Streets For All: Inviting Streets

Our 2016-2017 Annual Report, Streets for All, highlights our collection of recent achievements and goals. The stories captured in the Fiscal Year 2016-2017 SFMTA Annual Report demonstrate the role transportation plays in living out those values—chief among them the city’s Transit First Policy. Throughout the year, we will be featuring excerpts from Streets for All on Moving SF to give our readers better insight on what we have achieved thus far, and what we look forward to bringing to the people of San Francisco.

Inviting Streets (page 23 in Streets for All)

A Safer Golden Gate Park

As called for in Mayor Lee’s Executive Directive, the SFMTA teamed up with the Mayor’s Office and the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department to reduce unsafe speeding in Golden Gate Park. You’ll now find 10 new speed humps on John F. Kennedy Drive—a park road with historically high numbers of severe and fatal traffic injuries. The humps are working. On that portion of JFK Drive, data show that prevailing speeds have been reduced by 19 percent, down from 32 mph to 26 mph. This is encouraging news. Studies reveal that if you hit someone while driving 30 mph in a 25 mph zone, you’re almost twice as likely to kill them. By lowering car speeds in Golden Gate Park we’re making our landmark park more wonderful. Additional work to eliminate crashes here continues with our Golden Gate Park Traffic Safety Project.

Bike Training for Kids

In fiscal 2017, the SFMTA conducted bicycle safety education in 10 public middle schools. Our agency also helped support a two-week YMCA program called YBike that teaches children how to bike safely. Across the city over 1,150 children were served in 2017—including 133 kids who learned to ride a bike for the first time!

Calming City Streets

Our agency helps create more welcoming residential streets by calming traffic. This past year we launched quick and effective measures at a number of intersections. These include paint improvements (such as high-visibility crosswalks and advanced limit lines) and signal upgrades (such as pedestrian head start signals, 4-second yellows, and appropriately timed phases where all cars have a red light). To see an example of traffic calming, head to Sherman Street between Bessie Carmichael Elementary School and Victoria Manalo Draves Park. There, you’ll find a raised midblock crosswalk we installed to lower car speeds, new curb ramps, crosswalk warning signage, pavement markings, and a painted safety zone to make children, parents and teachers more visible as they go to and from school.