestrian deaths, and 2008 saw 13, the lowest number within the period. The rate of pedestrian deaths in the first three months of 2013 is nearly twice as high as the rate in 2008.

Will Mayor Ed Lee go beyond publicity shots and take leadership to curb the rising number of pedestrian deaths on San Francisco streets? Photo: bubbletea1/Flickr

Mayor Ed Lee’s office says the city’s final version of the Pedestrian Strategy, which will include a plan to fund the pedestrian safety improvements that are needed, is expected to be released this week, KTVU reported today.

“We know how to fix these streets,” said Elizabeth Stampe, executive director of Walk SF. “Delay here means tragedy.”

The latest victim is Tania Madfes, a retired teacher who died in the hospital last Wednesday after she and her husband were run down by a driver in a crosswalk at West Portal Avenue and Vicente Street. The SF Chronicle reports:

A San Francisco woman who devoted her career to encouraging girls to pursue opportunities that had been denied to her has died after she was struck by a car while crossing a street in the West Portal neighborhood with her husband.

Tania Madfes, 68, and her husband, David Madfes, were returning home March 21 from an evening at the Berkeley Repertory Theater and were walking across Vicente Street at West Portal Avenue when a car struck them at 9:40 p.m.

“We were crossing Vicente and – I can’t reconstruct in my head what happened – next thing I knew this car was there,” David Madfes said Thursday. “It hit my leg just as it came to a stop, and I fell and my wife was lying on the street on her back.”

Friday, March 8, 2013 1 Comment

Letter From London: What a Mayoral Commitment to Cycling Looks Like

by Aaron Bialick

Image: Mayor of London

A few weeks after SF Mayor Ed Lee displayed a total lack of commitment to the city’s Bike Strategy, London Mayor Boris Johnson has announced an aggressive $1.3 billion plan for a comprehensive bike network, including protected bike lanes.

Streetsblog NYC‘s Stephen Miller reports:

“Cycling will be treated not as niche, marginal, or an afterthought, but as what it is: an integral part of the transport network,” Johnson said. ”I want cycling to be normal, a part of everyday life.”

The plan includes big changes, including new types of bike lanes for the capital:

The flagship initiative, a 15-mile separated crosstown route connecting western and eastern suburbs via central London and business districts including the West End and Canary Wharf.

A network of “quietways,” akin to bike boulevards, that will connect suburban and central London neighborhoods.

Adding physical separation to the existing “cycle superhighways,” which sometimes offer little more than a stripe of paint on some of London’s busiest roads.

The plan also has a broad policy framework to transform biking in London:

Wednesday, February 13, 2013 40 Comments

Failing to Back Up His Words, Mayor Lee Won’t Fund SF’s Bike Strategy

by Aaron Bialick

Mayor Ed Lee has made it clear that he has no plans to take leadership on funding San Francisco’s vision for making bicycling a mainstream mode of transportation.

Mayor Lee will bike to City Hall on Bike to Work Day, but he refuses to make the necessary investments to put SF's bike infrastructure on par with other leading cities. Photo: Aaron Bialick

During a question-and-answer session at yesterday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, Supervisor Eric Mar asked the mayor how he will help fund the SFMTA’s Draft Bicycle Strategy, a compass to guide the city toward its official goal of having 20 percent of trips by bike by 2020. Essentially, as the Bay Guardian put it, Mar’s question “is simply asking the mayor whether he will put his money where his mouth is.”

But in the mayor’s tepid, convoluted answer (reprinted below), he never says that SF needs to invest more in bicycling.

In other words, Lee said “No.” He’s not going to put his money where his mouth is. All those feel-good statements about building 100 miles of protected bike lanes? Apparently, Lee has no intention of following through.

Instead of embracing calls to allocate a relatively modest sum to help put SF on par with cities like New York and Chicago — which are getting safer streets and better economic outcomes out of their investments in bike infrastructure — Lee asserted that the city is already doing enough to encourage bicycling.

