West Portal status quo deplorable
When the driver of an SUV hurtled at high speed into a bus shelter near the busy intersection of West Portal Avenue and Ulloa Street in March, hitting and killing a family of four, it shook San Francisco. Cries for street safety reforms came from every direction, including the Chronicle editorial board.
Investigations into the cause of the horrific incident are ongoing. So are calls for action to redesign the crash area to ensure that similar incidents of traffic violence can never happen again.
The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency recently released a proposal for the bustling intersection, which on any given day is host to buses, Muni trains, Muni inspector vehicles, private vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists.
The draft of a proposed reconfiguration of several streets around West Portal Station would limit the flow of private vehicle traffic in the intersection, opening it up for pedestrians and transit vehicles to move through more safely. Private vehicles heading toward the station on Ulloa Street and West Portal Avenue would be forced to turn right, to head away from it. The design would stop cars from driving through the bustling intersection.
Many of the suggestions seemed like common sense; it doesn’t take a traffic engineer to understand why allowing cars to make left turns in front of oncoming trains emerging from a tunnel near multiple busy transit stops is a bad idea — putting pedestrians in danger if drivers feel like they have to rush to avoid a collision.
But instead of the community coming together to agree on some of these basic safety upgrades in the wake of the tragedy, chaos ensued.
Some West Portal merchants, business owners and residents spoke against the plan, citing concerns that it would impact neighborhood businesses by cutting parking spots and pushing traffic onto other, overburdened side streets where there are also safety concerns. They demanded the process slow down to include more community feedback.
Supervisor Myrna Melgar, who represents the West Portal neighborhood, initially appeared ready to blaze forward in the face of this opposition. But SFMTA’s proposed safety upgrades are now on hiatus.
This weekend, a press release from Melgar announced the creation of the “Welcoming West Portal Committee,” a new group that wants to create a second, new traffic safety proposal.
“The proposed plan is over,” Deidre Von Rock, president of the West Portal Merchants Association, told the editorial board. “We’ll be starting fresh with actual data.”
This, however, would imply the SFMTA’s proposal for West Portal and Ulloa was rushed out from scratch. It wasn’t.
In 2019, the agency piloted changes to West Portal to speed up trains delayed by private vehicle traffic. Data was gathered to study its success. The latest plan drew from these efforts.
However, Von Rock and others say they want the city to look at West Portal and Ulloa, and four other intersections in the neighborhood. They’d like to review the number of bus stops on Ulloa, study the traffic impact on four adjacent streets, and scrutinize the passenger loading and drop-off zones in the neighborhood.
It’s a lot to figure out, and the more players there are involved the longer it could take.
That’s time we don’t have.
A few weeks ago, we had a definitive plan to improve an intersection that is broadly viewed as dangerous, confusing and contentious — and one that SFMTA Director of Transportation Jeffrey Tumlin told the editorial board, “has been notably problematic since the tunnel opened in 1918.”
Now, we have no hard and fast plan, but we do have yet one more committee.
Is this new approach a delay tactic? Or will it lead to not just better designs, but more of them?
All the neighbors the editorial board talked to, on all sides of the debate, said they’d requested support for years from the SFMTA concerning dangerous areas in West Portal to little avail. In those conversations, they highlighted other areas of the district that they believe deserve just as much attention as the one where the recent deadly crash occurred, which they felt had long been ignored. A five-way intersection at Vicente and Wawona streets was one example.
New members of the Welcoming West Portal Committee, and Melgar, expressed hope that by launching a community-led process to redesign one intersection, long-overdue attention could finally be brought to other problematic streets in the neighborhood.
“We don’t want to stay in the 1950s,” Karen Tarantola, president of the Greater West Portal Neighborhood Association, told the editorial board. “It would be great if we have discussions with the committee on how we can move forward.”
It’s true, perhaps this horrific collision could finally bring improved street safety not just to one intersection in West Portal, but to several — so long as conflicting opinions on an approach don’t stymie progress indefinitely.
Calls for greater neighborhood safety and calls for improving West Portal Station, however, don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Progress can be made incrementally.
Which brings us to the perpetual San Francisco conundrum: How much community input should the city consider before instituting a plan?
One thing, however, is certain: We can’t let the status quo remain.
If months progress, no action plans emerge and efforts fizzle out, it’ll be more than just a disappointment.
“Safety delayed is safety denied,” Joe Girton, a neighborhood resident and proponent of the SFMTA plan, told the editorial board. “The longer we wait the more we risk.”
We agree.