Today’s Headlines

  • Driver Who Hit Two People, Muni Bus and Fled Charged With 4 Felonies, 3 Misdeameanors (SFGate)
  • Man Hit by Muni M Train at 19th and Holloway in Front of SFSU (KTVU, SFGate)
  • DA Gascon Announces Ped Safety Education Grants for High-Injury Neighborhood Groups (CBS)
  • SFMTA Releases Map of Proposed Shared Muni Stops, White Zones for Private Shuttles (SFBG)
  • An In-Depth Look at Muni’s Labor Dispute From Founding Streetsblog SF Editor Bryan Goebel (KQED)
  • SFBG Delves Into the Muni Strikes and Battles of Generations Past
  • Drivers Routinely Park With Impunity in the Folsom Bike Lane at 18th to Access PG&E (PBB)
  • BART to Vote on New Train Car Design, Could Change Bike Amenities (East Bay Express, SFBC)
  • Huge, Blackened Rope Sculpture to Be Removed From Embarcadero Station (SFGate)
  • Smoke-Filled BART Train Breaks Down at West Oakland Station Monday (ABC)
  • East Bay Express Looks at the Numbers on Why Protected Bike Lanes Would Boost Telegraph Business

More headlines at Streetsblog USA

  • gneiss

    This whole business of providing a $33,000 safety grant to educate pedestrians is entirely misplaced. We’ve had cars on our streets for over 100 years and still there are injuries and crashes involving pedestrians, with or without ‘education’. Not to mention that the neighborhoods mentioned in the article are the highest density walkable locations in the city. Shouldn’t we be better educating motorists and making our streets safer for walking instead?

    This sounds like a move by Gascon to attempt to deflect criticism away from his appalling inability to hold the people who actually cause injuries and death on our streets to real, criminal, consequences. It’s no different from creating and educating school ‘lockdown’ procedures to avoid shooting deaths rather than effecting the societal problem of gun violence.

  • Guest54321

    Does anyone know how the TWU is coming up with the $1.10/hr pay cut figure? The KQED article says that there’s a 5.05% raise and a 7.5% pension contribution, which is pre-tax, so it amounts to a 5.05% take-home-pay cut. These seem to offset. Then there’s a 3% raise this year and another raise next year. None of these things sound like a pay cut to me. The article says that the union accountant “crunched the numbers” but doesn’t give any of those numbers.

  • SteveDombek

    You’re right. Pedestrians in a city like Copenhagen don’t need to be educated on how to avoid being run over. The root of the problem is our poorly designed streets.

  • Hopefully the education includes “there’s a crosswalk at every street intersection (unless it’s expressly forbidden) and you have right of way even if it isn’t a special marked crosswalk”.

  • Andy Chow

    How do you know that people in those cities never had any education about traffic safety?

  • Andy Chow

    For me safety campaign is no different than campaigns about drug use, safe sex, and DUI. It doesn’t necessarily make all collisions go away, but at least make people think twice about getting themselves into unsafe situation (like jay walking). Yes the same education should apply to motorists and cyclists as well, but advocating ignorance for the sake of political correctness is no different than not teaching young people about condom use for the sake of discouraging sex before marriage.

  • p_chazz

    Maybe the reason people aren’t being held to criminal consequences is because they aren’t committing crimes. A person may be civilly liable for causing an accident without it being a criminal offense. That is what insurance is for.

  • SteveDombek

    Maybe they do. But ‘education’ of pedestrians becomes much less important when the streets are designed with pedestrian safety in mind. A well-designed street should be intuitive.

  • gneiss

    p_chazz – let me remind you – an accident is what your dog does on the carpet when it isn’t potty trained. The incidents that result in death and serious injury from motor vehicles are crashes and overwhelmingly represent negligence on the part of motor vehicle operators. In most cases, they are violating the basic speed law (driving too fast for conditions) and violating the pedestrian right of way. To suggest that those actions are ‘accidents’ is an insult to the people maimed and killed in SF.

    Sadly, though, your attitude, that these are simply ‘accidents’ is why we will continue to see death and injury on our streets. Until drivers face real consequences and we provide better accommodation for people walking and riding bikes, the death toll will continue. No amount of pedestrian or bicycle training will solve that problem.

  • gneiss

    So Andy – were’s the money being spent on driver education then? As it stands, I’m seeing no equivalent message from the DA’s office suggesting that we need to better train drivers. I would be more satisfied if the DA also was advocating offering safety training for drivers along with the pedestrian training.

    The message the DA is sending is that somehow pedestrians are at fault here. That after a lifetime of living around cars we need extra training for the elderly. That parents aren’t teaching their kids to be safe. Don’t you find that a bit insulting, particularly when motorists disproportionately are the ones who are killing and injuring people on the streets?

  • Andy Chow

    I look at it this way: you want a street design that people are less inclined to jay walk and more inclined to use the crosswalks and obey the signals. It doesn’t mean that people can walk anywhere willy-nilly or that they can cross without looking both ways (that where the education comes in), but not a street environment where complying with traffic laws is onerous if not impossible and that reasonable people will choose to ignore it.

  • 94103er

    Hah hah hah! We can’t even get drivers to notice people walking in marked intersections with gigantic white (or yellow) stripes. Not even when there are signs saying ‘Stop here for pedestrians’ with the triangles marking ‘this is where you stop, doofus.’ Now this is just crazy talk–you mean we actually have right of way at all intersections?!? You might just make a driver’s head explode, saying that.

  • p_chazz

    Perhaps in your dictionary that’s what accident means, but it is generally understood to mean an injury that was caused without intent. I fail to see what jailing motorists who make errors in judgment would accomplish other than to exacerbate jail crowding and to ruin still more lives. As Gandhi said “an eye for an eye makes everyone blind.”

  • timsmith

    An “accident” may not be intentional, but it likely involves a degree of carelessness that led to the unintentional crash happening. It doesn’t matter if someone intended to hit you — what matters is they failed to take all reasonable precautions to avoid it. There are reasons why incentives exist to prevent this type of behavior, and clearly people feeling bad about it isn’t enough to stop it from happening.

  • NoeValleyJim

    Time for a new, and better, DA. I will seriously help to fund anyone who will run against him. Who is up for the task?

  • I haven not been able to get those numbers from the union.

  • murphstahoe

    Presumably you then believe that Chris Bucchere was simply in an accident.

  • coolbabybookworm

    There’s a difference between jailing someone and community service, suspending licenses, impounding vehicles etc. There are many options available. Most people here are not advocating extensive jail time, but that doesn’t mean we should shrug our shoulders and move on.

  • Jamison Wieser

    The satisfaction rates fantastic considering how contentious these things can be. The worst rating was 79% for the bike facilities, and they didn’t break out how much of the rest of the respondents said fair vs. pour.

    Hopefully they will keep it at one-rack per car. It could be confusing having racks only on the non-cab (E) cars because the cab (D) cars aren’t just at the front and back, those 8-9 car trains are made up of 3-4 trains with cab cars somewhere in the middle.

    There is a lot of efficiency in predictability. Bringing bikes on BART is a lot easier, and a lot easier to explain if it’s simply the center doors on any car.