A push for slower speeds on S.F.’s crash-filled streets
Paul Rivera vividly remembers the day he moved into his new home on Fulton Street. He sat on the couch he’d lugged one block over from his old apartment, chatting with his wife. Then he heard it: a loud, jolting crunch.
He looked outside to see that a car speeding east had crashed into a parked car attached to a trailer in which somebody lived. The collision was powerful enough to knock the trailer over, but fortunately its inhabitant wasn’t inside at the time.
“It was kind of a bad omen, you know?” Rivera told me in a major understatement.
Since that day in July 2020, Rivera estimates he’s witnessed at least 20 crashes near his home near 12th Avenue, just across the street from Golden Gate Park. And their common denominator? Speed.
“What the heck is going on on Fulton Street?” Rivera asked. “It has never been this bad.”
San Francisco has always had its share of dangerous drivers, but the pandemic seems to have scrambled many of their brains. Like in other parts of the state and country, drivers here are faster and more reckless than they were pre-pandemic, and the results show in the city’s grim traffic fatality numbers.
Through October, 30 people have died in traffic this year in San Francisco. That’s just one fewer than the 31 deaths in 2014 that were deemed so dire, city officials declared a goal of eliminating traffic fatalities by 2024. All these years later, we’ve made virtually no progress. (This year’s tally could grow; the medical examiner’s office is working to determine whether the victims in two recent motorcycle crashes died because of medical incidents prior to the crashes or the crashes themselves.)
That’s one reason Walk SF, the pedestrian advocacy nonprofit, on Tuesday will call on the Board of Supervisors — in its capacity as the San Francisco County Transportation Authority — to make San Francisco a “safe speeds city,” one where speed limits are lowered citywide in an attempt to calm our streets, make them more enjoyable and save lives.
It seems like a no-brainer, and I say this as someone who drives — in addition to walking, riding Muni and BART, and bicycling occasionally when I’m feeling particularly fit and brave. The streets recently have felt far more dangerous for everybody, and the city needs a full-throated response.
And, no, we don’t have to go the trash can or toilet route and devise a yearslong, expensive solution from scratch. Simply look to other cities and copy them. Portland, Ore., lowered its speed limit to 20 mph in all residential areas, and while not all drivers obeyed the new posted limits, they slowed down. Studies showed drivers were half as likely to travel 35 mph or faster as they were before.
“Behavior is contagious,” said Marta Lindsey, spokesperson for Walk SF. “The city has this huge opportunity. If it was able to more quickly apply 20 mph across vast swaths of San Francisco, we’d be a different kind of city.”
And now’s a great time to do it. We have the safe streets momentum after 62% of voters approved making car-free JFK Promenade in Golden Gate Park permanent. Let’s keep going and catch up to cities around the world that have made their streets safer and more enjoyable.
In San Francisco, most speed limits are 25 mph, but some roads have speed limits as high as 45 mph. So far, reductions have been piecemeal, but effective. The city lowered speed limits in the Tenderloin to 20 mph, and drivers there have slowed.
A 2021 state law gave cities authority to lower speed limits on roads that meet certain criteria including commercial corridors and roads with high crash rates. (Why the state controls cities’ speed limits is confounding, but then so is much of California and San Francisco.)
“We’re pushing to max out that authority and to do it fast,” Lindsey said. “Part of this is putting the heat on. Let’s figure this out. Let’s do this.”
The state law would allow changes in major swaths of the city, but so far, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency has lowered speed limits by 5 mph on just seven commercial corridors with its new authority. It has plans for 35 more, but qualifying streets near Fisherman’s Wharf, in the Financial District, in the South of Market district and in other pockets of the city are far off.
One reason for the slow pace of change? In this rich, high-tech city, the SFMTA’s sign shop is backlogged and can’t make new signs fast enough. This seems like a project an enterprising high school class could get done in one semester and not a reason to delay making our streets safer. Incredibly, Lindsey told me, it will take the sign shop five years at this rate to make new speed-limit signs for the roads that qualify.
“That’s where you’re like, ‘Come on, guys,’ ” Lindsey said in what could be City Hall’s new motto.
Stephen Chun, spokesperson for the SFMTA, said signs for the 35 additional roads will be completed next summer and that the sign shop has both a staffing shortage and a host of other duties including maintaining the 250,000 traffic signs already posted around the city.
“We’re doing all we can,” he said. “It’s not that we’re just sitting back and letting the delays come.”
He added that San Francisco has lowered the speed limits on more roads under the new law than any other city in California.
Over eight months this year, Walk SF used radar guns to track the speed of traffic on 47 blocks around the city, including some in every supervisorial district. Roads near parks tended to have the highest speeds.
For example, on Geneva Avenue near McLaren Park’s soccer fields, the speed limit is 25 mph, but drivers regularly zip past at more than 40 mph. On Fulton Street bordering the northern edge of Golden Gate Park and Lincoln Way bordering its southern edge, the speed limit is 30 mph, but drivers regularly top 40 mph.
Loyal readers know I really don’t like Lake Merced Boulevard, and once again, it tops a list for awfulness. (I recently wrote about how the loop circling Lake Merced ranks as the city’s worst hike, and Walk SF found it has the speediest drivers, often racing at 50 mph, far above the speed limit which varies from 35 to 40.)
Lindsey called lowering speed limits “the base layer” for all the changes needed to make the city’s streets safer. There’s the near-total lack of traffic enforcement by the San Francisco Police Department, even when it comes to dangerous driving behavior like speeding and blowing red lights. Walk SF also supports adding infrastructure like speed humps and traffic circles, adding speed radar signs and timing traffic signals to slow cars.
Any of that would be welcome for Rivera. Fulton Street where he lives doesn’t quality for lowered speed limits under the state law (again, so bizarre!), though the SFMTA is making other changes like removing parking spaces near intersections so drivers have better visibility and adding bulb-outs so pedestrians have less space to cross.
Rivera said he’s scared “every single time” he walks around his neighborhood with his 1-year-old daughter, Sophia, and their dog, Pepper. He saw a speeding SUV slam into a car pulling out of a parking space, sending the latter crashing into a neighbor’s planter. Another time, he saw two cars crash and catch fire. On Father’s Day, he was pushing his daughter in a stroller through an intersection and was nearly hit by a car careening around the corner.
“I fear for my life pretty much every day, and it shouldn’t be that way,” he said.
After each bad crash, he emails a description and photos to his supervisor, police captain and the SFMTA, but he doesn’t often get a response.
He’s joined Walk SF and shares its goal of a street filled with safer, calmer, more pleasant streets — like car-free JFK Promenade, where he spends a lot of time with his little girl and their dog. Lindsey, too, envisions the kind of city where visitors go home to tell their friends, “It’s so calm and safe and people drive slowly, and there are people walking and biking everywhere,” she said.
She added wistfully, “What a great city we’d be.”