Fix San Francisco’s unsafe streets
Last Wednesday morning, I was walking with a friend through our Marina neighborhood when he got an unexpected alert on his phone: “Accident at Union and Franklin with fatalities.” He had just dropped his son off at a school nearby and was concerned that a parent or teacher or child might have been involved. So we hustled to the scene.
What we saw was horrific.
Two cars had collided. One was on the sidewalk, pinned up against a building housing a tutoring center. Next to the car we could make out the clear outline of a body, jarringly still, covered by a violently yellow blanket.
Details soon began to emerge: Police said a woman ran a red light heading west on Union and collided with a car heading north. One of the cars flew onto the sidewalk, hitting and killing Andrew Zieman, a 30-year-old paraeducator who worked at the elementary school across the street from where he was struck.
“Do they have to just leave him there?” my friend exclaimed. “Can’t they move him?”
We left the area, but my friend couldn’t stop thinking about it. Neither could I.
Just like that, on the sidewalk, it could all end in an instant.
I’ve walked over 10,000 miles on San Francisco’s streets since I moved here over a decade ago, and I serve as head of the transportation committee of my neighborhood community association. So I know this has never been an easy city for pedestrians. I’ve seen and heard about plenty of bad driver behavior and near-misses.
But the past seven years have been particularly brutal.
Congestion, largely driven by the explosion of rideshare and delivery services, has clogged our streets with drivers who double park, make infrequent, abrupt stops and are unfamiliar with the city. Erratic and aggressive driving, sometimes a reaction to the above behaviors, has abounded. Near misses in crosswalks are the new norm.
Sure, some courteous drivers will give you a wave after nearly causing you great bodily harm. Others will run stop signs or red lights without even a glance at who might be trying to cross. Defensive walking has replaced defensive driving as the most important skill when navigating the city.
Now another pedestrian is dead — the 12th this year in San Francisco. And everyone should have seen it coming.
Despite the city’s adoption of Vision Zero, a plan to eliminate all traffic fatalities by 2024, we’ve never fallen below 12 pedestrian deaths a year. Last year, in the middle of a pandemic that saw a mass exodus from the city, there was only one fewer traffic fatality than 2014, the year Vision Zero was adopted.
None of this had to happen. The warnings were all there. My neighbors in the Marina began reaching out to me in my capacity as neighborhood association transportation chair about cars racing around at high speeds during the early part of shelter-in-place. Posts about it in the surrounding areas began popping up regularly on Nextdoor. Every day from my apartment, I could hear drivers zooming through stop signs to make a light three streets down.
I wrote to a city official in July of 2020 that speeding in Cow Hollow and the Marina “seems to be a pretty serious issue and I’m really concerned that someone is going to get seriously injured if it continues,” but didn’t get a response for six weeks. When I finally spoke with San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency officials, I was informed that any traffic calming measures would take years to install. Enforcement of existing traffic laws was up to other agencies.
Meanwhile, violations grew more brazen by the day. I remember the feeling of terror when a driver missed my partner by inches at 35 mph while blowing through a stop sign. We then watched him blow through three more.
Now the worst has come to pass — yet again — and it’s time for action.
First, we need to lower speeds. Streets that run through residential neighborhoods should have speed limits of 25 mph or below — plenty fast to get across our 7-square-mile city, with a much lower likelihood of causing serious injury in a collision. If a pedestrian is struck at 20 mph, the likelihood they die is 5%; at 30 mph that jumps to 40%. It gets ever grimmer pretty quickly after that. We know speed kills and we must do something about it.
Second, we need to enforce traffic violations again. In September 2014, there were 10,801 traffic citations issued in San Francisco. In September 2021, that number dropped to 824. Raise your hand if you’ve seen someone get ticketed in the city for running a stop sign or speeding or failing to yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk over the past four years.
I’ll wait.
Third, we need to crack down on illegal stopping and create more loading zones. Shared Spaces have been a godsend for local businesses, but they eliminated legal parking just as delivery services have mushroomed. Workers trying to make quick drop-offs now have to double park in bike lanes or the street. The city needs to remedy this by converting some of the remaining parking spaces to loading zones and require that delivery or rideshare drivers use those zones exclusively — and aggressively cite drivers who do not.
Finally, we need quick-build road diets, trimming down high-speed, often one-way corridors down to lower speeds and allowing for bike lanes and more space for pedestrians.
These are all short-term fixes, meant to change behavior and prevent more harm. In the long-term, we need to reassess whether having state highways run on city streets makes sense and address the shortcomings of a transit system that drives the need for so many private vehicles in the first place.
We already waited too long to address street safety. We can’t wait any longer. It’s a matter of life or death.