San Francisco’s transportation system is at a turning point. Officials must reckon with a quagmire of traffic congestion, unsafe streets — punctuated this past weekend by a red-light-running driver in the Tenderloin who hit two pedestrians, killing one of them — as well as bureaucratic rigidity, a restive workforce, and a public lack of faith in getting stuff done.
The situation requires dramatic changes. But it will also require a delicate balancing act to push through necessary short-term fixes, block by block, street by street, without sacrificing the political capital needed to turn vision into action.
Amid the unceremonious departure of transportation director Ed Reiskin and the appointment of an interim head, Mayor London Breed announced a nationwide search for a new executive to lead the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency — an administrative juggernaut in charge of our buses, subways, parking, taxis, bike infrastructure, paratransit, and more.
The new director will be the city’s fourth in 20 years. Reiskin’s tenure was tainted by high-profile “Muni meltdowns,” in which unprecedented driver shortages and service rerouting led to major delays. His permanent replacement might benefit from a new contract with the operators’ union that promises bigger, faster raises to recruit new workers and hopefully keep a nationwide decline in ridership from happening here. In addition, the awful death of cyclist Tess Rothstein, among others, spurred an acceleration of protected bike lane construction South of Market.
Breed has pledged to streamline everything from affordable housing to event permits. On transportation, she’s impatient to move forward as well. For instance, the mayor introduced a quick build pilot program, in which new bike lanes and other street safety projects will receive streamlined approvals for two years.
From here to zero
Public outcry and media attention are driving some immediate, practical fixes, like the work done on Howard Street following the Rothstein tragedy. Bike, pedestrian, and other safety advocates are convening today at City Hall to call for a “state of emergency” to speed planning decisions after two more preventable deaths in a span of four days, including the husband who was visiting the city to celebrate an anniversary with his wife (who was also injured).
Reform is slowly unfolding behind the scenes, but too slowly. SF’s stated Vision Zero goal of eliminating traffic deaths entirely by 2024 is on track to fall short, and the trends are looking worse. Fixing that will take not just tactics but strategy, not just action but vision.
In San Francisco, though, the deck isn’t stacked in favor of action and vision. “Most transit agencies are designed to be mostly insulated from political pressure,” says Jason McDaniel, a professor of political science at San Francisco State University. “There is no one political entity that can be held accountable.” Breed can hire and fire leadership — her “primary tool” of leverage, says McDaniel, and she seems to be pushing hard on it. “But a diffuse authority structure makes the transportation agency much less responsive to the political concerns of the big city.”
Whoever gets the mayor’s nod will have to deal with her, thousands of employees, and a frustrated populace. Jeff Cretan, Breed’s director of communications, says the ideal candidate would “take charge of the agency and provide a real vision for the future of transportation in our city.”
That’s all well and good, but are there any points of agreement among those constituents? Perhaps one vantage point can lead to common ground: San Francisco can only fit so many cars in its limited space. Nearly one million cars are registered in the city; more than 450,000 cruise in every day, according to the latest SFMTA data from 2017. (Roughly 15% of the land on some of the country’s most expensive urban real estate, or 195 million square feet, is paved for autos.)
How to manage the volume of cars will be a sticking point. The San Francisco County Transportation Authority, a planning and funding agency that’s different from the SFMTA, has authorized a pilot study on congestion pricing, hoping to ward off traffic by adding tolls to the city’s busiest roads. (Driving into London’s core during the day costs a thought-provoking £11.50, or about $14.)
The idea is to create a positive feedback loop in which everyone benefits. Drivers — including bus drivers, cabbies, and ride-hail gig workers — could get smoother traffic flow; pedestrians and cyclists could enjoy improved health and safety; and transit riders would arrive to their destinations on time. Imagine just one or two of those.
Auto-traffic safety is the most urgent of these potential benefits. Cars kill 40,000 people in the United States and injure up to 4 million every year, with 2018 having the highest tally since 1990. That’s a public health crisis, one practically guaranteed by long-standing laws and tax policies, according to University of Iowa law professor Greg Shill.
Vision Zero is a local and national campaign to design safer streets and encourage car-free trips, with boatloads of data to support best practices. SFMTA staffers have access to all the studies and thus have a good idea what to do. But putting the work in place is where things get complicated.
No right on red
Here’s an example of the complications. Amanda Eaken, who sits on the SFMTA Board of Directors, recently proposed prohibiting right turns on red citywide, a game-changing proposal in terms of traffic and safety, and safety advocates are pushing for it too. (A turning car is what slammed into Norman Yee, president of the Board of Supervisors, in 2006.) The National Association of City Transportation Officials recommends restricting right turns on red in its Urban Street Design Guide.
Despite Reiskin’s assurances, it wasn’t a high priority for the agency. If the SFMTA were able to implement the best traffic and safety practices, the city would already have banned right turns on red, as New York state has done in cities with more than 1 million people. (There are exceptions.)
So how do city leaders protect significant engineering decisions from the morass of politics? That’s the secret sauce that Breed’s office is looking for in replacing Reiskin.
Jamison Wieser served four years on the SFMTA’s Citizens’ Advisory Council, which meets monthly with agency staff to go over policy reports and recommendations. Wieser says the city faced a similar scenario in 2011, around the time of the departure of SFMTA chief Nathaniel Ford. Even a mayor as bullish as Breed might be cautious pushing a reform agenda with her new SFMTA hire; her office is “trying to gauge public support and priorities,” says Wieser, and adds that if the new hire comes from outside SF, the person would have a steep learning curve given “the politics and dynamics of San Francisco.”
