8 ms·

I'll tell you what -- they may say Market Street is car-free, but drive a car on it and no one will stop you. SFPD is so understaffed (and frankly uninterested

I'll tell you what -- they may say Market Street is car-free, but drive a car on it and no one will stop you. SFPD is so understaffed (and frankly uninterested) to properly police the streets of SF that you can pretty much do anything and unless you stab someone, you're not going to get a ticket for pretty much anything. We have tons of "bus-only" lanes, or bike lanes, and the rules are broken every other car with no penalties. Apparently, just like in tech, we think that some rules, paint stripes, and people's intentions won't require any significant human administrative monitoring or intervention. Compare it to NYC where you commonly see beat cops walking the street and patrolling every other block. And more importantly, giving out tickets with an apparent belief that people should get penalized for committing minor offenses. SF Police is just not present or interested in doing this, or resourced to do so. They can't even stop people from breaking into cars, and you think they're going to be ticketing people for driving in a partial pedestrian zone? I chalk it up to incompetent city government (which frankly right now, is actually hostile to proper policing -- with a DA who has openly said such, and a public who mistakenly thinks this is good to assuage their guilt), a lack of strong police culture, and the incredible cost of hiring people in California, that keep us from having the right amount of police. Honestly, this cost (driven by housing by the way) leads to our crime rate also.

