Golden Gate Park speeders are targets of city proposal
Jeff Berger and his 5-year-old son, Jake, make good use of their home’s proximity to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park by taking frequent, unhurried bike rides, tracing long arcs around the paved paths surrounding the Botanical Garden.
But on a recent weekday afternoon, as the pair were riding along Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, one of the park’s major thoroughfares, the elder Berger was struck by fear as he and Jake suddenly found themselves jockeying for space among a clot of cars on the bustling roadway.
“Between the tourists and the cars and the GoCars, I’m fearing for my son’s life in Golden Gate Park from traffic — on a Tuesday at 2 p.m. It felt like Manhattan or something,” Berger said. “This is supposed to be an area where people can walk freely and enjoy urban life. Instead, you have to worry about ducking and dodging cars in the middle of Golden Gate Park.”
In recent months, San Francisco city officials say there has been growing public concern about traffic congestion and speeding drivers in Golden Gate Park. To address those issues, the city’s Recreation and Park Commission on Thursday will take up a proposal by the Municipal Transportation Agency to install
10 speed humps and a number of other traffic safety measures to ensure the park remains safe for pedestrians and cyclists. The 10 new humps would join nine that were installed late last year.
In addition to being a heavily used public space, with as many as 13 million visitors each year, the park is an active commuter route.
Between 2011 and 2016, 157 people were injured and three people — one bicyclist and two motorcycle riders — were killed on Golden Gate Park roads, according to data from the MTA. There were 50 injuries to bicyclists and 17 to pedestrians — the remainder were injuries to motorists.
“This is a no-brainer for us,” said Recreation and Park General Manager Phil Ginsburg. “We want people to feel welcome and happy and safe in Golden Gate Park all the time. And frankly, there are too many cars in the park and people drive too fast. It’s not a freeway; it’s a park.”
Eight of the 10 proposed speed humps would be placed on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, one would be put on Chain of Lakes Drive, and one would go on John F. Kennedy Drive. In addition to improvements that include creating striped crosswalks and upgrading existing ones, MTA has proposed adding up to 15 so-called raised crosswalks, mostly on Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy drives. Raised crosswalks are speed humps with flattened tops placed at intersections that help to slow down traffic while making pedestrians more visible to drivers.
The proposed project’s estimated $580,000 price tag would be paid for by the San Francisco County Transportation Authority.
In 2016, the city installed nine speed humps, which slope more gradually than speed bumps, and one raised crosswalk on the western portion of JFK Drive — a stretch of road notorious for speeding cars. Those humps have proved effective in slowing traffic, according to Mark Dreger, the MTA project manager overseeing the proposed speed hump initiative.
Data collected at three locations both before and after they were installed indicated a drop in drivers’ speed from 32 mph to 26 mph, on average. “That’s just about the speed limit, which is great,” Dreger said.
JFK Drive between Transverse
“There are too many cars in the park and people drive too fast. It’s not a freeway, it’s a park.” Phil Ginsburg, general manager of San Francisco Recreation and Park
Drive and Bernice Rodgers Way appears on San Francisco’s High Injury Network — the 13 percent of city streets that account for 75 percent of all severe injuries or fatalities, Dreger said.
Last June, a woman was struck and killed by a speeding car on JFK Drive near 30th Avenue, spurring calls from San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and bicyclist and pedestrian advocacy groups to address traffic safety in the park.
Two months later, Lee issued an executive directive instructing the parks department and MTA to study and implement traffic-calming improvements in the park as part of the Vison Zero SF initiative, which aims to eliminate traffic fatalities by 2024.
Dreger said the locations for the new speed humps were selected based on an analysis of traffic patterns in the park and months of gathering public feedback.
Patrick Golier, a trafficcalming project manager for MTA, said that in addition to lowering the average speeds through the park, the humps have proved especially useful for cutting down what the city refers to as “egregious speeding” — at least 30 mph over the speed limit — by as much as 80 percent citywide in San Francisco. “If we space the humps correctly, we can almost eliminate the cases of really egregious speeding that people complain about the most,” Golier said.
According to data from the World Health Organization, a pedestrian or cyclist has a 90 percent chance of surviving being struck by a car traveling at 18 mph or slower, but less than a 50 percent chance of surviving an impact at 28 mph.
“Speed is what kills in this city,” said Cathy DeLuca, the interim executive director of Walk San Francisco, a pedestrian-safety advocacy group.
DeLuca supports the new speed humps and additional traffic-calming proposals for the park, but said she wants to see the city take further measures to curtail the overall volume of traffic cutting through Golden Gate Park.
“We’re pleased with the current plan, but it’s just a start,” DeLuca said. “If we’re going to agree to have roads in the park, they should be in service of the park, not a mini-highway through the city.”