Advocates for street safety want the city to go beyond the new downtown initiative to extend the ban across San Francisco. Last October, the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to pass a resolution urging the SFMTA to develop a plan to expand and implement the ban as much as possible.
“I think it’s progress,” Supervisor Dean Preston, who authored the resolution, said of the downtown expansion. “I’d like to see more, and I’d like us to be bold about expanding no turn on red.”
He hopes that eventually, every intersection in San Francisco will be no turn on red.
When asked whether his agency would take the ban citywide, SFMTA Director Jeffrey Tumlin explained that every banned intersection needs eight large metal signs, which are installed by the same crew that installs other street safety measures across the city.
“We do not have enough crews to be putting up thousands of metal signs all over the city,” Tumlin said.
While the outcome of the Tenderloin ban pilot was positive, the results were not transformative, Tumlin said. They suggest that this tool works best in areas where there are a lot of pedestrians.
If the agency moves too fast to expand into areas where there are few pedestrians, he worries that motorists may not respect the right-on-red ban, especially given San Francisco’s low levels of traffic enforcement.
“So our strategy for no turn on red is to now expand incrementally into the downtown and North Beach and South of Market and continue to evaluate,” Tumlin said.
“I’m glad to see MTA expanding no turn on red to more intersections in the city,” said transit activist Luke Bornheimer. “And I am disappointed to see MTA continuing to take this kind of slow bureaucratic approach of essentially going intersection to intersection, which costs us a lot of time and money and contributes to more people being killed and injured on our streets because it takes longer.”