svantana 7y ago
Can't it be policed using traffic cameras? That's a mature off-the-shelf solution that works well in a lot of other cities.
- MiroF 7y ago
  I'd rather live in a city with either this or just the current status quo in SF rather than one where beat cops are constantly handing out citations.
barrkel 7y ago
ANPR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni...) is generally the answer to this, along with an automated civil penalty mechanism. I don't know US law, but in the UK this would be entirely a civil matter for the local authority - the police aren't involved in regulating things like bus lanes.
adamsea 7y ago
> I chalk it up to incompetent city government (which frankly right now, is actually hostile to proper policing -- with a DA who has openly said such ... What did the DA say? Not familiar.
- komali2 7y ago
  The DA has said no such thing. The new DA did run of a platform of not convicting when it doesn't do any good to - an evidence based legal philosophy that was made very clear on his website, sources included. But he is pretty easy to pin a Communist red letter on and is the favorite punching bag of conservatives. He's a sort of "mascot of all that is wrong with Bad Communist San Francisco." "First they're a sanctuary for illegal immigrants, then they're a sanctuary for BURGLARS and BAD GUYS!!!" The police union and conservative media often oversimplify his platform, I don't know why. The union could only stand to benefit from increased officer safety from policies that evidently reduce crime, but I think they want to believe the only solution to crime is throwing people in jail. As for conservative media I have no idea why we're the chosen target but whatever.
  - dntrkv 7y ago
    I'd say it has everything to do with the current state of affairs in SF. I don't think it's the post-apocalyptic hellhole that many make it out to be but property crime here is really out of hand. Police don't take anything less than a stabbing serious (I had my motorcycle stolen and the police came by 6 hours after I called them and then jetted off to stabbing within 2 minutes of arriving). I called the police 6 times in the first few years I was here, every time they arrived at least an hour later and provided absolutely no help. Last time my motorcycle was stolen and I found the guy parting it out on Craigslist, they were of zero help. I just don't bother anymore. One of my friends that lives on Capp street witnessed burglars in an obviously stolen car with stolen goods, divvying up those goods in the middle of the night, and then went into a neighboring house. My friend was on the phone with the police as it was happening and they recorded the whole ordeal on video. Police slowly cruised by an hour later and that was that. I understand that jailing people won't magically fix all of our issues, but the approach we have been taking is obviously not working. We need to try something new. I personally like the idea of hiring more police and getting them to constantly patrol their beat so that they are in-tune with their community and the community feels the police presence. Because at the moment, parts of SF, especially the Mission, feel lawless as fuck.
CydeWeys 7y ago
We have the same problems everywhere in NYC. We have an unbelievable number of police on the force (corresponding to much higher crime levels of the past), yet there's very little traffic enforcement. People routinely drive recklessly, enter areas they're not supposed to, park illegally in travel lanes, bike lanes, or sidewalks, etc., and there's little risk of anything happening. Even worse, we have a huge placard abuse crisis where many tens of thousand of different government employees (cops, firefighters, teachers, city workers, etc.) get these ridiculous placards that essentially make them immune to parking enforcement, even when driving their personal vehicles in non-emergencies. The police (who largely live outside the city and drive to work) thus see this as one of their perks and they are loath to do anything to fix it. So the only solutions that will work are those that don't require the police to do their job. We need red light cameras at every intersection and speed cameras on every road (they'd very quickly pay for themselves), and we need physical protection installed everywhere so that cars cannot even enter bike lanes or drive up onto sidewalks. It's sad that this is what it's come to, but absent getting a non-car-based police force who live in the city who are actually interested in protecting us against drivers, I don't see it changing.
- certifiedloud 7y ago
  There is placard abuse, and also little risk of of penalty for parking illegally?
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    Yes. The placard abuse vehicles are essentially immune, while other vehicles rarely get tickets that are nowhere high enough in cost or frequency to prevent the behavior.
- farisjarrah 7y ago
