Fighting through tears, Linh Luu asked a question during an ABC7 News interview done from her hospital bed. "I really want to know exactly what happened," she told the reporter. "The way Sixth Street exists, you can go as fast as you want until you hit that stoplight, right?"
Luu is yet another victim of San Francisco's ongoing traffic violence emergency. She was part of Sunday night's vehicular bloodbath around 6th and Harrison. Her question showed that she intuited things that professional traffic engineers, regulators and lawmakers can't seem to grasp.
Sixth Street, as with so many streets in San Francisco, consists of six lanes designed to maximize speed, car storage, and throughput. Harrison at that intersection is even wider. There's no way streets should be this wide and unencumbered in a city where people walk and live and move about. But they are. The real question is why.
Instead of spending 12 years doing outreach on a project to reduce 6th Street by two lanes, with the proper leadership SFMTA could have copied other cities and been dropping in concrete Jersey barriers and other solid objects to force drivers to slow down (concrete installations, unlike other forms of enforcement, do not discriminate, starkly demonstrated in the photo below). Instead, the city took a Vision Zero pledge but failed to take the necessary steps to make it happen.
How many times have I heard SFMTA traffic engineers claim there's no way to stop the most egregious drivers? Jia Lin Zheng, who was booked on vehicular manslaughter charges for Sunday's crash, was reportedly going nearly 100 mph in his Tesla, causing the multi-vehicle crash that included the car that Luu and her now deceased boyfriend and dog were in.
If San Francisco had spent the past decade installing concrete barriers and pedestrian refuges such as the one pictured above, the chances are much better that Zheng would have been stopped or at least slowed down by a solid object before he killed. Instead, as previously reported, the city just made excuses for failing to achieve progress on Vision Zero while putting in pretend safety features consisting of nothing but plastic posts and paint.
And why couldn't Elon Musk, with all his technical and business prowess, have equipped Teslas with a device that prevents drivers from exceeding the speed limit to such an extreme? I hear people say nobody would buy a car with a speed limiter device. Just call it the "Tesla Ultra Box" or something that appeals to infantile, Borat-brained car-buyers. Or is one supposed to believe that with all the marketing talent at Musk's disposal, he couldn't find a way?
And if Musk and his fellow car-makers can't be bothered to save lives, what about the legislators we send to D.C. and Sacramento to protect us? Governor Newsom vetoed what was left of the heavily watered down S.B. 961. It was just going to require that cars make a beep sound if the driver heavily exceeded the speed limit. But even that was too much to ask.
If streets and cars were designed to limit speeds and prioritize safety, would deadly crashes still happen? Sometimes, but very rarely. Those remaining drivers who still find ways to be irresponsible are where policing and a functional department of motor vehicles are supposed to come in. Successful Vision Zero cities have shown how to reduce the likelihood and degree of Sunday's tragedy. Put simply, Misha Romanenko, the boyfriend of Luu, didn't have to die.
Combine all the lack of real, tangible action with one reckless driver, and that's the answer to Luu's questions about what happened. It's also a question that is foundational to Streetsblog's mission.
Tesla, other car makers, Newsom, the staff at SFMTA, past mayors and other politicians who cow from any real attempt to make our streets safe collectively owe Luu, and a lot of other people, a promise to do better. How about starting with a simple, unqualified law that requires new cars to have a speed governor set to 85 mph, the highest speed limit anywhere in the U.S.? Is that really too much to ask to start reducing this daily carnage?
