Traffic Enforcement

SF District Attorney George Gascón and SFPD Traffic Company Commander Mikail Ali held a press conference last Thursday to bring attention to distracted driving, since April is officially National Distracted Driving Awareness Month.

Officers with the SF Police Department have recently been spotted wagging their fingers at bicycle riders for neglecting to stop at a stop sign on northbound Harrison Street at 15th Street, where the "stop" line doesn't run through the bike lane like they normally do at intersections.

With a trial period for double traffic fine zones on 19th Avenue, Van Ness Avenue, and Lombard Street set to expire at the end of the year, State Senator Leland Yee hopes to extend them indefinitely, crediting the measures for drops in pedestrian injuries, despite results appearing mixed. Yee's new proposal, SB 219, could get the backing of the SF Board of Supervisors, which is set to consider a resolution [PDF] on Tuesday introduced by Supervisors Eric Mar and Norman Yee declaring the board's support for the bill.

Every Muni bus will be fitted with a front-facing camera to enforce transit-only lanes by spring of next year, according to the SF Municipal Transportation Agency [PDF]. Three hundred of the 800 buses in the system will receive them by this fall, and all of the new buses being purchased by the SFMTA will get them as well, the agency says.

Cars littered on San Francisco's sidewalks are a painfully common sight. The problem is perhaps most prevalent in outer neighborhoods like the Sunset and Bayview, where, for decades, homeowners with residential garages have paved over their front yards. The pedestrian environment on these streets is left degraded, with swaths of dead space where families and people with disabilities are often forced to walk around an obstacle course of cars and driveway ramps.

Since the Fell Street buffered bike lane was partially implemented in November, drivers have continued to block it. Mostly, they seem to be customers using Bank of America's sidewalk ATM and truck drivers from Ted and Al's Towing.

Dangerous, illegal right turns from Market Street onto the freeway at the intersection with Octavia Boulevard -- the location with the most pedestrian and bicycle crashes in the city -- may become less frequent after a long-awaited state decision that allows the city to use camera enforcement. The decision was announced by California Attorney General Kamala Harris last week.

Two pedestrians and one vehicle passenger lost their lives in separate car crashes in the last two weeks, marking the last of 19 pedestrian deaths in 2012, and the first two traffic fatalities of 2013.

While there's no concrete Pedestrian Action Strategy (formerly the "Action Plan") for San Franciscans to read over yet, city officials went ahead and held a press conference today to tell the public the document is coming next month.