Streetsblog San Francisco

The long legal ordeal is finally over for Raquel Nelson, the mother who faced three years in prison after her four-year-old son was killed by an impaired driver in suburban Atlanta.

Charges of vehicular homicide against Nelson — who was crossing the street outside a crosswalk when her son A.J. was struck and killed — were dropped yesterday in exchange for a guilty plea on jaywalking charges alone. She will pay a $200 fine, according to Transportation for America.

Nelson’s case gained national attention as an illustration of poor road design as a civil rights issue. The homicide charge was based on the idea that she was recklessly “jaywalking,” but Nelson was simply trying to get from the bus stop to her apartment, and the closest crosswalk was one-third of a mile away.

David Goldberg at Transportation for America says that while Nelson was finally cleared of the unjust charges, many other people around the country face the same kind of conditions that took the life of her son:

That particular ordeal is over for Raquel Nelson. But the underlying crime persists – not just in Cobb County, GA, but also in cities and inner-ring suburbs all over the country. Areas built since the 1950s to be automobile dependent now are home to many lower-income families who don’t have access to cars. Nevertheless, the busy roads around them typically have not been retrofitted with safety measures for people on foot, bicycle or getting to and from the bus. The situation is getting exponentially worse as low-wage workers and recent immigrants move to these areas for their more affordable housing.

Fortunately, Goldberg reports, some progress has come out of this case. Greater Atlanta is starting to change the way it approaches road design:

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• No Surprise Here: The Mission Wants Bike-Share (Mission Local)
• SFMTA Gives Preliminary Approval to On-Street Farmer’s Market on Inner Clement (Richmond SF)
• Hayes Valley Farm Cleared of Protestors to Make Way for Development (SocketSite)
• BART Unions Consider Strike After Approval of Preliminary Budget (KTVU)
• Advocates Discuss Displacement Concerns at SFBG Forum on Plan Bay Area
• Marin County Complains the Loudest About Plan Bay Area’s Perceived Impositions (Marin IJ)
• Marin County Supes Approve Study to Reopen Alto Tunnel for Bikes and Peds (Marin IJ)
• Bay Bridge Contractor to Receive $20 Million Bonus if Bridge Opens September 3 (Mercury News)
• Federal Board Gives Approval for CA High Speed Rail to Begin Construction (Sac Bee)
• Shayla Cypriano, 23, Crushed and Killed by Delivery Truck After Crash in San Jose (CoCo, NBC)
• SamTrans Launches New Blog Called “Peninsula Moves!” (Almanac)
• Construction Begins on New $145 Million, 13-Mile Carpool Lane on I-580 (CoCo Times)

More headlines at Streetsblog Capitol Hill

A driver smashed into a Muni shelter on Sutter near Taylor Street last night, and Matt Haze Kaftor witnessed the aftermath. It’s not apparent if anyone was injured. “By the time I saw the vehicle, it appeared all its inhabitants had been evacuated from the scene,” Kaftor said. “Front side and rear airbags were all deployed.”

Fingers crossed here — hopefully no one was unfortunate enough to be waiting at the shelter in the path of the driver, who reportedly decimated a concrete trash can on the sidewalk.

SFMTA spokesperson Paul Rose said the cost of repairing Muni shelters doesn’t come out of the agency’s pocket — they’re repaired by Clear Channel, the contractor that uses them for advertisements. No word on if they pursue reimbursements from the driver’s insurance company in incidents like this.

Many American cities are warming to the idea of handling their stormwater runoff at ground level. In Indianapolis, they decided to work bioswales and stormwater retention into the newly opened Cultural Trail. The eight-mile biking and walking route loops through the heart of the downtown, and in this short, Karen S. Haley, the Executive Director of Indianapolis Cultural Trail, tells us how these green islands keep rainfall from overwhelming the sewer system and polluting local waterways.

Imagine if these treatments became standard for every U.S. city looking to improve water quality by reducing sewer overflows.

It’s not quite as brilliant as Al Madrigal’s segment on the Daily Show last week, but Stephen Colbert’s riff on Dorothy Rabinowitz at the end of this clip is totally worth your time this morning.

Whenever street space is allocated for bicycling, someone will inevitably level the accusation that the city is waging a “war on cars.” But it turns out the people in those cars want separate space for bicycles too, according to surveys conducted in two major California metropolitan areas. Bike lanes make everyone feel safer — even drivers.

Rebecca Sanders is a doctoral candidate in transportation planning and urban design at the University of California-Berkeley. She’s spent a lot of time asking people — drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians — what kinds of street treatments would make them feel safer, giving them a list of safety improvements to choose from. Most drivers said their top priority was bike lanes. (In Los Angeles, the top choice was for improved pedestrian crossings, but bike lanes were a close second.)

Sanders began this research under the sponsorship of the state department of transportation (Caltrans), interviewing drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists on major corridors in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles. She asked drivers why they picked the mode they did, and asked everyone how they perceived safety issues, especially for biking. Then she asked what kinds of street treatments would make the street safer for them.

“What was interesting about that study was that in the San Francisco Bay Area, the most requested item, across the board, was a bicycle lane on the corridor,” Sanders told Streetsblog. “It was the most requested item by drivers, it was the most requested item by pedestrians, and it was the most requested item by bicyclists. That was quite surprising to us.”

It’s no shock that cyclists asked for dedicated street space in overwhelming numbers, and it stands to reason that pedestrians want bicycles off the sidewalk. Perhaps it should be just as obvious that drivers would welcome dedicated bike infrastructure, too. They find that bike lanes help them be aware of cyclists and make cyclists’ behavior more predictable, according to Sanders’ research. In general, there’s less potential for conflict between drivers and cyclists when they each have their own space.

