We need to pass the Street Safety Act – and then we need city leaders to deliver on it!

Monday afternoon, I was proud to rally with so many people and partners in support of District 7 Supervisor Myrna Melgar’s new Street Safety Act. 

• Check out coverage from NBC Bay Area and KQED
• Watch the speech by Nan Harrison, a crash survivor and member of Families for Safe Streets
• Share your thanks on Supervisor Melgar’s Instagram post

The Street Safety Act is a blueprint for getting our city to design and enforce streets that truly keep everyone safe. 

The Street Safety Act recommits our city to ending severe and fatal crashes, gets agencies to collaborate and work more efficiently, and focuses on bringing the most effective solutions to scale. There are deadlines, dashboards, and some serious red tape-cutting.

What’s in the Street Safety Act

You can read the full text of the Street Safety Act, but some highlights include:

• Reforming the Residential Traffic Calming Program so it takes a proactive, neighborhood-scale approach to adding speed humps, tables, and more to bring down speeds on smaller streets.
• Planning how to sufficiently redesign all high-injury streets with solutions including turn calming, signal timing, protected bike lanes, and lane reductions.
• Continue harnessing the ‘Quick Build’ program to better protect pedestrians in crosswalks, expand the Bike & Roll network, and design streets that keep drivers going at safe speeds.   
• Further embracing automated enforcement (red light and speed cameras) to address the most dangerous driving behaviors.
• Requiring the SFPD to develop a traffic enforcement plan that complements the speed camera program. 
• Adding ‘hardened’ daylighting to all high-injury streets to prevent illegal parking at the most dangerous intersections, to ensure clear sightlines.
• Adding a full suite of ‘Complete Streets’ safety improvements when repaving or conducting other street-level work on any designated high-injury network or arterial street.
• Establish street design standards and maximum review periods for approval by the Fire Department so safety projects are implemented faster.
• Holding public hearings annually for all key agencies and the Mayor’s Office to review street safety progress, challenges, and data.
• Requiring frequent updates to the high-injury network map so that projects can be prioritized based on the most current crash data. 

The Street Safety Act will be voted on September 16 

After our rally on Monday, we headed to the Land Use and Transportation Committee, where the Street Safety Act faced its first and only public hearing. 

So many folks gave public comment in support of the Street Safety Act, including the powerful statement from one of our members, Nancy Arbuckle.

The Committee (which includes Supervisor Melgar and District 11 Supervisor Chen and District 5 Supervisor Mahmood) voted to move the Street Safety Act out of committee to the full Board of Supervisors. It will go for a full vote by the Board of Supervisors on September 16. 

Between now and Tuesday, we’re talking with every Supervisor about why we need their support on the Street Safety Act. Already, District 3 Supervisor Sauter, District 5 Supervisor Mahmood, District 6 Supervisor Dorsey, and District 8 Supervisor Mandelman have signed on as cosponsors of the Street Safety Act, and District 1 Supervisor Chan, District 2 Supervisor Sherrill, District 4 Supervisor Engardio, District 10 Supervisor Walton, and District Supervisor 11 Chen have shared their support for it. Since the publishing of this blog, District 9 Supervisor Fielder has also signed on as a cosponsor. 

We want the Street Safety Act to launch a new era in traffic safety, which means we want nothing less than unanimous support!

Send an email before Tuesday to board.of.supervisors@sfgov.org to share your strong support for the Street Safety Act. 

Then it’s going to be about the Supervisors, Mayor Lurie, and agency leaders delivering on what’s in the Act – ASAP. 

That’s where all of us come in: continuing to show up and show that San Franciscans don’t just want and need safe streets, we demand them! Because we deserve to be safe as we get around every day in our city.

Sharing our thanks

To everyone who helped fill the steps of City Hall yesterday, thank you! And extra gratitude to folks who were able to stick around and speak at the hearing for the Street Safety Act. 

Thank you to our co-sponsors of the rally: Chinatown TRIP, San Francisco Bay Area Families for Safe Streets, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, San Francisco Transit Riders, Senior & Disability Action, and Streets For All San Francisco.

And of course, a huge thanks to Supervisor Myrna Melgar plus her legislative aide Emma Hare, who’ve worked so hard to write a resolution with the commitments, coordination, and accountability needed for Vision Zero to become a reality.