SFMTA Board Unanimously Approves L-Taraval Boarding Islands

Late this afternoon, after listening to testimony from some 50 speakers for more than three hours, the SFMTA board unanimously approved the Muni-forward project to consolidate stops, create red transit-only lanes, and install concrete boarding islands on the L-Taraval line.

This morning Streetsblog ran an opinion piece from Walk San Francisco’s Executive Director, Nicole Ferrara, urging the SFMTA Board to ask for concrete boarding islands for all stops on the Taraval line. The board members shared her concern about the five inbound stops that will get painted passenger boarding areas, rather than concrete safety islands. “It’s not ‘Vision 90 percent,'” said director Joel Ramos, referring to an SFMTA qualification in the plan that says if less than 90 percent of motorists respond to the new painted treatments at these five stops in question, then these stops will also get a concrete safety island installed later.

Despite the concerns, they decided to move forward with the plan in hand. “I just can not see continuing to drop people off into traffic,” from the train said Lee Hsu, another of the directors.

Streetsblog will bring more details on the meeting in a follow-up post. It’s sufficient to say for now that the concrete boarding island issue is essentially resolved, and, despite the pleas of local merchants and residents who came to the meeting, parking concerns will not trump safety on this project.