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San Francisco Still Among Most Dangerous For Pedestrians
dkatana writes: The city of San Francisco averages 200 injuries per year and 30 deaths. This is almost double the number of Barcelona, Catalonia, which has about the same population. The city started a Vision Zero program, aimed at reducing and ultimately eliminate pedestrian deaths by 2024. But after a year-long Vision Zero education push called Safe Streets SF, whose key message is that pedestrians always have the right of way, the results have been modest. Now a series of banners on light poles in the South of Market neighborhood with the message: 'Slow down! We live here!' are trying to convince drivers to respect people on foot.
...the way pedestrians act in Boston and New York: total chaos. People wander across the street randomly, and drivers are very aware that this is going to happen, so they slow down. It made for a much more pedestrian-friendly environment there than on the west coast, where cars travel far too fast and pedestrians are timid and restrained.
Nearly got knocked over when crossing - legally - at a pedestrian crossing in Berkeley, and a driver refused to stop and I had to jump out of the way.
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The organization asks that people default to "giving right-of-way" (yielding) to pedestrians. Pedestrians do not legally have permanent right-of-way. Right-of-way is determined by law, planning, and engineering.
The California Vehicle Code requires that all automobile drivers YIELD to pedestrians in the road, but as pedestrians do not have a permanent right-of-way, they can still be cited for jaywalking.
San Francisco is far more dense, because even though Barcelona has a lot of people living in suburbs, the Bay Area has more than twice as many. More workers commute in from other cities than live in San Francisco itself.
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Why was this voted down? CA still has a very strong car culture. Just look at the traffic in San Francisco. There are a lot of people here that are very anti-pedestrian and anti-mass transit.
A propaganda effort to change how safe drivers are can help a little bit, but what makes cities safer is physical world changes that make it easier to drive safely and harder to hit someone. In Seattle, for example, they redesigned 75th street after an accident and saw a major reduction in the number of collisions. (Things like removing parking, adding bike lanes, etc...)
http://www.seattle.gov/transpo...
Bike lanes are actually useful in that even if not used by bikes, they ensure you can nudge out into a road slightly for better visibility when turning into it if you need to. You also are less likely to intuitively drive as close to the center line as if you are avoiding parked cars.
Not everywhere. Maybe virtually everywhere in this US? Come to London: we don't have this nanny state concept of "jaywalking", just personal responsibility. Pedestrians do cross the roads wherever they like and whenever they think they can. It's up to the drivers to be aware of this and drive appropriately for the conditions. Trust me, as a cyclist in this city some parts of the West End are pretty scary: not because of the vehicles but because of nob-ends with their noses in mobile phones or just crowd mentality of one person's crossing so we all will.
Getting rid of jaywalking laws so and reseting the attitudes and expectations of drivers so that they show more caution and slow down might be more effective. Allowing people on foot to reclaim their city from the motor car will make cities a better place. It would be better to lobby for better and more transportation alternatives than entrenching driving. In some congested places like London they've even talked about remove all signage and lane markings to create "naked streets", because actually this makes drivers slow down and pay more attention and care. As a visitor to San Francisco my observation is that drivers rush too much and drive too much like aresholes in their rush to get across the city.
>If you are confused, or your attention is diverted, SLOW DOWN. I say this as a non-commercial driver who has logged $WAY_TOO_GODDAMN_MANY miles behind the wheel.
Driving too fast isn't really a problem in traffic in downtown SF. You're not going to break the speed limit because there's CARS EVERYWHERE.
What the problem is (having lived there for four years) is the hideously bad road signage. You're expected to be able to read two paragraphs of text on a sign within two seconds, to try to figure the fuck out if you're even allowed to be where you are, since the rules change as often as Calvinball. "No left turns except on Mondays through Fridays 7AM to 9AM and 4PM to 6PM". Sign below that: "Except on holidays." Sign below that: "Except MUNI and busses" Sign below that: "Except taxis" is an example of the kind of idiotic sign they expect drivers to be able to read and process while still avoiding pedestrians sporadically jumping into the street.
You also sometimes end up on a Muni line, and you don't know if you're supposed to be there. The answer? Sometimes. Sometimes not.
Then you have the irrational geometry of the city streets themselves, leading to super awesome signs like this:
https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker...
I once got a ticket from a sign that had six negative modifiers on it, and got it overturned because the bloody cop didn't work through the logic on it correctly and I did.