The city and the Great Highway

Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez

Letter to the editor in the SF Chronicle:

Transparency missing

Regarding “Surprising nastiness over Great Highway” (Bay Area, Oct. 17): Heather Knight’s column appears to insinuate a connection between my public information request to San Francisco’s Recreation and Park Department about the accuracy of its people-counting devices on the Great Highway and the claim of recent vandalism of those counters. 

I had no involvement or knowledge of that vandalism, nor do I support it.

But Knight was strangely uninterested in the fact that my research and public records request have revealed that the devices can pick up inaccurate data, and the data can be manipulated. 

I spoke to people at the company that make the devices and the parks department, and they acknowledge that a pedestrian or bicyclist can be counted as multiple people if one person passes more than one device, or if one person passes a device several times.

That may well explain why the data from city agencies about bike and pedestrian usage of the Great Highway differs so vastly from what my neighbors and I have seen with our own eyes. 

Usage during Great Highway closures has declined by 58% in recent months, according to data received via public records request.

The Recreation and Park Department and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency are not known for their transparency, which is why an ethics complaint against the park department for not producing public documents is being investigated by the city Sunshine Task Force.

City agencies are supposed to be transparent and accountable to the people. That’s the real story here, but Knight completely missed it.

Judi Gorski

San Francisco

See also Closing city streets based on a lie and Heather Knight sells city's phony emergency.