“We have not done a good job of recognizing and validating the concerns of drivers about predictability,” Sanders said. “For a long time, cyclists have been defensive; they’ve been fighting for space, and legitimately so. But in the process, some areas where we could really work together, I think, have fallen to the wayside. Everybody wants predictability on the roadway. Nobody wants to feel like they’re going to get hit or hit someone else and it’s going to be beyond their control.”

The results of Sanders’ San Francisco-area research are due to be published soon in the Transportation Research Record and are available now on the Berkeley website. Meanwhile, Sanders has continued to look into drivers’ attitudes toward bike lanes, making it the topic of her (as yet unpublished) dissertation. She has conducted focus groups and internet surveys to shed light on what drivers and cyclists need to feel safe.

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Gary Howe has been seeing things differently since he suffered a foot injury when he slipped on an icy patch of broken sidewalk in his hometown of Traverse City, Michigan, this winter.

Since then, hobbling has replaced walking for Howe, who runs Network Blog My Wheels are Turning and lives car-lite in this northern Michigan city.

The injury has been an eye-opener, he explains, showing how difficult things are for people who move at a slower pace:

I’ve written about walking speeds and speeds at crosswalk before. Normally, I’m one of the faster ones and well within the 4-feet per second that most people cross a street. With this injury, I’m reduced to about half of my normal pace, around 2-feet per second, maybe a tad faster, sometimes a little slower. I really noticed it the other day when my pace tested the patience of an otherwise considerate driver. The driver stopped (as is city ordinance) and waved me to cross, only to lose patience as I proceeded and finally giving me a gesture from behind the windshield communicating something like, “WTF? Can’t you go faster?”

Before the injury, I was already aware of the need for streets/sidewalks and crosswalk times to be designed with a wider range of abilities and speeds. During the last two months I now have the empirical understanding of what it is like for people with injuries, disabilities, or just slower cadence than the majority of people to get around.

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• 15 Hospitalized in Crash Between Muni Bus and Trolley on Market (SFGate, ABC, CBS)
• BART Unveils the Design of Its New Train Fleet (KTVU)
• BART Looks to Make Its Existing Trains Quieter (SF Examiner)
• BART Set to Approve Balanced Budget Today, Though Shortfalls Loom (SF Examiner)
• This Truck Ruined a Home in the Excelsior: A New Favorite Selling Point for Toyota (SF Weekly)
• $82,000 Parking Space in South Beach Still a Real Estate Bargain (SF Chronicle)
• Uber Unveils Prices Intended to Undercut Taxis and Competitors (SF Examiner)
• Crime Happens Everywhere, But KTVU Just Can’t Help But Play Up the “Dangerous Transit” Angle
• Watch: Dodging an Elderly Driver Speeding Backwards Down a Sidewalk in San Rafael (MIJ, KTVU)
• Belmont Becomes Third Bay Area City to Vote to Remove Red-Light Cameras (CBS, NBC)
• Berkeley Continues to Develop an SFPark-Style Pilot Program (Berkeleyside)
• Bay Area Legislators Question Potential Bonus Incentives for Speedier Bay Bridge Opening (Sac Bee)

More headlines at Streetsblog Capitol Hill

The Wiggle could be transformed into a greener, more bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly route in the coming years thanks to a new planning effort launched by the SFMTA and the SF Public Utilities Commission.

At an open house community meeting yesterday, planners shopped potential treatments like traffic diverters, traffic circles, bulb-outs, and raised crosswalks that could be used to calm motor traffic while adding plants and surfacing treatments to absorb more storm runoff.

“We want to think about how we can make the streets for people,” said Luis Montoya, a planner at the SFMTA’s Livable Streets Subdivision. “We’ve been hearing for several years about several issues going on on the Wiggle, whether it be cut-through traffic, bikes and cars speeding and not yielding to pedestrians, and people wanting to see more green on their streets.”

Bicycle traffic has grown dramatically in recent years on the Wiggle, the flattest central route connecting the eastern and western neighborhoods by zig-zagging through the Lower Haight. During that time, the SFMTA has added green-backed sharrows and more visible crosswalks, and the agency plans to remove parking spaces at corners (a.k.a. daylighting) this summer to improve visibility at intersections.

Connections to the Wiggle have also seen major improvements recently, with the installation of the Fell and Oak protected bike lanes on the west end, and an overhaul of Duboce Avenue on the east end that included a new green bike channel.

The SFMTA is now able to embark on more intensive changes to the Wiggle’s streetscape thanks to a partnership with the PUC, which is looking to replace the sewers and add water-absorbing treatments (similar to the project under construction on western Cesar Chavez Street), planners said.

The PUC is providing $4.2 million in addition to $800,000 from the Prop B street improvement bond. By combining projects and funds, both agencies can save time and money, planners said. The project is currently scheduled to be completed in mid-2016.

Ambitious visions for the Wiggle have been sketched out by city planners and livable streets advocates. In 2011, bicycle planners from the SFMTA joined planners from the Netherlands in a workshop called ThinkBike, where they set out to re-design major SF bicycle routes for walking and biking first. The conceptual plans that came out of the workshop depicted on-street greenways with chicanes and traffic lane closures, as well as green-backed sharrows and bike channels like the ones which were later implemented. Last year the SF Bicycle Coalition created more detailed renderings of a Wiggle greenway based on those visions.

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