Pedestrians

SFPD has arrested 27-year-old Mageb Hussain of Emeryville for hitting and killing an unidentified pedestrian on Van Ness at Pacific Avenue at about 1 a.m. last night. Hussain was reportedly driving a rental car and attempted to walk away from the scene of the crash.

Willie Brown's successors don't look so bad when reading the former mayor's windshield perspective drivel in his latest Chronicle column.

The SFPD has arrested, cited, and released a driver for killing 78-year-old Isaak Berenzon as he crossed Sunset Boulevard at Yorba Street in the Outer Sunset Tuesday at about 11 a.m. This is the third known instance of the SFPD arresting a driver who killed a pedestrian, and wasn't drunk or fleeing the scene, since New Year's Eve. Previously, such drivers typically faced no legal penalties.

When KQED asked Jason Henderson in a recent interview whether distracted pedestrians are contributing to a rise in traffic injuries and fatalities, he countered the nonsense. "Well, let's think of it this way," said Henderson, the author of Street Fight: The Politics of Mobility in San Francisco. "A pedestrian talking on the phone that bumps into another pedestrian is probably not going to result in a fatality."

The League of Pissed-Off Voters is, well, pissed off about Mayor Ed Lee's lighthearted tone in his "Be Nice, Look Twice" campaign -- his answer to the maiming and killing of San Franciscans by reckless drivers.

[Editor's note: Streetsblog will not be publishing Monday in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.]

Reminder: Today at 5 p.m. at City Hall, a hearing on the SFPD's treatment of pedestrian and bicycle crashes will be held by the Police Commission and a Board of Supervisors committee. You're invited to share your thoughts at the Board of Supervisors Chamber, Room 250.

"There is an epidemic of traffic fatalities and it can’t go on... Every one of us thinks: 'What if that was my child?'" The mayor of a major American city said this today, announcing efforts to pursue Vision Zero, the goal of ending traffic deaths within ten years. Standing at the site where a child was killed by a driver, he said, “That is, in fact, how we have to make public policy and how we have to implement public policy."

SFPD Traffic Company Commander Mikail Ali offered a particularly bizarre explanation yesterday for why a significant number of pedestrians killed in the city are Asian seniors: They're recent immigrants who are confused by our traffic patterns, he said.