San Francisco’s Walking Dead
The zombie apocalypse is already here. Smartphones are turning us into brainless marching would-be corpses. San Francisco is ground zero, and the city’s one-sided approach has failed to deal with a crisis that’s about to get much, much worse.
Call it a brush with death, by smartphone.
As I drove down 17th street in the Castro a handsome twenty-something dude with his face buried in his phone darted out from between parked cars into moving traffic. I slammed on my brakes and stopped with just inches to spare. My heart skipped a beat. Had I been driving even slightly faster at the speed limit, I would have run over him.
Then something amazing happened.
The guy gave me a look. Not the fuck-you-I’m-walking-here-Ratzo-Rizzo shade that many San Franciscans throw at drivers, but an epiphany. He seemed to realize that he’d come precariously close to death. And for what? To text “lol” to a bro about what he’d had for lunch?
He slid the phone into his jeans front pocket and put his hands up, as if to say, “My bad.” It was a rare moment of self-awareness.
All too often these days confrontations like this are ending in tragedy. Last year 948 pedestrians were struck by vehicles in San Francisco – an increase from 798 in 2007. And of those who were hit, 21 people died, up from 16 deaths in 2012.
The surge in deaths and accidents has happened despite a huge and very expensive effort by the city to stop the problem.
That’s because the city’s response so far has been to assign blame in all sorts of directions, except at those who too often are actually responsible.
Us.
As pedestrians, let’s admit it, we’ve collectively become remarkable dolts with our heads buried in our phones, stumbling along sidewalks, bumping into each other, and sometimes – like brainless zombies – walking right out into moving traffic.
We’re breaking the first social contract we made as children. You remember that one, right? When you were a toddler your parents taught you to look both ways before crossing the street. It’s the first promise you made for interacting with the wider world. And with good reason. If you don’t look, you could get hit by a car. Well, those facts don’t change just because you’re older and have enough cash to buy an iPhone.
San Francisco isn’t New York, where jaywalking is “practically the definition of a New Yorker.” Something else is up. We haven’t suddenly become arrogant. We’ve become incredibly distracted, and I blame technology.
The role that smartphones are playing in pedestrian/car stand-offs, accidents and deaths has not been widely reported. Frankly, it’s often not included in initial police reports, and sometimes isn’t made public until many months later (after the media has publicly crucified sometimes innocent drivers). But if you speak to the city’s police officers, they will tell you how dangerously distracted pedestrians have become in recent years because of their phones.
In the 21 fatalities last year drivers were at fault two-thirds of the time, mostly due to speed, according to police. In accidents that turn deadly, speed is almost always a factor, regardless of how the incident started.
But in the other 900-plus cases where pedestrians were struck it was rare that drivers were criminally charged, prosecuted or convicted. That means that in the final analysis, there’s more involved with these cases than careless drivers. To be clear, there are plenty of terrible drivers in San Francisco, but distracted pedestrians are often responsible for these accidents. (Near misses, like the one I had on 17th Street, are not included in the city’s stats.)
Of course, no one wants to be seen as blaming the victims. How awful would that be, especially for the injured or families that just lost loved ones?
But San Francisco has gone to the other extreme. In the past few years the city’s response to this growing tragedy has been an almost textbook case of ineffective government: throw a lot of money at projects and programs that ultimately miss the point, don’t work, and end up creating unintended new problems.
Instead of acknowledging that pedestrians bear any responsibility in pedestrian accidents, the city has spent millions on efforts that mostly target or impede drivers. One recent public outreach survey that asked for feedback on how to spend an additional $17 million on this issue over the next five years did not include one cent for educating or warning pedestrians about the dangers of their own behavior.
The most visible efforts the city has made are so-called bulb-outs – curb expansions that eliminate driving lanes or parking spaces in order to shorten the distance needed to cross the street. The idea is that if there’s less space for cars and pedestrians to share, then less opportunity for accidents.
