Running and safety on city streets

Photo: Marissa Leshnov

The Chronicle's Heather Knight in a recent column:

On Sunday, Julie Nicholson ran for the first time through the spot in the Panhandle where a car had nearly killed her. She was jogging on Jan. 4 last year when a car speeding north on Masonic Avenue blew through a red light, hit another car and careened into the park — straight at her. She flew 30 feet, landing with a thud....She broke her neck and her back, and her head was bleeding....What followed was a grueling eight months of recovery, but she’s OK now. And on Sunday, she embarked on a miraculous endeavor: a half-marathon along some of San Francisco’s most dangerous streets, ending at that same spot in the Panhandle. She hadn’t had the nerve to run there since the crash.

As a jogger who also lives in that part of town, my question: Why jog on the street when we have the wonderful Kezar Stadium nearby? No cars, no carbon monoxide, no bikes, no dogs, and a great running surface.

Knight accompanies Nicholson on that run for safety on city streets:

And on Sunday, she embarked on a miraculous endeavor: a half-marathon along some of San Francisco’s most dangerous streets, ending at that same spot in the Panhandle. She hadn’t had the nerve to run there since the crash....That’s why it was important and meaningful for a dozen runners, also in yellow shirts, to join Nicholson for her run. Some, like her, were survivors. Highlighting their own injuries and others’ devastating deaths is crucial to ensuring the longtime problem is on City Hall’s priority list.

Knight refers to the city's Vision Zero slogan that masquerades as a safety policy:

Back in 2014, San Francisco officials, rattled by the previous year’s 34 traffic deaths, pledged to end traffic fatalities within a decade, adopting a plan they called Vision Zero. But three years from the deadline, there are almost as many deaths as when the initiative began. Last year, despite people sheltering-in-place and the roads far emptier than normal, 29 people died on city streets. No year since the adoption of Vision Zero has seen fewer than 20 deaths.

That's because Vision Zero was always bullshit, a slogan and not a realistic safety policy. The city's Vision Zero website has a bar graph How Are We doing? that tracks traffic fatalities back to the seemingly arbitrary year of 2006.

Turns out in 2006 we did the same as we did last year, with around 30 traffic deaths. (See Vision Zero hits the wall.)

More from Knight:

Then Nicholson and the others ran to John F. Kennedy Drive and 30th Avenue in Golden Gate Park. That’s where Heather Miller, 41, was killed by a hit-and-run driver while riding her bike on June 22, 2016. The driver, 19-year-old Nicky Garcia, was later arrested and charged with murder, vehicular manslaughter, and hit and run.

It's clearly impossible to prevent people from stealing cars and speeding recklessly through the city. 

What's the moral of that awful story? Knight's lame attempt at one:

Strangely, the state controls cities’ abilities to make proactive changes like lowering speed limits and installing automated speed enforcement cameras to ticket those blasting through our streets. Legislators are trying yet again to get that changed in Sacramento this year after previous no-brainer attempts failed. Isn’t it interesting how our supposedly progressive state does so many things so backward?

It's a "no-brainer" that the state doesn't allow 58 counties to choose their own traffic laws? Not to mention that people like Garcia obviously don't care what the speed limit is.

Once upon a time, Heather Knight seemed to have a more realistic sense of what was happening on city streets. 

Now she apparently thinks that the situation can be cured by more enforcement (see No relationship between tickets and fatalities) and more traffic cameras (see Vision Zero crashes into reality).

It's not perfectly safe to ride a bike or run on city streets, and there's nothing City Hall can do to change that.