Today we joined Mayor Daniel Lurie, agency heads, and city leaders on the steps of City Hall as he announced Executive Directive 25-06, the Street Safety Initiative, a new roadway safety strategy for San Francisco that promises a coordinated effort to design, operate, and manage streets and transportation systems that ensure the safety of everyone who shares our streets.
We are pleased to see that, with the Street Safety Initiative, the Mayor is taking ownership of improving our streets to be more safe and accessible to people who ride bikes, scooters, and who walk and use mobility devices. “For a long time, street safety advocates have been demanding not just leadership, but leaders willing to bring all of the City’s agencies together to tackle a problem that we know is solvable,” said Christopher White, executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. The Street Safety Initiative brings the heads of city agencies together to coordinate their work and accelerate improvements. We also see the Mayor promising to deliver on existing strategies and plans, such as citywide daylighting and the Biking and Rolling Plan. SFBike and other advocates will make sure that these promises are delivered.
There is, of course, the risk that these will be just words, without strong followthrough. We will be watching closely to make sure the Mayor’s office and City agencies deliver on the promise of the Street Safety Initiative and prioritize its implementation, because that’s the only way to achieve real progress.
And progress can be both effective and efficient – citywide daylighting has been law for nearly a year now, and the Biking and Rolling Plan is the culmination of three years worth of community engagement, street-design research, and best practice commitments. We want to see the Working Group focus on those existing plans and materials. “We don’t need another year to decide which high-stress corridors and intersections to address and remedy,” said Claire Amable, director of advocacy for SFBike. “We have all the information we need to move quickly and intelligently to improve street conditions and save lives.”
As the Initiative states, safety is a non-negotiable value of San Francisco, and we cannot accept traffic violence as the cost of moving around our city. There is no doubt that the surest way to improve safety and reduce congestion on our streets is to make it more convenient and more pleasurable for people to choose sustainable modes like walking, biking, rolling, and taking transit.
