“Focus on the Five – Using multi-year collision data, the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) is focusing on enforcing the five violations that are most frequently cited in collisions with people walking. The goal is to have half their traffic citations be for these five violations.”
And then let’s extract all the five-digit CVC section numbers cited in the official SFPD report, plus let’s also throw in a CVC number for the pedestrian who died last year after getting hit by a MUNI bus on Geary around Baker.
(And let’s ignore all the the lower-case subsections like 21950(b) and the like, treating 21950(a) and 21950(b) as the same violation, for example.)
And then lets throw all the extracted numbers into Excel for a Sorting.
And then let’s eyeball the numbers to separate them out:
So those are your top “five violations that are most frequently cited in collisions with people walking (and bicycle riding, but I don’t think that affects the numbers too much.)
“Focus on the 23 Five” campaign to target the top five causal factors of pedestrian crashes – running red lights 24 (California Vehicle Code 21453(a)), running stop signs (California Vehicle Code 22450(a)), violating pedestrian right-of-way (California Vehicle Code 21950(a)), failing to yield while 2 turning (California Vehicle Code 21801 (a), and speeding (California Vehicle Code 22350)…
See how that works? 21950 and 22350 are in there, but CVC violations on the part of pedestrians, like 21456, 21954, and 21955 have been omitted from the list.
Is the official “Focus on the Five” about pedestrian safety or “pedestrian rights?”
I’m thinking it’s about pedestrian rights, like the right to jaywalk, that kind of thing.
Is SFGov serious about SF Vision Zero 2024, a “program” that has the goal of ending all transportation deaths in San Francisco long after all the pols who voted for it have termed out?
Well, how can it be if it’s afraid to enforce traffic laws for political reasons?
If you want safety for pedestrians, wouldn’t you want them to be afraid of getting cited for jaywalking?
No? All right, well then keep on doing what you’re doing, but you’ll never ever achieve Vision Zero 2024 the way you’re going about it, SFGov.
Nothing goes unrecorded by the car dash cams of Taiwan:
TransAsia Airways Flight 235 looks to have lost a lot of power from its left engine. But assuming that the propeller blades of the failing engine were feathered to lessen drag, there’s no reason why a properly-loaded ATR 72 shouldn’t have been able to climb out to a safe altitude using the remaining engine.
There appears to be a lot of data recorded on this crash, so they mystery should be solved soon…
(Well, sure it’s not an actual bike-only path, it’s a multipurpose trail, or something. But most call it the bike path cause bike riders are allowed on it, as opposed to the ped-only path near Oak on the other side of the Panhandle.)
I’m a polite ped so I generally stay off the paved part* of the Golden Gate Park Panhandle bike path near Fell. This was my view of an impolite ped as I trod on the grass for a few blocks:
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She spent most of her eastward journey smack dab in the middle of the westbound lane or smack dab in the middle of the trail on the dashed yellow line. This went on for minutes. Westbound cyclists didn’t know how to pass her, on the left or on the right. Occasionally she’d veer to the right side of the right lane, where she belonged, but that phase of her journey didn’t last too long.
So what was this, a cry for help? Yeah, sort of.
Who will hear her?
*Yeah, this bike path is wider (12 feet) than before (8 feet), but it’s still too narrow. 16 feet sounds right, considering.
King-American hauled off to UC at least one Jetta occupant:
The area around USF seems more like a college town these days, with tons of stus milling about the surrounding blocks, as compared with a couple decades back – IDK why, perhaps that’s just my impression…
How would you find out that you’re one of SF worst drivers? I mean, who’s going to tell you? So yes, you can make a right on red and rely on others to avoid you, but that’s not the way to drive, right?
I don’t watch the cable TV news myself, but here are a few points:
1. American-style measurements are all over the aviation industry, like measurement of speed (in nautical miles per hour) and altitude (in feet). Pilot confusion with differing measurement systems has killed passengers and crew IRL.
2. And yes, international travel isn’t as safe as domestic travel, for a host of reasons. American pilots have better training, on average, and they have an easier job of it, not having to deal with the Intertropical Convergence Zoneand Russian paramilitaries, for starters. Not a single passenger has died due to a crash on a domestic flight on a large (we’re talking about something bigger than a private jet or a regional airliner) jet since 9/11. And if you want to talk about international flight on 100+ seat jets either going to or coming from America, we’ve lost a total of three passengers (on an Asiana flight at SFO) since 2001, that horrible year.
