It’s a sunny, windy afternoon on the Wiggle as several vehicles and a bicycle queue up along Steiner Street at Duboce Avenue. There’s a long wait at the stop sign.
As a man on a Honda scooter inches up to see if the intersection is clear, an impatient driver in a white SUV swerves into the lane for oncoming traffic. This reckless behavior isn’t just a common sight for Michael Oluwasegun Odunikan, it’s a painful memory.
In August 2023, Odunikan, who lives in a senior housing complex on the intersection and uses a motorized wheelchair, was crossing Duboce when a car turned right and struck him. He says he was “catapulted” onto the pavement and Muni tracks. He still hasn’t recovered.
The intersection is a key spot on one of the city’s oldest bike routes, but Odunikan’s crash highlights how it’s far from safe for anyone who’s not in a car.
Established in 1993, the Wiggle zig-zags through the Lower Haight and Duboce Triangle, a crucial connection between downtown and western neighborhoods.
Back then, San Francisco Bicycle Coalition co-founder Joel Pomerantz printed and circulated an essay describing how the route would reconstitute “the way traffic flows,” with a 15 MPH speed limit and “barricades to limit traffic to local cars.”
But most of the route today has no protection, just sharrows — “share the road” arrows painted on the asphalt. While most of the Wiggle could use an upgrade, activists are keenly focused on three particular blocks: Steiner between Duboce and Waller, which runs along the east side of Duboce Park and is a key pinch point for both cars and bikes.
They say it’s time to designate these blocks as an official Slow Street, and for a brief moment some of them took matters into their own hands.
SF is at a turning point, amplified by the pandemic, to reorient its dangerous streets away from car-first uses, and the tension is often framed as bikes versus cars. While some seniors and disabled people protested closures of the Great Highway and JFK Drive to cars, these groups aren’t monolithic. The fight to upgrade the Wiggle also shows that people who can’t ride a bike aren’t necessarily on the drivers’ side.
Senior living
Around the lower part of the Wiggle, there are at least four dedicated senior living facilities with more than 200 residents like Odunikan who often need help getting around the neighborhood. Also, up the street from Duboce Park is a major medical center where patients come and go all day long. Slow Street accouterments like narrowed intersections or traffic diverters could be life changing.
Leesa Barnhart, who lives in the same building as Odunikan on Sanchez, often helps her neighbors cross streets. She says that the threat of speeding cars makes residents walk too fast across the Muni train tracks on Duboce – at great risk. “It becomes another way for them to fall,” Barnhart says. “They need to move slowly.”
These dangers and Odunikan’s crash became the impetus for Wiggle Fest, a street fair that closes Steiner to traffic between Duboce and Hermann for four Saturday hours twice a year.
At the inaugural fest, organizer Doug Thorogood was amazed to see how many seniors came out to enjoy the park. “They don’t have equitable access to the park that the rest of us do, to go to coffee and watch dogs and meet neighbors,” says Thorogood.
In contrast to other neighborhoods, merchants are signing on to the effort too. Six local businesses are listed on a Slow Steiner website, and the Lower Haight Merchants and Neighbors Association (LoHaMNA) participates in Wiggle Fest and “strongly supports” measures to “promote safer biking and walking on shared streets and advance the city’s Vision Zero goals,” says president Natalie Burdick.
The original 15
The Wiggle wasn’t just early, it was inspiring. Its original vision of a 15 MPH speed limit and less traffic now forms the core principles of the Slow Streets program, which the SF Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) formalized in December 2022 for 16 streets.
At the time, SFMTA set a limit of 1,000 cars a day and pledged to install traffic calming features such as low-rise “cushions,” small purple signs, and diverters.
Six months later, only four of the 16 met the speed requirements, while 12 were under 1,000 cars a day. SFMTA is currently working on upgrades to two streets with stubbornly high traffic volume, Minnesota Street in the Dogpatch and Noe Street, just a stone’s throw from the Wiggle (but not on it).
Frustrated with the slow pace of improvement and lack of data from SFMTA, nonprofits SF Parks Alliance and KidSafeSF launched a program last year to give video cameras to residents along slow streets to record traffic and compile data.
The group issued its own audit Thursday, showing that traffic on Lake and Page Streets exceeds the 1,000-cars-per-day goal, while Hearst and Cayuga were “dangerously out of compliance” on speed, with averages exceeding 25 MPH nearly half the time along Hearst.
On Tuesday, a car speeding on Cabrillo Street to escape police crashed into a building. “If Cabrillo had improvements – speed cushions, narrowed intersections – no driver would be able to move with such force as to take out the corner of a building,” KidSafeSF leadership team member Sara Barz told The Frisc.
KidSafe SF and neighborhood coordinators for 18 slow streets have called on the city to install more traffic calming measures and audit the streets every six months. (Spokesperson Michael Roccaforte said SFMTA would make its audits of select slow streets available through presentations at SFMTA board meetings or an agency newsletter.)
There needs to be something to train people to be better street users.
duboce triangle resident Michael Oluwasegun Odunikan
The slow streets organizers also want more of them, and to have them connect neighborhoods and bike routes. Steiner and the Wiggle fit this bill. SFMTA didn’t have traffic data available for the few blocks of Steiner near Duboce Park, but there are data from a Telraam sensor.
The past week, between 2,000 and roughly 5,000 vehicles have traveled daily on these blocks. That’s thousands of cars and trucks a day on what’s arguably the city’s most important bike route.
Wishful thinking
The push to turn Steiner into a Slow Street comes at a pivotal moment. The city is developing an expanded citywide bike network, known as the Bike and Roll Plan. A draft is due next month, but it won’t be finalized until 2025.
SFMTA’s Roccaforte says a Slow Steiner won’t be part of the Bike and Roll plan. Slow streets are in their own project category, with a separate planning, public outreach, and approval process.
So it seems, then, that Odunikan and his neighbors will have to wait for more safety. It’s not just his life that was disrupted by a reckless driver. His daughter has moved in with him to help. After three months of physical therapy, he still needs assistance to get in and out of bed from his wheelchair.
But Odunikan can still make art. From his wheelchair, he sketches scenes from several vantage points around Duboce Park. One shows the view of palm trees from his hospital room at nearby Davies Medical Center; another the grassy field of Duboce Park from the Harvey Milk Center for the Arts.
Odunikan also has visions of what he experienced at the last two Wiggle Fests: a few hours of a car-free street that allows neighbors to gather safely and enjoy the park.
He and others got a teaser days after the last street fair. Along Steiner, Safe Street Rebel did a guerilla installment, as they did in March on Franklin Street, of traffic-calming posts that forced cars to yield to pedestrians and bikes.
But two days later, city workers took out the installment, much to Odunikan’s disappointment.
“It was wishful thinking that Steiner would be more like Wiggle Fest all the time,” he says. “There needs to be something to train people to be better street users.”
Correction 5/17/24: This story previously reported that the guerilla installment of traffic posts on Steiner Street was dismantled within a few hours. That was incorrect. It was dismantled two days later.