Traffic Calming

When a group of Bernal Heights and Glen Park neighbors began discussing the need for traffic calming last year on San Jose Avenue between Interstate 280 and Randall Street, a one mile segment known as the Bernal Cut, they had no idea it would take so long to get the attention of city and state traffic engineers. Many of the neighbors in the fledgling Bernal Glen Neighborhood Organization also didn't realize other residents on San Jose Avenue just to the north had been lobbying both the SFMTA and Caltrans for traffic calming along the length of the corridor from I-280 to Cesar Chavez since 1994, with mixed success.

A week after a 21-year-old German tourist on a bicycle was killed by a hit-and-run drunk driver on Masonic Avenue, the first death of a bicyclist in the city this year, advocates who have been working for years to calm the major arterial are calling on the SFMTA to make immediate safety improvements.

Starting last week along Tiffany Street near 29th Street, contractors started cutting up sidewalks, jackhammering them and taking the crumbled pieces of concrete away in trucks. By the end of the week, what looked like an ugly construction zone began to get the personal touch of residents hoeing and digging in the dirt underneath the concrete, preparing it for a block party planting day this last Saturday, when the street was closed to cars and neighbors came together to work and throw a street party.

By the time the political tides had turned against ripping up neighborhoods to make way for freeways in the late 1950s, the result of the San Francisco freeway revolt, many areas had already been substantially altered to make room for the footprint of enormous future roadways.

Although there is no record book for the cities with the most traffic-calmed streets, San Francisco planners believe their city has the most road diets, or roads that have had auto lanes narrowed or removed to calm traffic speeds and provide room for other modes of travel.

When the Examiner reported that a double-fine zone on part of Van Ness Avenue had not only failed to reduce crashes, but that crashes had actually increased by 40 percent there in the last year, it raised eyebrows. Now that SFPD has released detailed crash statistics for 2009, a closer look reveals an even more alarming figure: pedestrian crashes along Van Ness Avenue's double-fine zone quadrupled in 2009 compared to 2008.

A 55-year-old San Francisco woman died early this morning at San Francisco General Hospital nearly ten hours after after she was hit by a driver while crossing Sloat Boulevard at Forest View Drive.

The Presidio Trust has finished compiling the traffic data it collected during a three-week trial closure on Presidio Boulevard in October, a closure that brought much scorn for the Trust from drivers and some neighbors of the park. Despite the outcry, the trial provided important information for the Trust as the reconstruction of Doyle Drive approaches, according to Trust officials. Trust staff will present the study findings to its board tonight at its monthly meeting, but no action will be taken [PDF].

In Stockholm, Sweden, a fascinating political intervention has been taking place during the past few years. Starting originally around 2000-2001 in an anarcho-syndicalist youth organization, Planka.nu is a surprisingly innovative and effective transit activist group. Today it is still an entirely volunteer organization without paid staff, but they have a comfy office tucked on the western end of the Stockholm island of Sodermalm, just a hundred steps or so from the target of their activism, the Tunnelbana, or local subway system.