3. And the thing about cowboys – that’s a reference to the Boeing / American approach to automation vs. the Airbus / international approach. So a “cowboy” pilot has greater power to do something stupid, but also a greater ability to get out of trouble. A “cowboy” is more likely to have military experience. A cowboy is the opposite of a “college boy.” Oddly enough, the computer-assisted cowboy and cowgirl pilots are doing better, on average, than the auto pilot-reliant college boys and girls.
The job of these hosts is to be appealing (by looking good in a suit or a fuchsia(?) minidress(?), to look somber (due to the tragedy) and to goad the invited expert into saying what s/he knows in an interesting way. Seems as if they were getting that job done.
So yeah, asking about the metric system sounds like a stupid question, I’ll agree. But everything the hosts were talking about comes from real life, it comes from someplace. It’s not just Fox News waving the flag.
IMO.
So laugh at Fox if you want, but they’re doing their job better than Jezebel / Isha Aran is doing its job of debunking Fox News. And, bonus, Fox News consulted an expert and Jezebel, which doesn’t know much about aviation, did not.
The orange side mirror cozy tells us that that this minivan is operating as a Sidecarand the fact that its front wheels are closer to the median than the rear wheels when it’s going straight down the highway tells me that it was in an accident and then it wasn’t properly repaired:
Click to expand
IMO
Is this a particularly dangerous sitch? Prolly not.
And, in fact, Lady Diana would have been better off in this vehicle* with this driver** on these roads*** and with San Francisco EMTs**** at the ready than she was in her deadly accident in France.
And it’s not an SFMTA-approved San Francisco taxi cab with more than a half million miles on the odometer.
But still, this Sidecar aint right.
IMO
*A Mercedes Benz S280 that had badges saying “S600″ and “V12,” an S280 that wasn’t repaired properly after being stolen for its airbages, an S280 that handled differently turning left vs turning right
**Not drunk, let’s hope.
***Pick America’s poorest state and try to find exposed support beams without a guardrail ala that tunnel in Paris. You can’t.
****American-style “scrape and scoot” response vs. a French-style “stay and pray” let’s-take-more-than-an-an-hour-to-get-to-the-hospital approach…
The SFMTA makes all kinds of mistakes all the time, but it’s afraid to admit that it ever might have made a mistake ever, oh well.
Check out the newish light signals at Fell and Shrader:
(Filmed in Nike-Vision, except this woman is a real person who lives in the area and just happened to be passing through – quite unacceptable to those who reside in Niketown.)
So I understand the red bike and the upraised hand signal – so far so good.
So now I understand what the SFMTA means, but I needed to study the lights.
IMO, the SFMTA should be focused on safety instead of ideology. IMO, the SFMTA should strive to keep things simple. IMO, the SFMTA should factor human nature into into its signal schemes. For example, this woman here entered into the intersection way late and had to rely upon the driver seeing her. Is the SFMTA at all curious as to why people might be confused by this unique-in-the-world intersection with its current signal setup? Not at all.
So, yes, you had a little fender-bender with your big bus, and yes, it was related to the endless tinkering done by the SFMTA MUNI DPT DPW bowl of alphabet soup. So what! It’s not that big of a deal. CSI San Francisco isn’t going to send it’s Go Team and the NTSB isn’t coming neither.
Therefore, get your bus out of the roadway, pull it over. Sure, take a couple iPhone shots first, sure. But then get outta the way. THIS IS SFPD POLICY. Don’t you know this? You had at least two employees on the scene, why not have one, I don’t know, let’s call him the Driver, drive the bus to one side of the road or the other. Did you call the SFPD? IDK, but if you did, don’t you want them to show up? Now, how are they going to do that if you block the road, which, as stated, is a noteworthy bottleneck already, due to ongoing construction efforts, for umpty-ump minutes?
The light for this car was green green green, perhaps for two seconds as the cyclist that you can see on the right came down from the Panhandle bike path, camera left.
OTOH, the cyclist on the left saw the lights and managed to not run the red light – you can see her sort of chuckling at her friend there.
IMO, this would have been a 100% cyclist-at-fault accident, but I’m not 100% sure it would have gotten written up as such, oh well.
I’m also not sure why the SFGov/SFMTA/SFBC Establishment established this set-up to route traffic from the bike path into Golden Gate Park/JFK Drive – I suppose it’s a bit faster for cyclists, compared with the obvious alternatives.
But the whole system breaks down if the nut behind the steering wheel, or in this case, the handle bars, doesn’t know when she has lost the right of way…
