SF Has Three Years to Get to Zero Visitors Deaths. A State Velocity-Restrict Invoice Is Making an attempt to Assist – Streetsblog San Francisco
This article first appeared in the Frisc and is reprinted with permission.
Despite a long-standing promise to eliminate the traffic deaths by 2024, San Francisco has made no progress toward that goal and has received little support from state lawmakers overseeing the city’s road rules.
One of the SF representatives in Sacramento tried unsuccessfully to make big changes. Will his new attempt do better?
Earlier this year, AB 550 – a bill endorsed by MP David Chiu to pilot the use of speed cameras in six cities, including San Francisco – became a beacon of hope for advocates who want to slow down motorists and save lives.
Speed kills: In 2019, speeding was a factor in 26 percent of road deaths, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In California, drivers who drive too fast cause an estimated 1,000 road deaths each year.
In San Francisco, 30 people died in clashes in 2020 despite a traffic drop due to the pandemic. The 30 deaths were a 3% year-over-year increase and 11% above the annual average since 2014, the year city guides promised to eliminate the traffic deaths.
In 2021, 13 people were killed in car collisions, most of them pedestrians.
But the law, which was Chiu’s second attempt to use automatic cameras in high-collision areas, died unexpectedly on committee in May, leaving proponents – and Chiu himself – in shock.
“My heart was broken when we couldn’t get AB 550 out [the] Assembly means [Committee]but this fight will go on, “said the San Francisco legislature.
Back for more
Now state lawmakers are back with another proposal that addresses the speed problem from a different angle. Unlike the doomed AB 550, AB 43 cleared a major hurdle last week – the Senate Transportation Committee – and is going to a hearing on the Senate Appropriations Committee next month.
AB 43, written by Glendale MP Laura Friedman and co-authored by Chiu, would give Caltrans and local jurisdictions more power to set speed limits – especially in areas with vulnerable pedestrian groups such as the elderly, children, people with disabilities and people who are not housed.
“In recent years, study after study has confirmed and re-confirmed how speed kills and how these guidelines can make a huge difference,” said Chiu The Frisc a day after the bill was approved by the transportation committee. Studies show that lowering a specified limit by as much as 5 miles per hour can significantly reduce serious injuries and pedestrian deaths.
“In the age of online phone apps like Waze and Google Maps, a lot of people drive through neighborhoods they are unfamiliar with and often drive too fast,” Friedman said at the hearing last week.
AB 43 would create exceptions to a longstanding (some would say archaic) traffic policy rule. To set speed limits, California currently relies on the 85th percentile method, which sets the limit on a given road to the speed at which 85 percent of traffic is moving. Developed in the middle of the last century and used nationwide, the standard can actually force cities to increase speed limits to accommodate fast drivers. There is a growing reputation for dropping it across the country.
“[It] assumes that most drivers will travel at a safe and reasonable speed based on road conditions, ”a 2020 report from a California State Task Force on Road Fatalities said.“ It is also based on the idea that speed limits are safest when they are at the natural speed most drivers drive and that uniform vehicle speeds increase safety and reduce the risk of accidents. “
Chiu told The Frisc that he hopes AB 43 will pass. During his 12 years in the public service, he saw that “more people understand how important it is for us to deal with these problems and how avoidable these incidents of traffic violence are with an intelligent transport policy”.
Ambition to meet reality
While Chiu, Friedman, and other state lawmakers work to get AB 43 on the governor’s desk, the San Francisco Vision Zero Task Force, which includes transportation, public health and community members, prepares a draft three-year plan Reduction of the city’s road deaths. However, some road safety advocates say it isn’t brave enough to hit the original goal of zero deaths by 2024.
“The pace and aggression are not what it takes to really move the needle,” Marta Lindsey, communications director for Walk SF, told The Frisc.
The draft contains a multitude of ideas such as a comprehensive speed management plan, the installation of more than 100 traffic calming systems per year and a possible extension of the red lock bans approved in the Tenderloin at the beginning of the year.
The goal of over 100 tranquilizers per year, often in the form of quick-install bollards and painted areas to protect pedestrians and cyclists, is typical of Lindsey in the slow pace of the city. (Another example is the latest initiative by the municipal transport authority to install left-turn calming devices at a total of seven intersections.)
Measures to slow car turns have shown results in other cities such as Portland and New York where pedestrian injuries have decreased by 20 percent. “Let’s get bigger when you have something that promises a lot,” said Lindsey.
When asked about criticism from bicycle and pedestrian advocates that the city’s “rapid construction program” is not progressing fast enough, even with positive data, SFMTA spokeswoman Erica Kato did not respond directly to the problem, but sent a list of the agency’s efforts since 2019 – including “10 new transit islands, over 86 painted safety zones and more than 19 kilometers of new or improved cycle paths, among many other improvements in road safety”.
One problem is that the city’s ambitions are often neglected. Nesrine Majzoub, communications director for the SF Bicycle Coalition, said that while the city has come up with bold projects, many of them have been “watered down”.
For example, a dramatic transformation of Market Street was underway for more than 10 years when the board approved the project and its $ 604 million price tag in October 2019. The plans included wider sidewalks, fully protected bike lanes, a ban on cars, and only through lanes. However, citing the pandemic budget issues, regulators scaled back plans for Market, which included putting bikes back into circulation, much to the disappointment of bike advocates.
“I think there is frustration and I think there is heartbreak at the same time,” noted Majzoub. “It shouldn’t be dangerous to walk a few blocks or ride a bike anywhere in our city.”
While San Francisco has weathered the pandemic, some residents have used the past year and a half as an opportunity to redesign the streetscape.
Last April, the city began closing certain residential streets to through traffic to give people more space for social distance and movement. At least 28 corridors received the temporary slow road treatment. The first test to make the changes permanent focuses on Page, Sanchez and Shotwell streets.
Plans to close the Great Highway and JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park have already met opposition.
But Chiu said he had seen steady change among his local voters. “It’s almost like every two weeks another grassroots activist comes up to seek assistance in changing the streets in their neighborhood,” he said. “I know these people work together and work together across neighborhood and city limits to make our community safer and more livable.”
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Grace Hase is a Bay Area freelance journalist. She previously worked as a reporter for Metro Silicon Valley / San Jose Inside covering the San Jose City Hall, transportation, housing policy and the COVID-19 pandemic. Grace holds a BS in Political Science and a BS in Journalism in Investigative Reporting from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
