Open Letter to Mayor Lurie: What if it Were Your Child Under That Tent on Market Street?

Dear Mayor Lurie.

We need to have a frank talk. Because people are dying on San Francisco’s streets and the correct response is not more meetings and studies and generic resolutions.

As you know, on Friday, August 7, a truck driver ran over and killed a 32-year-old woman named Yebin Kim on Market Street.

I asked your office twice if you would now support building protected bike lanes on Market, because if the protected bike lanes that were part of the Better Market Street plan had been built, this tragedy would not have happened. Your office sent this:

My number one priority is the safety of our residents. The tragedy on Market Street is heartbreaking, and my condolences go out to Yebin’s family and friends. Under our Street Safety Initiative, we’re bringing city departments together to help everyone travel around our city safely—including cyclists, scooter riders, pedestrians, kids, and seniors. As the city investigates the incident on Market Street, we will continue to move the work forward to create safer streets for all San Franciscans.

I’m tired of asking your office specific questions and getting generic responses.

So I ask you to think about how your response would differ if it were your son or daughter, or another loved one, who died that morning.

I think it’s smart, as a mayor, to let the SFMTA—the experts on transportation and streets—handle what happens on Market Street, to a point. But I can tell you as a bit of an expert myself, if SFMTA engineers or director Julie Kirschbaum or people on your staff are telling you it’s impossible to add protected bike lanes to Market Street or that such crashes are inevitable, then I don’t care what qualifications they have on paper; they’re full of crap. It’s an intrinsic principle of Vision Zero and Dutch design that you don’t mix trucks and transit vehicles, the heaviest machines on the street, with your most vulnerable road users, cyclists and scooterists. But that’s exactly what happens every day on Market Street with entirely predictable results. Kim’s death was no accident—it was the inevitable outcome of incompetent design.

SFMTA’s own studies show that San Francisco’s streets are more deadly than they were in 2014, when the city signed its Vision Zero pledge. That’s because previous mayors failed to follow through on street safety. It’s because the SFMTA itself failed to complete safety projects whenever driver throughput and parking became a factor.

People continue to be injured and killed on Market Street. It’s long past time to undo the deadly mistake made by your predecessor’s administration and instruct SFMTA to put concrete protected bike lanes on Market Street.

It is absolutely possible to run world-class transit on Market, support businesses fully, and keep everybody safe, including pedestrians, cyclists, and scooterists. Market is not that dissimilar to the vibrant central streets in Rotterdam, or even Market Street in Philadelphia, which now has protected bike lanes for part of it. We can do this. If you have staffers telling you otherwise, get rid of them.

As the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition pointed out, a cyclist was severely injured on Market Street in July in nearly the same kind of crash that killed Yebin Kim. If you think meeting with department heads will make a difference now, why didn’t you have that meeting in July? The simple fact is Yebin Kim died because a deadly condition is being deliberately left unfixed.

Again, how would you respond if it was one of your children riding on Market Street that morning instead of Yebin?

Would you have another meeting? Or would you instruct SFMTA to put concrete separated bike lanes on Market Street immediately and move heaven and earth to make sure that happened?

You already know the answer.

Now can be your moment to change the status quo on San Francisco’s streets and save the life of the next Yebin Kim. You can literally prevent someone’s son or daughter from being killed. Please don’t be like your predecessors and squander that opportunity.

Sincerely and urgently,

Roger Rudick

Editor of Streetsblog San Francisco