  I'm all for stronger traffic enforcement as much as the next concerned citizen, but honestly things like surveillance/speed/red light cameras don't actually make anyone safer. If you google "Red Light Cameras Safety" You'll see plenty of articles like this one that state plenty of reasons why these cameras don't help as much as initially thought. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/red-light-cameras-may-not-make-streets-safer/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/red-light-cameras... Instead, it would probably be much more effective to fine people for these transgressions as a percentage of their income. A $500 speeding ticket or a $100 parking ticket isn't really going to bother a person driving a $140,000 Tesla as much as its going to bother someone who is driving a $1500 Toyota Camery. We can probably actually continue to have the police selectively enforcing like they do now, but if people actually fear the consequences of breaking boneheaded traffic laws because they'll have to pay $15000 for a speeding ticket, then they'll be a lot less likely to break those laws.
floatingatoll 7y ago
Making this change will force the removal of the Market Street routing from all digital mapping apps: Waze, Google Maps, Apple Maps, Uber driver app, Lyft driver app, etc. Whether or not some tiny fraction of a percent violate the ban, the vast majority of drivers will no longer route through this section of the street on their way to somewhere else.
- asdf333 7y ago
  yes, and also i believe the idea is to gradually start enforcing. there are bound to be many people who aren’t aware of it yet.
komali2 7y ago
I rode a bicycle yesterday on market Street and there were cops everywhere. I'll let you know today. Typically there are a lot of police up and down Market street. I will personally stop my bicycle in front of private cars and guide them off market as well. Other bicyclists I've talked to are saying the same. We often do this for no-right-on-red to guarantee that the bike lane's right of way is protected. Market street will remain private car free. As for your comments on chesea, they are cartoonishly bad faith. His platform is clear, he won't be ignoring crime, he will be focusing on evidence based solutions. He continues to explain his reasoning behinds his decisions with evidence and continues to get flack from the police union and their lackeys that boils down to "commie LIKES CRIMINALS IN YOUR BACKYARD!!!"
- tyre 7y ago
  I don't think it's in bad faith to say Chesa wants less policing. He has repeatedly said so. His position is that more policing doesn't actually make us safer in the long term because it draws more people into the prison system, which can permanently derail someone's life. Other people feel that not enforcing "quality of life" crimes a) makes life worse for residents (there's a reason we have those laws in the first place, and it's not solely racially based) b) could snowball into worse crimes. His election is the people of SF trying something new, and that new thing is focusing the attention of the police force elsewhere.
  - komali2 7y ago
    I'm not really seeing anything on his platform about not persecuting quality of life crimes. An entire page is devoted to his plan for policing car break ins, for example. I do see a section about drawing the court's attention away from misdemeanors so they can focus on felonies.
- drdeadringer 7y ago
  I am not understanding something. How does a bicyclist guide a car driver?
  - 7y ago
somuchlan 7y ago
You're kidding right? There's SFPD/SFMTA workers everywhere diverting traffic. There's even a long thread on reddit of everyone thanking everyone out there doing all this work. I rode in this morning and they were all there again so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- rconti 7y ago
  Oh wow, 2 data points, case closed. Surely you can't believe that level of enforcement will last. Anyone who's ever been on market street knows that "bus lane" never meant anything.
- karthikb 7y ago
  Yesterday was also the first day. The real question is, will there be enforcement 6 months, 20 months, 90 months from now when it's no longer in the headlines.
endorphone 7y ago
Serious question -- and hopefully it doesn't get bound up in useless left/right rhetoric -- but what is San Francisco doing wrong? They're clearly flush with cash: The budget has grown by leaps and bounds despite a static population. I do realize that San Francisco imports the homeless problem from much of the rest of the country (nice weather, good people...if you're homeless it certainly seems better than NYC), and that has to have costs, but it seems like a city that should have gold-plated services.
- s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
  The homeless import is a myth, no studies back that claim. Most homeless are from the area and due to mental, housing, and drug issues.
  - endorphone 7y ago
    I was careless with wording, but I don't mean that a bus-load of homeless people are ferried out to San Francisco. Instead that the weather, people, and connections has a drawn a lot of people with a very laissez-faire attitude towards life, and that invariably conflicts with raw capitalism in a way that can have negative outcomes. This loose attitude on life pretty much defined San Francisco for a couple of decades.
- joshmaker 7y ago
  I don't think that SF is better than NYC for the homeless. A big difference between SF and NYC is that NYC provides shelter for people that can't afford housing and SF does not. Only 5% of homeless people in NYC are unsheltered compared with 67% in the Bay Area. Legally, NYC is required to provide shelters for anyone who needs it, while SF shelters have waitlists of over a month. https://medium.com/@josefow/new-york-decided-to-end-street-homelessness-and-it-basically-succeeded-ab27f3ec5a65 https://medium.com/@josefow/new-york-decided-to-end-street-h... https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-homeless-unsheltered-67-percent-NYC-13757259.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-homeless-uns... https://sfpublicpress.org/news/homelessness/navigation/2017-06/shelter-wait-times-soar https://sfpublicpress.org/news/homelessness/navigation/2017-...
