Plans for two quick-build parking-protected bike lane safety projects, on Howard Street from Embarcadero to 3rd and on 7th from Townsend to Folsom, were reviewed yesterday evening by some eighty participants at a public meeting at the Bessie Carmichael Elementary School school in the South of Market Neighborhood. However, many who participated in the meeting said they were unhappy with the design of the intersections.
Incoming SFMTA Director Jeffrey Tumlin and Supervisor Matt Haney at last night's meeting
“We’re going to approve two quick-build projects tonight,” said Supervisor Matt Haney, who praised Mayor London Breed’s directive to streamline the approval process for safety projects. An outreach meeting is all that is now required to approve such a project, rather than going through several outreach meetings and then waiting for legislative approval. Haney added that if they’d had a quick-build system in place years ago, it would have saved lives. “We didn’t move fast enough.”
"Data tells us that 75 percent of injuries occur on 13 percent of the network of streets," said Jaime Parks, Livable Streets Director for SFMTA. And many of those streets are in SoMa, thus the need for the streamlined process.
SFMTA's Parks (white shirt) and People Protected Bike lane advocate Matt Brezina, commenting on the poor intersection design, at last night's meeting.
With lives at stake, faster, of course, is better. But "the intersections are disappointing," said bike-advocate Parker Day, pointing to the table maps. "That's not built to the eight-eighty standard."
Advocate Parker Day makes notes on the plans at last night's open house
The eight-eighty standard refers to designing bike infrastructure that's safe and comfortable enough for both an eight-year-old child and an eighty-year-old adult. Neither group is in any position to zipper through a mixing zone with turning car and truck drivers.
Furthermore, protected intersections, the alternative to mixing-zones, are considered "best practices" by the National Association of City Transportation Officials. According to a report put out earlier this year entitled "Don’t Give Up at the Intersection," NACTO officials point out that "43 percent of urban bicyclist fatalities occurred at intersections in 2017."
The organization recommends that bike-safety projects employ:
Protected intersections, which keep bicycles physically separate from motor vehicles up until the intersection, with greatly reduced crossing distances, improved sightlines, and dramatically safer results on the streets where they have been installed.
"Can we not look at protected intersections?" asked Matt Brezina, one of the co-founders of the People Protected Bike Lane movement in San Francisco, of the SFMTA's Parks, at the meeting.
"We're looking to see if we can do something like that," was the answer.