But some of these bulb-outs are so enormously overproduced that they jut too far out into the street and cause danger and confusion. One was just built in my neighborhood at the juncture of Noe and Market Streets. Cars now slam on their brakes and stop in the middle of a very busy intersection, bewildered. What the hell is that thing? Can I go? Should I stop? There’s going to be an accident, if there hasn’t been already. Wasn’t the bulb-out supposed to prevent accidents?
And cyclists hate the bulb-outs, since they create an alarming narrowing of the road at corners that they’re supposed to share with cars.
There’s also the fact that some horrific pedestrian fatalities have happened at narrow intersections. A narrow intersection is no guarantee of safety, especially if someone is distracted.
The city’s other plans for dealing with the crisis include: adding cameras that will automatically ticket drivers going over the speed limit (big brother), so-called “road diets” (eliminating traffic lanes) to create gridlock and slow drivers, new rules that prevent turns at intersections (cars only go straight, right?), and speed bumps (pray that you’re never in an ambulance that hits one).
All anti-car. Not one cent in that $17 million plan for educating pedestrians about the dangers they create for themselves with their own distracted behavior.
That San Francisco has only targeted one side of the pedestrian/car accident crisis is not surprising. Many in the city’s leadership have wrongly interpreted local pro-transit laws as a mandate to be anti-car, which explains why there’s so much effort to demonize drivers, rather than making any substantive improvements to the city’s truly awful public transit system. (Few city leaders even understand that the rise of our local cycling culture has happened in large part because so many people vehemently hate taking the poor-performing trains and buses.)
Okay, so cars are the knee-jerk targets of San Francisco politicians. For everything. Always.
But perhaps a larger part of the problem is that we’re a city filled with people who are big on demanding their rights, and not so hip on accepting the personal responsibilities that come with those rights.
For example, folks here love to express their right to protest, but don’t always feel the need to get their facts or targets correct. A few years back a protest in response to police shooting a crime suspect swept through the Castro. Windows were smashed. Locals were terrorized. But the controversial shooting had actually happened miles away, in Bayview, and the Castro and its residents had nothing to do with it. Oh, and after an investigation, it turns out the suspect had shot himself. Oops.
You also see the rights versus responsibility disconnect with the city’s cycling community, where advocates have successfully demanded their right to share the streets, and then a large number of cyclists won’t obey even the most basic rules of the road.
So it’s no surprise that San Francisco’s policies have so far failed to acknowledge that pedestrians bear any personal responsibility for their own safety. Responsibility is a dirty word here.
Other communities have not been so blind.
I was just in Tokyo and noticed a huge public awareness campaign there that specifically targets pedestrians who are hurting themselves and others by burying their heads in their smartphones while walking. You don’t even have to read Japanese to understand the messages, since cartoons make the warnings so clear: if you walk while looking at your phone you will fall down stairs, fall into train tracks, and harm other pedestrians.
Stanford University has also been ahead of San Francisco. The school has had a public awareness campaign about the hazards of walking and being distracted by smartphones – and the dangers at Stanford are nothing compared to the streets of San Francisco.
And here’s the scary part. We’ve only seen the beginnings of the smartphone zombie apocalypse with our handheld devices. As Google Glass and other wearable technologies grow in popularity, expect people to become more distracted than ever. An even deadlier crisis looms, and the city that created so much of the world’s technology (television and Twitter were invented here, to name only two) is woefully unprepared.
By some accounts, San Francisco is already the most dangerous city in the nation for pedestrians. The “fixes” so far that have only targeted cars have clearly failed – proven by the fact that accidents and deaths have increased since the city started these programs.
Will the city get it?
This week there was an inkling of change. The mayor’s office acknowledged that, perhaps, distraction might be playing a role in road accidents and deaths. So soon the city will start a campaign called “Be Nice, Look Twice.”
The idea is to get everybody using the city streets to, well, be nice to each other. It’s hardly a demand for personal responsibility, but, hey, it’s a start.
Let’s see if the zombies notice.
