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You can now legally walk with drinks on SF's Valencia St
- trillic 1y agoCan you also legally Jaywalk with drinks? https://www.rmdlaw.com/blog/california-new-jaywalking-law-impact-pedestrian-accident-claims/#:~:text=This%20law%20allows%20pedestrians%20in,immediate%20danger%20of%20a%20collision. https://www.rmdlaw.com/blog/california-new-jaywalking-law-im...
- TulliusCicero 1y agoNice change I suppose, though it's still insane that the US has such strong prohibitions against drinking alcohol in public imo.
- Schnitz 1y agoEspecially in SF where you can smell someone smoking weed on pretty much any street.
- sitkack 1y agoIn NYC esp from Chelsea to the Village you literally can't get away from the smell of weed, even indoors, as the ventilators will suck it in. I don't terribly mind, but some people really don't like it. If it was a glade plugin, I'd lose my mind, now that is a chemical weapon.
- busymom0 1y agoHere in Ottawa, Canada, they are planning on allowing drinking in parks this year: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/alcohol-park-pilot-project-ottawa-2025-1.7558277 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/alcohol-park-pilot-pro...
- fanatic2pope 1y agoToronto did it too, and it has been fine. https://secrettoronto.co/legal-drinking-toronto-parks/ https://secrettoronto.co/legal-drinking-toronto-parks/
- AnotherGoodName 1y agoYeah when i moved to the USA i found it jarring when someone explained to me the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-container_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-container_law A widespread law specific to the USA that doesn't seem to be a thing anywhere else in the world. We can take beers to a picnic in our parks. Shocking i know. Other societies haven't collapsed from allowing this.
- SR2Z 1y agoTo be very fair, I do not know a single person who has ever been charged with this. I and all my friends drink in the park all the time and the cops don't seem to care. If I get on a crowded bus, odds are good that there's a homeless man with a brown paper bag. This law is probably only enforced against businesses selling booze or people who are being a nuisance.
- dawnerd 1y agoMight surprise you but it affects minorities the most and a common excuse for an officer to probe them for possibly worse crimes.
- drfuchs 1y agoPerhaps strong no-alcohol-in-public laws are related to weak no-guns-in-public laws.
- throwawaymaths 1y agoyou could open carry in California until about 2010ish
- whalesalad 1y agoI remember walking through a neighborhood in Sweden, in the town of Örebro, with a tallboy beer. I was there on an extended work trip, but had met some friends in town who invited me to social gatherings. So they said let's go to the club, we can take these drinks to go it's no problem. I assumed it was fine, since there seems to be much more tolerance and acceptance of this in Europe. As we were walking down the road... a Volvo police car comes screaming towards us, lights and sirens going. It stops and - arguably one of the most beautiful police officers I have ever seen - approached me and started to speak in Swedish. I apologized and said sorry I do not speak Swedish, I am a visitor from the US. She chuckled and said, "Your friends are not being honest with you - you cannot drink this on the street - please pour it out". Then as quick as she stopped, she said, "We are hunting for a a shooting suspect, gotta go" and jumped back in and left. It was the most "American" European experience I have ever had. So we can't drink on the street? And a shooting has happened? Wild.
- bombcar 1y agoI’m going to presume that “We are hunting for a a shooting suspect, gotta go” is what they are taught in police training to say to an American when they have to leave. There is no evidence available that will ever change my mind.
- whalesalad 1y agoJust a few months ago there was a fairly large shooting event in the same town, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_school_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_school_shooting
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- redczar 1y agoThe U.S. has effectively made walking illegal or unpalatable in most places. https://digitalcommons.tourolaw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1727&context=scholarlyworks https://digitalcommons.tourolaw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
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- eddd-ddde 1y agoIt's like the CAP theorem. Permissive firearm policy, public drinking, free healthcare. For some reason the US only gets one of those.
- almosthere 1y agoIt is a little strange that drinking in public was more offensive than walking naked and pooping on sidewalks... but whatever
- recursive 1y agoPooping on sidewalks is a cornerstone of civilization. I wrote a song about it. It's also a Disney fan fiction. https://soundcloud.com/tom-theisen-2/tale-old-as-time https://soundcloud.com/tom-theisen-2/tale-old-as-time
- colechristensen 1y agoSeeing someone openly injecting themselves with something was not an uncommon sight within a few blocks of Valencia when I used to work in the neighborhood. Also poop on sidewalks. It was wild how the vibe changed over the course of 2 or 3 blocks towards or away from Valencia.
