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The city of San Francisco pushed out the unhoused, "cleaned up" the adjoining streets, and pedestrianized Howard Street between 3rd and Fourth around Moscone Center for last week's Dreamforce convention. To help protect the building from runaway vehicles, they used concrete barriers--the very kind this publication has advocated for ad nausea to protect the lives of cyclists and pedestrians.
City officials weren’t revealing their strategies for keeping the few blocks surrounding Dreamforce clear and clean, but it was evident this week that extra effort went into that goal. Homeless people and panhandlers have a right to hang out if they’re not disturbing anyone or blocking passageways, but they did seem to get the message from the endless streams of police, smiling city street ambassadors and security forces that they should steer clear for now.
Concrete barriers on the west side of Manhattan. Photo: Streetsblog/Rudick
But morally confused bureaucrats and careerist officials believe, correctly, that it's in their interest to temporarily erect concrete barriers to protect those attending a $90 million conference, while residents and commuters are left with plastic bollards, and green and white paint. So they just did it.
In other words, Salesforce's Mark Benioff draws a lot of proverbial water in this town.
Meanwhile, other cities are doing exactly what's needed, employing boulders, concrete, cast-iron, and whatever else it takes to make streets safe for its citizens. Streetsblog New York is celebrating the installation of concrete barriers all across the city. Santa Monica Next is showing it is not nearly as hard to put in permanent concrete barriers as many people pretend. Paris is also putting down concrete.
As the Marin County Bicycle Coalition put it on Twitter:
It's called a jersey barrier*, folks.
You put it between bikes and cars, and everyone is better off.
But in San Francisco, with a couple ofrare exceptions, it's still plastic and paint. Unbelievably, San Francisco couldn't even put the temporary Salesforce Jersey Barrier to the left of the bike lane where it would protect cyclists and pedestrians. They could have put them in the correct position and just left them there and that would have been something permanent for the people that live, work and play in the city for more than one week per year.
I stumbled upon these new @NYC_DOT interventions on Underhill in Brooklyn yesterday and I hope this becomes the toolkit for neighborhood streets across the city. Apart from the noticeably calmed traffic, gotta love how many parking spaces went to the wood chipper for this 😎 pic.twitter.com/HdSq4SjRJy