dahart 7y ago
> Apparently, just like in tech, we think that some rules, paint stripes, and people's intentions won't require any significant human administrative monitoring or intervention. This certainly is one problem that could be solved with tech and very little human interaction; no reason at all not to install cameras on Market that text you about your violation immediately and mail you a bill for the ticket.
Eric_WVGG 7y ago
Those "beat cops" are most certainly not doing traffic enforcement. At best you'll see a handful of parking citations. I have a pet theory that they don't bother controlling bad drivers, simply because there's nowhere to pull them over; stop anyone in the middle of the street and you've created an instant traffic jam. But really our mayor and DA set the agenda and they think traffic is just dandy. [edit] A prominent NYC cycling blogger made a similar point just a minute ago. In the wake of news that NYC issues more traffic violations to cyclists (responsible for two deaths last year) than truck drivers (400+), he said, "I suspect NYPD ticketing stats are a meaningful measure of only one thing: how easy it is to stop the vehicle."
dehrmann 7y ago
> We have tons of "bus-only" lanes...and the rules are broken every other car with no penalties They're somewhat ill-conceived because need to enter them to turn right, so there's judgement calls on what's acceptable. And they are enforced. I think Muni has forward-facing cameras in buses to catch people in these lanes.
mixmastamyk 7y ago
> They can't even stop people from breaking into cars, and you think they're going to be ticketing people for… One is a cost, the other a revenue source. Yes, my experience is that there’s a city employee to tend the meter within five minutes, but good luck getting a response to a crime within four hours. The priorities are clear.
lkbm 7y ago
You don't need cops. You need more aggressive cyclists. People will turn onto Market Street for two reasons: 1. Somehow they missed that it's a car-free zone. They don't need a ticket; they need to discover their mistake and not repeat it. 2. They think it'll save time and fuck bikes anyway. Any cyclist can block them. What are they going to do, run you over? Last driver I came face-to-face with in the separated bike lane on my commute ended up hopping the curb to get around me. Next time he'll probably take a car lane.
- chasd00 7y ago
  in my experience, banning cyclists would go a long ways to making the pedestrian experience better too.
awscherb 7y ago
We have the same problem in Boston. There is no one traffic enforcement division for the BPD, and it instead done on a district-by-district basis, often being tasked to just one or two officers [1]. We, too, have plenty of bus-only lanes where the red paint has completely faded, and they are back to general purpose lanes. One of my favorite examples you can clearly see the faded red paint, "bus only" signs, yet plenty of regular cars on Google Streetview [2]. As someone who lives and walks to work in downtown Boston, it is also a cultural issue. During rush hour, there is effectively no such thing as a moving violation. I walk through some of the busiest intersections on a daily basis, and just about every single time, some traffic law is broken. No right on red is a complete joke. People will actually honk at you if you are stopped at a red light with a "no right on red" sign. Don't block the box? If you don't block the box, traffic coming from the other way will, and you won't make it through the _next_ light cycle. Red lights are just a suggestion at many intersections, with 2, even 3 cars running through _after_ the light has turned. The joke I always say is that if BPD enforced all moving violations for just one day downtown, they'd raise enough revenue to fund another Big Dig. Not true, of course, because even the cops themselves don't follow the traffic laws. Why should they? [1] https://www.wgbh.org/news/local-news/2019/03/13/boston-city-council-wants-to-know-bpd-traffic-enforcement-plan-and-whether-there-is-one https://www.wgbh.org/news/local-news/2019/03/13/boston-city-... [2] https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3524301,-71.0622098,3a,75y,52.83h,80.44t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1shobEDChBcCiF2Wsg2V2C7Q!2e0!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3524301,-71.0622098,3a,75y,5...
- MiroF 7y ago
  Just get cameras. I don't know why this isn't done anywhere else, but in DC, cops won't pull you over for a moving violation (and I'm glad they don't) but the cameras will get you if you're running red lights or not yielding on right on red.
  - awscherb 7y ago
    I suspect we don't have those because it's politically unpopular. The disregard for traffic laws is so deeply ingrained and I also believe single occupancy vehicle is still the main mode of commute here. Also, the comments "what about the jaywalkers", "what about those pesky cyclists always blowing red lights", etc. come up ad nauseam.