According to the Bike Strategy, the “20 percent” vision would require an investment of $500 million in infrastructure like protected bike lanes — which would still amount to less than 8 percent of the SFMTA’s capital spending, according the SF Bicycle Coalition. With a smaller investment of $200 million — the scenario deemed most realistic by the SFMTA — the city could reach a bike mode share of 8 to 10 percent by 2018. Currently, the agency only has $30 million in funding secured for bicycle improvements during that time period.

To put the $500 million citywide network of safe bicycle infrastructure in perspective with other SF transportation projects, the 1.7-mile Central Subway costs $1.6 billion, the replacement of Doyle Drive with the Presidio Parkway costs roughly $1 billion, and BART’s newly proposed expansion of Embarcadero and Montgomery Stations would cost an estimated $900 million. As Bikes Belong’s Martha Roskowski noted during her San Francisco visit last week, “It’s a drop in the bucket of the ‘great big spending’ of the city. It’s really a question of priorities.”

But in his statement, Mayor Lee failed to even acknowledge the need for increased investment in bicycling — a turnaround from his occasional pro-bike rhetoric, and a huge disappointment to San Franciscans who took it to heart.

Thursday, January 31, 2013 7 Comments

SF’s Pedestrian Strategy: A Smart But Unfunded Vision for Safer Streets

by Aaron Bialick

Two years after the Pedestrian Safety Task Force formed to devise a plan to meet the ambitious targets for reducing injuries set by former Mayor Gavin Newsom, the SF Municipal Transportation Agency has released its Draft Pedestrian Strategy [PDF]. The document serves as a rough guide for how the city can re-engineer streets and target traffic enforcement to make walking safer in the coming years.

Second Street. Photo: Michael Short, SF Chronicle

Advocates say the goals are on par with the targets set forth by cities like Chicago and New York, who have recently set the bar with their own pedestrian safety plans. But implementing the infrastructure called for in the plan will require leadership from Mayor Ed Lee and other elected officials, who must increase the abysmal level of funding dedicated to pedestrian safety projects, as well as a diligent effort by city agencies to get the most out of their budgets by integrating pedestrian improvements into transit and road re-paving projects.

“We’re very pleased with the central ambitious commitment set out in the Pedestrian Strategy: to fix five miles of streets per year,” said Walk SF Executive Director Elizabeth Stampe, who praised the plan for taking “a big step forward with clear metrics and timelines. With these, it creates accountability. Walk SF and its members will be monitoring the implementation of the plan closely.”

“The mayor’s goal is to cut injuries in half,” added Stampe. “To succeed will take political will and funding. The SFMTA’s Strategic Plan states that ‘infrastructure support for walking is cost-effective,’ but over and over again [at the SFMTA board meeting this week] we heard how little we’re spending on pedestrian improvements.”

Will Mayor Ed Lee bring leadership and help fund the Pedestrian Strategy he's touted to make streets safer for San Franciscans? Photo: Thor Swift, Bay Citizen

As Streetsblog has reported, two to three pedestrians are injured in San Francisco every day. In addition to the human toll, this costs the city an estimated $76 million per year, much of that in health care costs paid for out of public funds. Two pedestrians have been killed in January alone. Last year, 19 pedestrians died in traffic, and 17 were killed in 2011. Overall, roughly 800 to 900 pedestrians are hit by cars in the city every year.

“When comparing ourselves to other major U.S. cities, many look towards San Francisco as being on the leading edge of progressive transportation,” said Paul Supawanich, a transportation planner at Nelson/Nygaard and former chair of the SF Pedestrian Safety Advisory Committee. “However, in the arena of pedestrian safety, places like New York and Chicago were setting the standard, we were behind. While it’s taken longer to produce than many had expected, the Pedestrian Safety Task Force has produced a great vision, and one that provides meaningful and tangible steps towards reducing pedestrian injuries and fatalities.”