A breakthrough could come if street safety coalesced as a formidable issue for everyday voters. A growing field of activists (especially bicycle advocates) are doing their best, pushing bureaucrats and elected officials to make good on Vision Zero and safety with specific changes.
‘What’s wonderful about no right on red is that everyone has their turn.’ — Jodie Medeiros, Walk SF
“We put our giant laundry list together, and it’s everything from zebra-striped crosswalks that reduce conflicts to no right on red. That’s something we want to see everywhere on the high-injury network,” says Jodie Medeiros, the executive director of Walk San Francisco, one of the groups calling for a state of emergency. “What’s wonderful about no right on red is that everyone has their turn. It’s inexpensive, it can be done all over the place without a lot of infrastructure, and it’s going to save pedestrians.”
Right on red is an example of an issue that the mayor on which can’t stick her neck out too far. The city already has intersections where right turns on red are prohibited, Cretan acknowledges. “We are still evaluating the impacts of this proposal, including how it could affect Muni service,” he says. “The mayor is committed to looking at these kinds of solutions and determining their effectiveness before moving forward.”
So advocacy can grease the wheels of sound planning decisions, but to stretch an extended metaphor, someone still has to be steering the trolley — and dilemmas arise when politics obstruct the path ahead. Even though the Board of Supervisors has no direct authority over SFMTA, they use their budget approval power over the agency to delay or stymie projects.
At a board meeting in April, SFMTA board director Cheryl Brinkman voiced this concern: “There’s a few projects that come to mind that are watered down or canceled due to lack of supervisor support in that district,“ she remarked. “When push comes to shove, not only might [supervisors] not support a project in their district, but they won’t speak up in support of a project in another supervisor’s district.”
Brinkman singled out Supervisor Ahsha Safaí, who opposed a bus lane expansion into the Excelsior District, then pointed to a watered-down bike lane on Polk Street, in Supervisor Aaron Peskin’s district. Last year, Peskin and Safaí sought to introduce a ballot measure to hamstring the SFMTA’s ability to conduct traffic safety work by requiring the Board of Supervisors’ approval — in part because traffic engineers disagreed with Safaí on the need for a stop sign in his district. Their measure would have reversed an 18-year-old ballot measure, Proposition E, that consolidated the Department of Parking and Traffic with the modern-day SFMTA, but the supervisors eventually withdrew the proposal.
There are cases when the tension between government branches is resolved constructively. Despite Supervisor Catherine Stefani’s initial pushback against Ford GoBike rental stations last year, the SFMTA and the operating company Motivate conducted more outreach in the Marina and Cow Hollow neighborhoods, found satisfactory sites, and expanded bike-share to Stefani’s district. In District 5, Supervisor Vallie Brown used public-support surveys to expand bike-share stations in the Haight and Cole Valley.
Supervisor Matt Haney has thrown his full support behind Better Market Street, which would accelerate transit in the main downtown thoroughfare by blocking private automobile traffic, while improving safety at intersections.https://twitter.com/printtemps/status/1151318975692718080?s=11
Yet in considering major initiatives to reach Vision Zero goals, the SFMTA will have to approach democratic input as a means of improving conditions, not whether to back off. Street safety advocates hailed the mayor’s quick-build program as a step in the right direction, but it is essentially an uneasy compromise between the mayor’s authority over her departments and SF’s established rhythms of exhaustive participatory process.
Just this week, the SFMTA board voted to close one block of Octavia Boulevard along the two-block green space south of Hayes Street. As for the next block? That will take further study from staff, the board directors said, even as they called it the next logical step.
Matt Brezina, an organizer with People Protected Bike Lanes, which rallied for a fully protected bike lane on Howard Street, says streamlining at SFMTA “should cut at least three months off the approval timeline for projects on high-injury corridors.”
Even better, he says, would be to keep projects within SFMTA. “These near-term projects have been successful because they stay in one department: the SFMTA.” he says. “It doesn’t touch Public Works or even contractors.”
Walk SF’s Medeiros had a similar take. “I definitely think the SFMTA is moving quicker,” she says, with crews going out to “make traffic changes with low-cost materials like paint and posts. We are encouraging them, because we believe once people experience it, they aren’t going to fight against it.”
On San Francisco’s abundant pavement, lives are at stake in a delicate political balancing act. Officials need to keep pushing quick, incremental fixes without sacrificing momentum for the long game — to de-emphasize the private automobile. Bicyclists may soon enjoy a lower risk of deadly collisions in SoMa, thanks to Breed’s quick-build mandate to improve bike lanes there ASAP. But on the other hand, drivers still enjoy zero risk of paying for metered parking on Sundays, thanks to Ed Lee’s capitulation to driver outrage. Free Sunday parking “began with the mayor’s office and could end with the mayor’s office,” Wieser says.
London Breed will need a new SFMTA head who has not only experience but tolerance for criticism — likely from the mayor herself. Resumés, anyone?
Diego Aguilar-Canabal is the former managing editor of the Bay City Beacon and also writes for the East Bay Express. Follow him on Twitter: @daguilarcanabal