Mayor London Breed, transportation officials, and advocates held a rally Thursday afternoon on the steps of San Francisco City Hall to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of the city's Vision Zero pledge and to promise to do better on safety in the wake of the West Portal tragedy. The mayor said the city is now "prepared to be aggressive" to make changes to San Francisco streets so "it doesn't happen again."
Most of the speeches, including those from SFMTA's Amanda Eaken and Jeffrey Tumlin, contained familiar platitudes about safety and the city's supposedly past focus as a car-first city. They also talked about bringing "joy" to streets. The mayor and others boasted about the imaginary 41 miles of protected bike lanes constructed in the city. In reality, of course, most of the "protected" bike lanes are actually just marked by paint and plastic posts, with mixing-zone intersections.
As the event progressed, Streetsblog watched cyclists struggling to get around double-parked cars on Polk Street's unprotected bike lane, right in front of the speakers. Even as lawmakers and officials went on about the need to prioritize safety, they were literally looking at Polk's compromised bike lane. Polk was supposed to have protected bike lanes as part of a street redesign. But the protected lanes were removed from the designs to preserve parking in 2013 by merchants and David Chiu when he was a Supervisor.
"What are you saying when this is the road literally in front of city hall?" remarked District 3 Supervisorial candidate Danny Sauter, who also attended the rally. "Protecting this bike lane would say a lot."
There were some "specifics" listed in a follow-up release from the mayor's office, such as a call to daylight the entire high-injury network by the end of the year. However, most of the list deals with things that were already in progress or should have been done all along, such as citing drivers for parking on the sidewalk.
"There were blocks that felt very safe and very secure," he said. "But then you're immediately – voom! – disgorged into three lanes of moving traffic with no protection."
What happened in West Portal was entirely predictable and preventable. The city must now close Ulloa to through traffic and make sure it can never happen again