In his 32 years at the Sherman Market, owner Elias Batshon has seen “hundreds of accidents” at the intersection of Union and Franklin streets. Last week, he witnessed the collision that left 30-year-old educator Andrew Zieman dead just across from the elementary school where he worked.
“An old lady ran the red light on Union Street,” Batshon says. “Two cars were coming down [Franklin]: One got T-boned and he ended up hitting the wall and pinned [Zieman] against the wall.”
Batshon adds that his own car, which was parked near his store, was also hit.
Apparently Zieman was not in the crosswalk, but standing on the sidewalk when the crash occurred. (According to reports, a driver at the scene was arrested.)
This fatal collision has shaken the residents and workers of Cow Hollow, along with the city as a whole. But we’ve seen this before: The incident echoed another car crash that felled two pedestrians, severely injuring one and killing 29-year-old Lovisa Svallingson, who was crossing Polk Street near City Hall back in May.
A nationwide reckoning with traffic violence is underway. More pedestrians died in U.S. car crashes last year than in any previous year in the last two decades, and pedestrian deaths have increased 46 percent since 2010, according to data from the Governors Highway Safety Association. SF is dealing with its own crisis, and it’s not going well.
Zieman’s death is SF’s 12th pedestrian death this year, and comes just weeks after the Vision Zero team presented its annual strategy update at a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority board meeting.
Given that there were 30 traffic fatalities in San Francisco in 2020 — only one fewer than in 2014, when the city adopted Vision Zero and pledged to end traffic deaths within 10 years — it was not a surprise that SFMTA Streets director Tom Maguire recently expressed doubt about that goal: “I don’t know that we will be reaching zero traffic deaths by 2024.”
Whether San Francisco even gets close might depend on what are called Quick Build projects — site-specific roadway improvements done fast by transit officials that sidestep the typical bureaucracy required to make changes.
It’s too late to save Andrew Zieman’s life, but the quick-build fixes now planned for Union and Franklin could avert the next crash.
Paint and plastic
Maguire and other agency staff emphasized at the Nov. 2 SFMTA board meeting that the two-year-old Quick Build program, which takes paint and plastic bollards to make speedy traffic improvements, has been a standout because projects can be designed and deployed in a few weeks or months. By contrast, major streetscaping work can take years to make its way through the city’s process, requiring public hearings and the potential for appeals.
In the wake of Zieman’s death, neighbors, street safety advocates, and District 2 supervisor Catherine Stefani are calling for immediate action at Union and Franklin. At a Board of Supervisors meeting earlier this week, she said the intersection was one of the most dangerous in her district, and had been “riddled with near-misses for far too long.”
Stefani called on SFMTA to “consider every possible intervention to reduce traffic speeds along this corridor,” whether that’s reduced speed limits, lane reductions, speed bumps, and so on.
SF’s top transit official, SFMTA director of transportation Jeffrey Tumlin, said earlier this week the agency would allocate funds to “tame” Union and Franklin; Stefani said she has assurances that improvements to the intersection will come within two weeks.
SFMTA spokesperson Erica Kato tells The Frisc that the rapid response team recommends painted safety zones at “all eligible corners” of the intersection, meaning corners where drivers turn quickly and fail to yield to pedestrians. Another priority is improving sight lines by relocating parking meters at the northeast corner. (In road-planning jargon, this is known as daylighting.) She also said more details about the planned Quick Build project at Union and Franklin would be coming soon.
‘People go crazy down that street’
Batshon, who lives in South San Francisco, says he often feels unsafe crossing one-way Franklin to get to and from his market on the northeast corner — “People go crazy going down that street” — and that cars speed to make a long string of green lights. He thinks a monitor that flashes red and blue and shows drivers their speed would be one effective solution. Another, Batshon adds, would be to change the timing of the lights on Franklin so drivers meet a red light every few blocks.
Amanda Littlefield clocked in for her first day of work at Skinnovation, a facial spa on Union Street steps away from where Zieman died, just hours after the accident occurred. Now she says she avoids Franklin as much as possible, and that whenever she’s driven on it, “everyone is always going way above the speed limit.” Littlefield feels speed bumps or a red light camera might make the street safer.
The intersection of Union and Franklin is not on the city’s high injury network, although the Department of Public Health is updating the network and will release an update early next year. Though streets on the high injury network have priority for Quick Build projects, Kato says in this case it doesn’t matter.
“The fact that these corridors are not on the high injury network will not limit the resources we allocate toward this intersection,” she writes in an email. “There is a clear need to make Union and Franklin safer, and we’re committed to applying our tool kit quickly and effectively.”
Months after Svallingson’s death, road crews in late October were putting down paint and a bollard-protected bike lane on another part of lower Polk Street. No one can say for certain that such improvements would have saved her. A less chaotic intersection at Union and Franklin might not have spared Zieman either. But it’s possible they could have. After yet another life cut short, that’s enough reason to do what must be done on our streets.