- bigyabai 1y agoCrazy how $350,000/yr residents will look at that and say "the city is the problem" and "get these homeless shelters out of my neighborhood" as a reaction.
- colechristensen 1y agoIn that general area it's more people living in tents on the sidewalk as the cause. But yeah, SF handles homeless issues poorly and spends a tremendous amount of money doing it. And you don't have to be a "get those people out of my sight and that's all I care about them" kind of person to think that SF has been doing a bad job.
- const_cast 1y agoPart of the problem of handling homelessness is that the better you are at helping them, the more visible homelessness there will be. I live in Texas, we're typically very hostile to homeless people in our cities. We have anti-panhandling signage everywhere, spikes under overpasses, anti-homeless benches, very few shelters, and we arrest homeless people for panhandling all the time. The result is that the city appears to not have that many homeless people. But they're all pushed to specific overpasses and highways where they can live without persecution. Many, I'm sure, either move to cities that better accommodate them or die. Point being, if I was homeless, I'd want to be SF. Not Euless.
- ortusdux 1y agoSeattle passed HB 1515 last month, which relaxed open container laws in prep for the upcoming world cup matches. https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary/?BillNumber=1515&Year=2025&Initiative=false https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary/?BillNumber=1515&Year=202...
- sitkack 1y agoEveryone I know coyly drinks in the park in embarrassingly obvious ways. HB 1515 sounds like great news, but it is just a carve out for a specific event. At least they wrote it down and didn't just say, hey LCB look the other direction.
- bihla 1y agoThis is essentially a no-op measure. There is already no enforcement against drinking in public anywhere in SF
- 6510 1y agoThe law needs tree shaking, if code is never executed it shouldn't be there.
- kjkjadksj 1y agoIt is executed though for people who are abusing the grace of the law. Throw a rager in the park and you will get a talking to. Drink with a couple people and not be disruptive and you won’t. How would you formalize that into law though?
- 6510 1y agoI thought about that puzzle quite a bit. The edge cases can get quite lame. The only answer I've found is that one should define the rules strictly enough for people to make sense of them in advance. They should either be easy to find in context or be few enough to learn. The obligations seem: 1) Document the issue at hand accurately and keep it up to date. 2) Write out the laws in a strict way that leaves as little room for interpretation as possible and keep it up to date. 3) Make sure those affected know what the laws are wasting as little of their time, money and effort as possible. We seem surprisingly incompetent at 3. We should also be able to make the variables dynamic so that the thing updates it self.
- ketzo 1y ago“No enforcement” means people who don’t care about breaking rules will do it in brown bags “Officially allowed and advertised” means businesses will specifically cater to people with money who will come specifically to do it
- noop415 1y agoThe problem with no-enforcement is that it allows selective enforcement. In NYC, if you are on Wall St and use hard-drugs, there is no enforcement. Yet with stop-and-frisk and entire generation of colored individuals in poorer neighborhoods got random stopped, frisked, and booked with criminal history for "possession" offenses. If it is really no-enforcement, best to codify it with a law and really make it legal.
- asveikau 1y agoThey should close Valencia to cars.
- fourseventy 1y agoI mean, people already walk around in SF openly using hard drugs and shitting on sidewalks and they are left alone.
- ovi256 1y agoSome people are above the law. In a country ruled by laws, that's bad.
- const_cast 1y agoIt's not that they're above laws, it's that laws only work on people who have something to lose. You don't want to be arrested because you have a job, a family, people who care about you. A lot of homeless people are more focused on "how do I make today not the worst day of my life?" Turns out, drugs are really good at that. And, being arrested isn't so bad. Also, arresting people is expensive. We can fine most people. Can't fine homeless people.
- why_at 1y ago>How it works: To participate, patrons must show ID at a participating bar or restaurant and receive a branded wristband Ugh, I don't want to get raging drunk on a bar crawl, I just want to be able to sip a beer that I brought from my house as I walk down the street.
- simple10 1y agoThey never really enforced open containers (walking around with drinks) in the Mission District around Valencia St unless someone was causing a problem. My guess is this change just makes it easier for police to identify who's over 21 with the wrist bands.