Pedestrian Safety

Today, advocates for livable streets attended the memorial service for Thu Phan, a woman killed in a crosswalk on Market Street on February 5. Yesterday Streetsblog urged SFMTA to stop compromising on safety improvements, a theme echoed at the event.

On Tuesday, March 1, at noon, advocates for vulnerable road users will hold a memorial for Thu Phan, a woman who was killed by a city vehicle while she was crossing the street at 7th and Market in her motorized wheel chair. The memorial will be held at UN Plaza, adjacent to the crossing where she was hit. Afterwards, participants will walk to City Hall to testify at 1 pm at the SFMTA Board Meeting. 38-year-old Phan of Berkeley was fatally struck on the morning of Friday, Feb. 5, by a white Ford sedan making a restricted left turn across the crosswalk.

Over a hundred people braved the wind and rain yesterday evening to attend the latest public outreach meeting about SFMTA's planned "Muni Forward" improvements to the L-Taraval streetcar line. The meeting was held at Dianne Feinstein Elementary school, about two blocks south of Taraval.

It's a bit of shameless self-promotion, but I wanted to share of pair of comics pages that I drew. These comment on issues that many Streetsblog L.A. readers care about: parking and Vision Zero. I think that parking, of all the issues that dramatically affect cities, is highly misunderstood, and I wanted to see if I could use a fun visual medium to begin to scratch the surface of the insights I've learned from parking expert Donald Shoup.

It's been a rough couple of weeks for pedestrians and cyclists in the Bay Area. On Monday, we brought you the sad story of a woman in a wheel chair run over and killed on Market Street and a woman in Berkeley who barely survived getting hit by a car on Fulton Street. Yesterday word came down about another possible road-rage-hit-and-run on a cyclist, this one on Russian Hill. There were also hit-and-run deaths in San Jose.

Megan Schwarzman, 42, a research scientist at the Berkeley School of Public Health, was riding her bike southbound on Fulton Street near Bankcroft Way on Tuesday around 5 p.m. when she was hit and dragged under a car driven by Berwick Haynes, a Sunnyvale resident. Haynes remained at the scene and was later arrested for suspicion of driving under the influence of drugs, according to reports. Schwarzman's injuries were so severe that the Berkeley Police sent its “Fatal Accident Investigation Team.” Fortunately, Schwarzman is expected to live, reported Berkeleyside, an independent news site.

Gyro-meters and accelerometers are circuits inside your cell phone that detect movement. It is part of how the phone helps you navigate and how the screen stays oriented. But it may also work to identify how harshly a driver is swerving, braking, and accelerating.

"What you measure is what you get," the saying goes.

State Senator Jerry Hill (D-Millbrae) has been earning a lot of attention recently for a proposal to slash the fine for drivers turning right at a red light without stopping. This move seems particularly heartless considering California's streak of leading the country in traffic fatalities, nearly a quarter of which were pedestrians. Failure to yield is one of the top five causes of traffic crashes.