svantana 7y ago

Can't it be policed using traffic cameras? That's a mature off-the-shelf solution that works well in a lot of other cities.

MiroF 7y ago
I'd rather live in a city with either this or just the current status quo in SF rather than one where beat cops are constantly handing out citations.

barrkel 7y ago

ANPR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni...) is generally the answer to this, along with an automated civil penalty mechanism. I don't know US law, but in the UK this would be entirely a civil matter for the local authority - the police aren't involved in regulating things like bus lanes.

adamsea 7y ago

> I chalk it up to incompetent city government (which frankly right now, is actually hostile to proper policing -- with a DA who has openly said such ... What did the DA say? Not familiar.

komali2 7y ago
The DA has said no such thing. The new DA did run of a platform of not convicting when it doesn't do any good to - an evidence based legal philosophy that was made very clear on his website, sources included. But he is pretty easy to pin a Communist red letter on and is the favorite punching bag of conservatives. He's a sort of "mascot of all that is wrong with Bad Communist San Francisco." "First they're a sanctuary for illegal immigrants, then they're a sanctuary for BURGLARS and BAD GUYS!!!" The police union and conservative media often oversimplify his platform, I don't know why. The union could only stand to benefit from increased officer safety from policies that evidently reduce crime, but I think they want to believe the only solution to crime is throwing people in jail. As for conservative media I have no idea why we're the chosen target but whatever.
- dntrkv 7y ago
  I'd say it has everything to do with the current state of affairs in SF. I don't think it's the post-apocalyptic hellhole that many make it out to be but property crime here is really out of hand. Police don't take anything less than a stabbing serious (I had my motorcycle stolen and the police came by 6 hours after I called them and then jetted off to stabbing within 2 minutes of arriving). I called the police 6 times in the first few years I was here, every time they arrived at least an hour later and provided absolutely no help. Last time my motorcycle was stolen and I found the guy parting it out on Craigslist, they were of zero help. I just don't bother anymore. One of my friends that lives on Capp street witnessed burglars in an obviously stolen car with stolen goods, divvying up those goods in the middle of the night, and then went into a neighboring house. My friend was on the phone with the police as it was happening and they recorded the whole ordeal on video. Police slowly cruised by an hour later and that was that. I understand that jailing people won't magically fix all of our issues, but the approach we have been taking is obviously not working. We need to try something new. I personally like the idea of hiring more police and getting them to constantly patrol their beat so that they are in-tune with their community and the community feels the police presence. Because at the moment, parts of SF, especially the Mission, feel lawless as fuck.

CydeWeys 7y ago

We have the same problems everywhere in NYC. We have an unbelievable number of police on the force (corresponding to much higher crime levels of the past), yet there's very little traffic enforcement. People routinely drive recklessly, enter areas they're not supposed to, park illegally in travel lanes, bike lanes, or sidewalks, etc., and there's little risk of anything happening. Even worse, we have a huge placard abuse crisis where many tens of thousand of different government employees (cops, firefighters, teachers, city workers, etc.) get these ridiculous placards that essentially make them immune to parking enforcement, even when driving their personal vehicles in non-emergencies. The police (who largely live outside the city and drive to work) thus see this as one of their perks and they are loath to do anything to fix it. So the only solutions that will work are those that don't require the police to do their job. We need red light cameras at every intersection and speed cameras on every road (they'd very quickly pay for themselves), and we need physical protection installed everywhere so that cars cannot even enter bike lanes or drive up onto sidewalks. It's sad that this is what it's come to, but absent getting a non-car-based police force who live in the city who are actually interested in protecting us against drivers, I don't see it changing.

certifiedloud 7y ago
There is placard abuse, and also little risk of of penalty for parking illegally?
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  Yes. The placard abuse vehicles are essentially immune, while other vehicles rarely get tickets that are nowhere high enough in cost or frequency to prevent the behavior.
farisjarrah 7y ago
I'm all for stronger traffic enforcement as much as the next concerned citizen, but honestly things like surveillance/speed/red light cameras don't actually make anyone safer. If you google "Red Light Cameras Safety" You'll see plenty of articles like this one that state plenty of reasons why these cameras don't help as much as initially thought. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/red-light-cameras-may-not-make-streets-safer/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/red-light-cameras... Instead, it would probably be much more effective to fine people for these transgressions as a percentage of their income. A $500 speeding ticket or a $100 parking ticket isn't really going to bother a person driving a $140,000 Tesla as much as its going to bother someone who is driving a $1500 Toyota Camery. We can probably actually continue to have the police selectively enforcing like they do now, but if people actually fear the consequences of breaking boneheaded traffic laws because they'll have to pay $15000 for a speeding ticket, then they'll be a lot less likely to break those laws.

floatingatoll 7y ago

Making this change will force the removal of the Market Street routing from all digital mapping apps: Waze, Google Maps, Apple Maps, Uber driver app, Lyft driver app, etc. Whether or not some tiny fraction of a percent violate the ban, the vast majority of drivers will no longer route through this section of the street on their way to somewhere else.

asdf333 7y ago
yes, and also i believe the idea is to gradually start enforcing. there are bound to be many people who aren’t aware of it yet.

