Traffic Enforcement

Tomorrow's bi-weekly SFMTA engineering hearing has a couple of peculiar items on the agenda:

Just before Christmas, the SFMTA installed a camera at the corner of Fell and Masonic on the Panhandle to help enforce the left-turn signal frequently violated by drivers.

Despite the department's insistence that officers are not targeting bicyclists on Market Street, new numbers from the San Francisco Police Department confirm that cops are going after people on bikes following two high-profile crashes.

San Francisco police officers issued twice as many tickets to drivers operating without a license between January and May this year than they did for all of 2010, according to data from the SF Police Department (SFPD). The spike contrasts with an overall drop in traffic violations.

“Whose Streets? OUR Streets!” yell rowdy demonstrators when they surge off the sidewalk and into thoroughfares. True enough, the streets are our public commons, what’s left of it (along with libraries and our diminishing public schools), but most of the time these public avenues are dedicated to the movement of vehicles, mostly privately owned autos. Other uses are frowned upon, discouraged by laws and regulations and what has become our “customary expectations.” Ask any driver who is impeded by anything other than a “normal” traffic jam and they’ll be quick to denounce the inappropriate use or blockage of the street.

Here's another installment in what could ideally become a series on how police departments are doing right by pedestrians and cyclists. We posted the Chicago bike video a couple of weeks back. We now present the Sacramento crosswalk sting. (Warning: Insufferable Geico commercial may precede video.)

It doesn't take much for a car illegally driving in Market Street's transit-only lanes to set Muni vehicles back by an entire stoplight cycle. In fact, it happens all the time, and despite the delay and frustration it causes transit riders and operators, motorists face little risk of getting a ticket.

When transit-only lanes were first striped in San Francisco in the 1970s, they were meant to be a bold enactment of the city's brand new Transit First policy. But like the policy, the lanes have only been partially implemented and are all too often flouted. Stricter enforcement is part of the equation, but many of the lanes are marked so half-heartedly that it's hard to place the blame on drivers alone.

Construction begins this week on a nine-month project that could periodically disrupt Valencia Street's bike lanes. The result, residents hope, will be a greatly improved streetscape for pedestrians and bicyclists.