How I Envision A Post-Vision Zero Richmond District
Last Thursday, Vision Zero held a coffee talk at the Richmond Senior Center to gather input about the next Vision Zero strategy. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make a morning meeting last Thursday, so I didn’t get the chance to hear what it was about and provide my input. I’m happy to see efforts like this, though. Unfortunately, except for some repainted crosswalks, I haven’t seen that many efforts throughout the Richmond to implement streets that embody Vision Zero. Arguello has been somewhat calmed. We’re still waiting to see how 8th Avenue looks in practice. The redesign of Geary crawls along as we continue to wait for the second phase of Geary BRT. Fulton has a few more crosswalks.
Vision Zero contains lots of good ideas. But it occasionally confounds me that it was ever necessary in the first place. The fact we have just accepted the severe injuries and deaths people driving cause in the name of perceived convenience for so long saddens me. This is the price we pay for living in a world where we are inculcated into car culture at a very young age.
We don’t need bold ideas. Or rather, we already have plenty of bold ideas. What we need is bold leadership to implement ideas we already know work. Reducing the real human cost of injuries and deaths shouldn’t be a hard sell. That’s something most everyone agrees with in the abstract.
It’s when it becomes concrete we struggle. Yes, people who have built their lives around automobiles will be inconvenienced by the changes we need to make to create better, safer streets. Yes, it is going to require some changes in behavior on our part. Yes, we are going to have to give up some things or figure out different ways of doing them. We need to have real conversations about that. Yes, there will be tradeoffs. We also need leaders to champion safe streets with the understanding that human lives are worth more than parking spots or faster streets.
Anyway, here’s some changes I’d love to see in my neighborhood and throughout the City by 2024 as we seek to get to and sustain vision zero. I’m aware some of these changes would require changes that go far beyond the city. If we truly aspire to be the leaders we claim we can be in this regard, though, that is not a good excuse. It’s our job to make that version of the city possible. Here are three ideas I’d love to see implemented to create that future.
Daylighting at every intersection
When I lived in Minneapolis, I once saw a traffic enforcement officer at a street corner with a tape measure. They were trying to figure out if the nearest car was in fact 30 ft from the Stop Sign as required by law. Saint Paul has the same law. It’s also illegal to park within 20 ft of a crosswalk, marked or unmarked.
Needless to say, San Francisco does not also have that law. But we should! SFMTA highlighted the power of daylighting, as we call it here, in a post back in 2015. They aren’t even advocating for 20 or 30 ft, merely 10. It should be something we do at every intersection in the city. It also gives us the ability to do other traffic calming like bulbouts.
Yes, this involves a loss of parking. In neighborhoods like the Richmond, these spaces are perceived as free, especially since only approximately 10% of the spaces are metered in San Francisco. But they aren’t. We all pay for those spaces with unsafe intersections, to say nothing of subsidizing someone else’s parking. Yes, it would be thousands of spaces throughout the city. It seems like a lot until you realize the city has 275,500 on-street parking spaces, not including public garages and private parking. We need to stop fighting one space at a time. There will still be tons of parking in San Francisco and it’s disingenuous to say otherwise.
Longer crosswalk times
I’ve taken to walking around the Richmond more recently. It’s the best way I know to slow down time, and in a world constantly clamoring for more, more, more, sometimes it’s nice to turn the ringer off and just stroll. The problem is, it’s hard to just walk in the city, harder than it should be. Crossing Geary or Park Presidio involves a long wait at a light frequently followed by a quick hustle to get across in the alloted time. Don’t even get me started on the beg buttons.
Our intersections should be geared towards our most vulnerable street users first. That means we need to be able to see people at them, and we need to give them more time to cross proactively without them having to beg for it. Of course, the challenge here is balancing that with other improvements like the coming BRT. Still, I’d love to see a good attempt at making crossing times longer at intersections like 6th and Geary, BRT or no. We need to create a more inviting space to walk around, and right now Geary feels like it divides the neighborhood in half. Slowing it down and making it more friendly to folks walking would go a long way towards changing that.
20 mph speed limit
California (really, most places in the US) has this weird thing where it sets speed limits based on how fast people are already driving. Which is strange, because that doesn’t really seem like an ideal way to make decisions about what should be safe out there. In addition, we engineer our streets for speed in many places. You can see where the cyclical nature of this is leading. The way the speed limits are set is called the 85th percentile rule, and this is a state issue.
Thankfully, Assembly Members Friedman and Frazier proposed AB-2363 this year. While it doesn’t immediately change anything about how we set speed limits, the bill is set to convene a task force to study alternatives to the 85th percentile rule. One outcome I’m hopeful for out of this is the ability for cities like San Francisco to establish speed limits that make more sense for our urban environment. Most streets in the Richmond could easily be 20 mph, a more reasonable speed for our neighborhood. Speed is the number one factor when it comes to fatalities in crashes. As someone who’s been hit by someone driving twice, I’m pretty sensitive to this. I got lucky. Twice. We need to stop building our streets so people have to get lucky. Coupled with engineering changes to our streets to slow them down, a 20 mph speed limit could go a long way.
Let’s hope Governor Brown signs this one and we get the tools we need soon to establish speed limits that make sense for most of San Francisco and other cities throughout California.
Bonus fourth idea: no right turn on red
Here’s another thing that feels sacrosanct to the Millennial driver in me, but it blew my mind when I learned recently that right turn on red wasn’t really a thing until the Energy Crisis. Like Daylight Savings, I hope it’s another thing we’ll revisit soon. While people driving should be aware of who is out on the streets, especially folks who are not driving, we just end up creating additional moments of conflict leading to deaths and severe injuries for really minor time and gas savings. Changing this makes actions more predictable for everyone. If we want to lower traffic deaths to zero, it’s about slowing our streets down. This is another way to do just that.
I worry about Vision Zero turning into a vapid talking point, something that everyone says they support without actually doing much to support. It’s our job to hold our leaders accountable when they do that. We need to keep making changes before people die. We already know where we need to put in the effort, and the kinds of things we need to do. I hope our leaders continue to push for these important life-saving measures.
There have only been 10 traffic fatalities on our streets in San Francisco in 2018 so far. It’s still 10 too many, but I am glad to see it’s less than last year and I’d love to see us get to 2019 without the number going up; sadly, if the past is any indication, that won’t be the case. That’s the real human cost of delaying much-needed changes to our streets. Never forget that.