komali2 7y ago

I rode a bicycle yesterday on market Street and there were cops everywhere. I'll let you know today. Typically there are a lot of police up and down Market street. I will personally stop my bicycle in front of private cars and guide them off market as well. Other bicyclists I've talked to are saying the same. We often do this for no-right-on-red to guarantee that the bike lane's right of way is protected. Market street will remain private car free. As for your comments on chesea, they are cartoonishly bad faith. His platform is clear, he won't be ignoring crime, he will be focusing on evidence based solutions. He continues to explain his reasoning behinds his decisions with evidence and continues to get flack from the police union and their lackeys that boils down to "commie LIKES CRIMINALS IN YOUR BACKYARD!!!"

tyre 7y ago
I don't think it's in bad faith to say Chesa wants less policing. He has repeatedly said so. His position is that more policing doesn't actually make us safer in the long term because it draws more people into the prison system, which can permanently derail someone's life. Other people feel that not enforcing "quality of life" crimes a) makes life worse for residents (there's a reason we have those laws in the first place, and it's not solely racially based) b) could snowball into worse crimes. His election is the people of SF trying something new, and that new thing is focusing the attention of the police force elsewhere.
- komali2 7y ago
  I'm not really seeing anything on his platform about not persecuting quality of life crimes. An entire page is devoted to his plan for policing car break ins, for example. I do see a section about drawing the court's attention away from misdemeanors so they can focus on felonies.
drdeadringer 7y ago
I am not understanding something. How does a bicyclist guide a car driver?
- 7y ago

somuchlan 7y ago

You're kidding right? There's SFPD/SFMTA workers everywhere diverting traffic. There's even a long thread on reddit of everyone thanking everyone out there doing all this work. I rode in this morning and they were all there again so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

rconti 7y ago
Oh wow, 2 data points, case closed. Surely you can't believe that level of enforcement will last. Anyone who's ever been on market street knows that "bus lane" never meant anything.
karthikb 7y ago
Yesterday was also the first day. The real question is, will there be enforcement 6 months, 20 months, 90 months from now when it's no longer in the headlines.

endorphone 7y ago

Serious question -- and hopefully it doesn't get bound up in useless left/right rhetoric -- but what is San Francisco doing wrong? They're clearly flush with cash: The budget has grown by leaps and bounds despite a static population. I do realize that San Francisco imports the homeless problem from much of the rest of the country (nice weather, good people...if you're homeless it certainly seems better than NYC), and that has to have costs, but it seems like a city that should have gold-plated services.

s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
The homeless import is a myth, no studies back that claim. Most homeless are from the area and due to mental, housing, and drug issues.
- endorphone 7y ago
  I was careless with wording, but I don't mean that a bus-load of homeless people are ferried out to San Francisco. Instead that the weather, people, and connections has a drawn a lot of people with a very laissez-faire attitude towards life, and that invariably conflicts with raw capitalism in a way that can have negative outcomes. This loose attitude on life pretty much defined San Francisco for a couple of decades.
joshmaker 7y ago
I don't think that SF is better than NYC for the homeless. A big difference between SF and NYC is that NYC provides shelter for people that can't afford housing and SF does not. Only 5% of homeless people in NYC are unsheltered compared with 67% in the Bay Area. Legally, NYC is required to provide shelters for anyone who needs it, while SF shelters have waitlists of over a month. https://medium.com/@josefow/new-york-decided-to-end-street-homelessness-and-it-basically-succeeded-ab27f3ec5a65 https://medium.com/@josefow/new-york-decided-to-end-street-h... https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-homeless-unsheltered-67-percent-NYC-13757259.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-homeless-uns... https://sfpublicpress.org/news/homelessness/navigation/2017-06/shelter-wait-times-soar https://sfpublicpress.org/news/homelessness/navigation/2017-...

dahart 7y ago

> Apparently, just like in tech, we think that some rules, paint stripes, and people's intentions won't require any significant human administrative monitoring or intervention. This certainly is one problem that could be solved with tech and very little human interaction; no reason at all not to install cameras on Market that text you about your violation immediately and mail you a bill for the ticket.

