Pedestrian Safety

Streetsblog tipsters riding on Folsom through SoMa had some good news to report: the parking protected bike lanes, part of the short term improvements planned for this street, are now under construction.

It just got easier for San Francisco to do something productive with land under and next to freeways.

Streetsblog tipster Chris Waddling brought this to our attention: apparently a new bike lane in the Bayview District may soon get removed. "Supervisor Cohen is seriously considering bowing to people demanding that new bike lanes on Paul Ave be removed a mere months after they went in," wrote Waddling, in an email to Streetsblog.

A handful of determined seniors went to yesterday's SFMTA board meeting to plead with Director Ed Reiskin and members of the board to take immediate action to make the Fell Street and Baker intersection crossing, which connects the Mercy Terrace senior home with the Panhandle Park, safe.

Jodie Medeiros, who this week became the new Executive Director of Walk San Francisco, will never forget the moment she became a safe-streets advocate. "I was at the corner of Valencia and Duboce. I was on a sidewalk waiting to cross the street," she told Streetsblog in a phone interview this morning. The light turned green for Medeiros. Just before she stepped off the curb, a cyclist entered the intersection, going in the same direction, and a van ran the red light and "hit the woman, dragging her under the car." The woman was loaded into an ambulance with injuries that, fortunately, did not seem life threatening. But that event from over ten years ago "catapulted me to work for the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition."

Melodie, a woman in her late 50s who lives in a camper along one of the streets leading into the Hairball, pleaded with city officials and advocates to just give homeless people some sanctuary and peace. "There's no where else to go," she said to a group of some 40 bike and homeless advocates who attended a San Francisco Bicycle Coalition panel last night on homelessness in the Hairball.

Over the weekend, the guerrilla safety group, SFMTrA, installed safe-hit posts and painted bulb-outs at the intersection of Fell and Baker, on a crosswalk where David Grinberg, a 90-year-old man, was killed on Wednesday, Oct. 4. The city, which apparently has no immediate plans to improve the crosswalk that connects the Mercy Terrace senior-living apartments with the Panhandle Park, removed the unauthorized safe-hit posts earlier this week.

"The driver was so inattentive he went five or six blocks after he killed my son," explained Alvin Lester, the father of 21-year-old Arman, who was killed in 2014 while riding his skateboard. Lester said the driver, who was distracted, or fell asleep, or who knows what, plowed into his son, killing him instantly. That incident, which happened at 3rd and Cargo Way in San Francisco, was a result of bad policies and bad designs.

Berkeley bike advocates are pushing back against the use of "Rectangular Rapid Flashing Beacons (RRFBs or flashers)" in the city's bicycle visioning plan. The idea is to use them where 'bike boulevards' cross heavily trafficked streets. In an op-ed this week in Berkeleyside, bike advocate Charles Siegel makes a compelling plea for the city to instead install four-way stop signs, specifically at the intersection of California and Dwight.