Friday, January 11, 2013 173 Comments

Mayor’s Transpo Chief: “Let’s Be San Francisco and Take Down the Freeway”

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by Aaron Bialick

The 280 freeway looking from Potrero Hill, where it divides the neighborhood from Mission Bay. Photo: Michael Patrick/Flickr

The idea of removing the northern section of Highway 280 near Mission Bay is gaining more traction as planners look for ideal ways to usher in high-speed rail and transit-oriented development in downtown San Francisco.

At a SPUR forum yesterday, Mayor Ed Lee’s transportation policy director, Gillian Gillett, sketched out a proposal to follow in the footsteps of the removals of the Embarcadero Freeway and a section of the Central Freeway, which revitalized the neighborhoods the roads used to divide. As Adina Levin at Green Caltrain reported, Gillett argued that replacing the elevated portion of I-280 with a street-level boulevard, from its current terminus at 4th and King Streets south to 16th Street, would improve the livability of the area, open up land to develop new neighborhoods, provide funding through real estate revenue, and open up engineering solutions to facilitate the extension of Caltrain and CA High-Speed Rail to the planned Transbay Transit Center.

If the freeway is left to stand, its pillars would present an engineering obstacle to running the train tracks undergound, meaning the only other feasible way to allow rail tracks to safely and expediently cross 16th Street would be to dip 16th underneath the tracks. And that would make the intersection — a gateway to Mission Bay — even more hostile for people walking and biking than it already is.

As past cases have shown, creating a surface street where that part of I-280 now stands and integrating it into the neighborhood would actually reduce overall car traffic. In a moment that would make the city’s mid-20th Century freeway protesters proud, Gillett told the crowd, “Let’s be San Francisco and take down the freeway.”

Walk SF Executive Director Elizabeth Stampe called the proposal “an exciting opportunity to re-orient our city around sustainable public transportation and create a more walkable city.”

Wednesday, December 19, 2012 3 Comments

Lacking Details, Officials Tout Upcoming SF Ped Action Strategy

by Aaron Bialick

Market and Fremont Streets, one block from where a pedestrian was killed last week. Photo: fdo h/Flickr

While there’s no concrete Pedestrian Action Strategy (formerly the “Action Plan”) for San Franciscans to read over yet, city officials went ahead and held a press conference today to tell the public the document is coming next month.

Mayor Ed Lee, SFMTA Director of Transportation Ed Reiskin, and other officials gathered on the Powell Street Promenade (a.k.a. the “mega-parklet”) to tout the importance of street safety improvements and targeted enforcement efforts to reduce pedestrian injuries by 25 percent by 2016, and 50 percent by 2020, as set out in former Mayor Gavin Newsom’s Executive Directive on Pedestrian Safety.

The press event was unusual in that the officials didn’t have much substance to make public at this time. They previewed the pedestrian safety plan but that was about it. Lee said the plan will help ”lessen the inequality that exists that we know today between neighborhoods, where people literally fear walking on our streets.”

The main piece of actual news to surface today is that SFPD is using a new data-driven enforcement tactic called “Focus on the Five.” SFPD Deputy Chief of Special Operations Denise Schmitt said that under this strategy, each police district is targeting enforcement at its top five most dangerous intersections or areas, as well as focusing on the top five most dangerous traffic violations: drivers running red lights, running stop signs, violating pedestrian right-of-way, committing turning violations, and speeding.

Schmitt said police are targeting corridors like Market Street, Van Ness Avenue, and 19th Avenue, where a disproportionately high number of the 800-900 vehicle-pedestrian collisions occur every year. ”We’ve got to bring these incidents down,” said Schmitt. “Really, what this is all about is saving lives and letting people enjoy this city.”

“The need for action is clear,” said Walk SF Executive Director Elizabeth Stampe, who called “Focus on the Five” and the developing Pedestrian Action Strategy “promising” ways to “use data to prevent traffic crimes just as we do to prevent other crimes.”