Eric_WVGG 7y ago

Those "beat cops" are most certainly not doing traffic enforcement. At best you'll see a handful of parking citations. I have a pet theory that they don't bother controlling bad drivers, simply because there's nowhere to pull them over; stop anyone in the middle of the street and you've created an instant traffic jam. But really our mayor and DA set the agenda and they think traffic is just dandy. [edit] A prominent NYC cycling blogger made a similar point just a minute ago. In the wake of news that NYC issues more traffic violations to cyclists (responsible for two deaths last year) than truck drivers (400+), he said, "I suspect NYPD ticketing stats are a meaningful measure of only one thing: how easy it is to stop the vehicle."

dehrmann 7y ago

> We have tons of "bus-only" lanes...and the rules are broken every other car with no penalties They're somewhat ill-conceived because need to enter them to turn right, so there's judgement calls on what's acceptable. And they are enforced. I think Muni has forward-facing cameras in buses to catch people in these lanes.

mixmastamyk 7y ago

> They can't even stop people from breaking into cars, and you think they're going to be ticketing people for… One is a cost, the other a revenue source. Yes, my experience is that there’s a city employee to tend the meter within five minutes, but good luck getting a response to a crime within four hours. The priorities are clear.

lkbm 7y ago

You don't need cops. You need more aggressive cyclists. People will turn onto Market Street for two reasons: 1. Somehow they missed that it's a car-free zone. They don't need a ticket; they need to discover their mistake and not repeat it. 2. They think it'll save time and fuck bikes anyway. Any cyclist can block them. What are they going to do, run you over? Last driver I came face-to-face with in the separated bike lane on my commute ended up hopping the curb to get around me. Next time he'll probably take a car lane.

chasd00 7y ago
in my experience, banning cyclists would go a long ways to making the pedestrian experience better too.

awscherb 7y ago

We have the same problem in Boston. There is no one traffic enforcement division for the BPD, and it instead done on a district-by-district basis, often being tasked to just one or two officers [1]. We, too, have plenty of bus-only lanes where the red paint has completely faded, and they are back to general purpose lanes. One of my favorite examples you can clearly see the faded red paint, "bus only" signs, yet plenty of regular cars on Google Streetview [2]. As someone who lives and walks to work in downtown Boston, it is also a cultural issue. During rush hour, there is effectively no such thing as a moving violation. I walk through some of the busiest intersections on a daily basis, and just about every single time, some traffic law is broken. No right on red is a complete joke. People will actually honk at you if you are stopped at a red light with a "no right on red" sign. Don't block the box? If you don't block the box, traffic coming from the other way will, and you won't make it through the _next_ light cycle. Red lights are just a suggestion at many intersections, with 2, even 3 cars running through _after_ the light has turned. The joke I always say is that if BPD enforced all moving violations for just one day downtown, they'd raise enough revenue to fund another Big Dig. Not true, of course, because even the cops themselves don't follow the traffic laws. Why should they? [1] https://www.wgbh.org/news/local-news/2019/03/13/boston-city-council-wants-to-know-bpd-traffic-enforcement-plan-and-whether-there-is-one https://www.wgbh.org/news/local-news/2019/03/13/boston-city-... [2] https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3524301,-71.0622098,3a,75y,52.83h,80.44t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1shobEDChBcCiF2Wsg2V2C7Q!2e0!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3524301,-71.0622098,3a,75y,5...

MiroF 7y ago
Just get cameras. I don't know why this isn't done anywhere else, but in DC, cops won't pull you over for a moving violation (and I'm glad they don't) but the cameras will get you if you're running red lights or not yielding on right on red.
- awscherb 7y ago
  I suspect we don't have those because it's politically unpopular. The disregard for traffic laws is so deeply ingrained and I also believe single occupancy vehicle is still the main mode of commute here. Also, the comments "what about the jaywalkers", "what about those pesky cyclists always blowing red lights", etc. come up ad nauseam.