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San Francisco Chronicle​

S.F. to end program that allows residents to request ‘traffic calming' tactics on city streets

When San Francisco transportation officials began taking requests for 'traffic calming' designs on residential streets, the projects piled up quickly. That was in 2013, and city leaders were just starting to elevate road safety as a priority — it would take another year to adopt Vision Zero, the initiative to end traffic fatalities within a decade. But people already grasped the idea that subtle changes to a street could reduce the risk of crashes, while making the environment quieter and more liveable. Applications poured in for speed bumps and raised crosswalks, concrete islands and rubber road cushions, durable posts and new markings to make lanes wider or narrower. Now, with a looming budget crisis and a backlog of about 300 resident proposals, leaders of San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency decided it's time to suspend the program. Many factors played into that decision, said Viktoriya Wise, the agency's director of streets. Chief among them was trust. SFMTA staff want to assure the public that they're committed to safety and can deliver on any application the agency has approved, even if the demand is overwhelming. 'If I told you I'm going to do something, I'm actually going to do it,' Wise said. At the same time, she noted, construction costs are rising, and SFMTA is confronting a $322 million deficit expected for next year. The Residential Traffic Calming Program is among the first services to evaporate as officials try to align their ambitions with their resources. Wise acknowledged the financial strain. But she largely characterized the traffic calming program as a victim of its own popularity, especially after SFMTA lowered the entry barrier. What had been a steady flow of roughly a hundred projects a year suddenly spiked during the pandemic, when officials dropped a requirement for applicants to gather signatures from the majority of residents on their block. Thus, in fiscal year 2021, the agency accepted 110 applications. That number rose to 215 the following fiscal year. 'We saw an explosion,' Wise said, conceding that the number of requests exceeded her team's capacity. Separately, SFMTA was pursuing dozens of car-slowing interventions that staff had planned and engineered without any prompting from constituents. Among them: the controversial 'neck-down' to narrow two lanes of traffic on Kirkham Street, and speed bumps along Eighth Avenue in the Inner Richmond. While Wise mostly attributes the increase to a streamlined process, she also wonders whether people became more conscientious about driving speeds when they were forced to work from home. Perhaps, Wise suggested, residents looked out their windows all day, and witnessed a lot more reckless driving. Currently SFMTA is working with the County Transportation Authority to rally funding for all the new infrastructure, and Wise has left open the possibility of one day reviving the residential traffic calming program. For now, the agency will stop taking applications on July 1.