SF's faith-based traffic "collision" system
 |
| Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle |
The SF Chronicle once again pushes the pro-bike, anti-car PC line in last Sunday's edition:
On a dark December night, with a chilly breeze blowing from the west, a dozen bicyclists parked their rides on the sidewalks of Market Street at Octavia Street[sic], pulled bright-yellow T-shirts over their work apparel and grabbed glow sticks and signs...“Join us,” they yelled, as portable speakers boomed “The Safety Dance,” a 1983 pop hit. “Protect the bike lanes.” The group quickly grew to about 70 people.
This was the latest rendition of People Protected Bike Lane, an amalgam of performance art, political protest, street party and community organizing event that was born in San Francisco and has quickly spread to cities across the country and around the world. The goal is to get local governments moving on building barriers to separate bike lanes from vehicle traffic on some of the city’s most dangerous streets.
Are Octavia Blvd. and Market Street in fact "dangerous streets"? (It's Octavia Boulevard, not street, by the way.) Not according to the latest city Collisions Report, which tells us that two thirds of injury accidents happen at intersections (page 13).
The intersection of Market/Octavia is listed among the most dangerous in the city, with 22 "injury collisions" in a recent four-year period, which is 5.5 accidents a year. Is that really a large number for one of the busiest intersections---and a freeway entrance/exit---in the city? per Vision Zero ideology, the city doesn't believe in "accidents," since they are all supposedly preventable.
Neither the Chronicle nor the city provide any more information on those accidents: among them 4 pedestrians injured and 15 cyclists, though it's fair to think that many were due to the negligence of cyclists and pedestrians.
But what the demonstrators are claiming is that Market Street in general is a dangerous street, which is simply untrue according to the Collisions Report: two Market Street intersections are on the list of Highest Injury Collision Intersections on page 13---Market/Octavia and Market/Fifth (25 injury accidents).
Of course Market Street is on the Vision Zero "network" of high-injury streets, but then every busy street in the city is on that map. That makes it easy for the city to cherry-pick streets on which it can make safety "improvements" by not providing any information about why accidents/"collisions" happen, like who or what was responsible and what should be done to prevent them in the future.
In short, the Vision Zero slogan/policy is a faith-based system. The public is supposed to trust a city government about how and why traffic accidents happen on our streets, even though back in 2013 a UC study showed us that a supposedly pro-bike City Hall couldn't even count cycling accidents on city streets.
Speaking of faith, city residents can't count on learning about the city's troubled history of counting traffic accidents from the Chronicle, since long-time transportation reporter Michael Cabanatuan has never written about that UC study. Nor has anyone at the Examiner, the SF Weekly, Streetsblog, or the Bicycle Coalition (see Local media ignore cycling accident study).
There's been a North Korea-like blackout on the subject here in Progressive Land, except for yours truly at District 5 Diary.
Labels: Anti-Car, Bicycle Coalition, Children and Bikes, City Government, Cycling and Safety, Language, Media, Pedestrian Safety, SF Chronicle, SF Weekly, Traffic in SF, UC Study
posted by Rob Anderson @ 2:10 PM
6 comments
6 Comments:
The true definition of vision zero is "zero carbon". Not traffic deaths or "collisions".
Nicely-written description of the mushy facts and myopic reasoning behind our city's civic efforts to screw up traffic. Good for you - to see through the semantic misdirection tactic of calling danger zones "corridors". If truth and accuracy were a priority they would be called high-injury "plus signs" or "squares", since, as you correctly point out, almost all the mayhem takes place in intersections.
By the way, the Market and Octavia crossing is a good example of how fruitless the quest is for the Holy Grail streetscape design that will usher everyone where they're going, collision-free. Back when such things were reported and counted (and contrary to your suspicions about who is at fault), the pattern of collisions was clear and consistent: Motor vehicles making illegal turns were right-hooking cyclists who were lawfully in the bike lane. If there was ever an intersection in which the "design" was at fault it was this one. The fact that at least one cyclist per month is still getting whacked there suggests that the Faithful have yet to experience their salvation.
On the Market/Octavia intersection: still not clear why the city couldn't change the traffic light timing so that bikes and cars don't share a green light, which would allow motorists the sensible, easy right turn onto the freeway.
Like the traffic light the city installed at the Fell/Masonic intersection. On second thought, that's not a good analogy, since the Bicycle Coalition's campaign against that intersection was always based on lies about its safety.
I guess it's not clear to me either why a staggered green light system won't be tried at Market and Octavia. You and I are two guys who are regularly paying attention to surface transportation matters in minutia and neither one of us gets a clue as to why this intersection hasn't been reformed? Either we're not on the ball as much as I think we are, or else the MTA and the SFBC don't think the public is worth disclosing the method to their madness. My experience is that trying to engage them on a discussion about intersections is about as productive as trying to drain the ocean with a kitchen sponge.
Some historical backgrond on the issue for those coming in late:
I've blogged about the right-turn ban at this intersection since 2005. A typical early post: The no right-turn ban: An exchange.
As reported by Matier & Ross, when he was District 5 Supervisor, Matt Gonzalez carried a resolution on behalf of the Bicycle Coalition and their enablers in City Hall to impose the right-turn ban.
A functional link to "Matt Gonzalez" above.
Post a Comment
<< Home