Pedestrian Safety

Note the 'call to action' at the end of this post.

New on-street bike lanes separated from auto traffic are nearing completion in Palo Alto and Menlo Park, and a handful of neighboring cities have plans to install them too. Separated bike infrastructure gained traction among local planners after Caltrans approved Class IV Separated Bikeway design standards [PDF] in December 2015. The first protected intersections were built last year in a handful of North American cities.

How can San Francisco keep families from moving away? That was the central question of a panel discussion this afternoon hosted by the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR). The panel included Susan Exline of the San Francisco Planning Department, Daniel Parolek, architect with Opticos Design, and San Francisco's District Seven Supervisor Norman Yee. The panel was lead by SPUR Board Member Doug Shoemaker.

SFMTA announced late last week that San Francisco will soon break ground on the first protected intersection in San Francisco. From the agency's web article:

Back in 2009, Streetsblog informed readers about neighborhood efforts to calm traffic at San Jose Avenue at Guerrero and 28th Streets. There's little that aligns more closely with the mission of Streetsblog than the creation of small inviting parks that can transform a dangerous traffic sewer into an enlivened public asset. And, thanks to the hard work of advocates, that's exactly what's happening--and with more permanent infrastructure in each phase of the project. From the "Pavement to Parks" website:

Motorists who drive through the intersections of Market, Sutter and Sansome Street don't need to worry. Yesterday's crash, involving a taxi cab that drove up onto the sidewalk and seriously injured two people, is already cleared up. Not much to see here, except for the remains of a street post and a kiosk that was too big to cart off yet. The SFPD is reporting, via an official statement, that the cab driver "...was having a medical issue when he hit the gas and drove up onto the sidewalk. The driver hit a public bathroom, a newsstand and then hit the [sidewalk] shoe shine stand where the two victims were working."

Dan Crosby works in tech and cycles to his job in SoMa, using the bike lanes and bridges along Cesar Chavez. Recently, Crosby brought this situation to the attention of Streetsblog: "There’s now a homeless encampment on the westbound Cesar Chavez bike bridge under the 101. There have often been a couple of tents there, but now there’s at least six tents, and a bunch of people standing around, ironically, a pile of bikes," he wrote in an email to Streetsblog. "Yesterday I had someone exit their tent right in front of me in the very narrow space left for me to pass, and today I had to weave around several people."

Normally, Valencia Street in the Mission is dominated by traffic, double-parked cars blocking bike lanes, close calls, and the occasional injury. But not yesterday; yesterday, Valencia Street was all about games, fun and dancing--and a bit of politics and social advocacy--thanks to Sunday Streets.

The last time San Francisco looked comprehensively at how we plan for parking, Eisenhower was president, gas was 25 cents a gallon, and we hadn’t even started building BART. It was an era when cities came to be dominated by drive-ins and drive-thrus, when streetcar lines were were being torn up, and new freeways were bulldozing old neighborhoods. As a result, our city’s parking policy still acts as a viagra for traffic, pollution and unaffordability.