San Francisco Citizen

These were the final two I saw after just passing three others ALL walking/jogging west to get to Trader Joe’s. This is my personal best, after all those years.

Oh yeah, I know all about the history of jaywalking and about Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the Red Car and so forth. So what. How does that kind of stuff help us here? Answer: It doesn’t.

Moving on….

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Here’s what I said about Trader Joes #100, a half-decade ago, on the old blog:

“Of course, everybody needs to be on the lookout for all the Frogger-like jaywalkers carrying their groceries across six lanes of parked and moving cars. (Somebody is going to get hit one of these days.)”

Now that got a bit of attention from TJ’s Corporate. (I know because I saw the logs indicating such.)

So what the reaction? Nothing, basically.

Stuff like this is what the TJ’s people spent their time on instead, it would appear.

Now this is what occurred last year. Actually, it’s the one-year anniversary of  the death of 25-year-old Suzanne Monaco.*

Did the San Francisco Planning Department plan things well? No, obviously.

Is the SFMTA doing anything about this particular block? No. They have plans to put a whole lot of useless trees and a useless median south of Geary but they don’t seem to care about where TJ’s parkers park  and where they walk.

Yes these jaywalkers are illegally crossing the street and yes they are 100% responsible for their deaths when they get killed but what can be done to prevent future deaths right here in this one location?

I don’t know, a parking garage, an enforcement action, a ban on parking on the east side of Masonic on that particular block of Masonic, a traffic signal and crosswalk, opening up Emerson Alley to allow shopper parking on the roof, you know, just throwing things out there.

This situation is one giant FAIL for SFGov.

You should all be ashamed, SFGov.

Srsly.

Leaving you with one reaction, from Jessica Levin:

“I saw the flower memorial outside Trader Joe’s, and if that is the spot where she crossed, then she must have had a death wish. That’s a busy high speed corridor in both directions and she crossed near a blind crest. She didn’t deserve to die, but if anyone gets the blame, unfortunately it is the pedestrian. I parked across Masonic exactly once (and I did jaywalk to get back to my car) but I was careful to cross at the crest where I could see traffic coming from quite a distance, and even then I was extremely nervous. That was two years ago, and I have never done it again.”

*Was she really carrying “an armful of groceries” while heading “west” back to the store? Probably not.