The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency Board of Directors voted unanimously Tuesday to greenlight a series of controversial street-safety changes in the West Portal neighborhood. The plan is a compromise reached by city officials and community groups after a series of contentious disagreements about how — or if — to make neighborhood streets safer after a horrific four-fatality traffic crash in March.
Deidre Von Rock, president of the West Portal Merchants Association, said she “begrudgingly” accepts the latest street plan, which was reshaped after the initial SFMTA proposal sparked outrage from Von Rock and others in the neighborhood.
“As presented it is the least-bad of the options we were given,” Von Rock said.
Supervisor Myrna Melgar and Mayor London Breed developed the latest proposal with SFMTA officials.
Melgar addressed the SFMTA board ahead of the vote, urging them to approve the changes. She described it as a compromise that most people in the middle should be able to “live with,” while acknowledging that the issue remained deeply divisive.
“We still have folks who oppose it on both sides,” Melgar said. “Folks who think that it doesn’t go far enough in addressing the risks, and then folks who think nothing should happen at this intersection, ever.”
In mid-March, an SUV speeding on the wrong side of Ulloa Street struck a family of four who were waiting at a bus stop. All four members of the family died, including two young children. The crash galvanized city leaders to address traffic safety, with Breed calling for a “complete overhaul” of city streets. About a month after the crash, officials announced their intention to reshape the West Portal streetscape, giving a 10-day window for feedback before pushing a plan forward.
Local merchants and neighborhood leaders balked at the proposal, criticizing what they saw as a knee-jerk reaction to a tragedy that could have far-reaching impacts on businesses in the area. After the SFMTA concluded that the infrastructure of the street did not cause the crash, critics said the streetscape proposal was using the deaths in service of a larger transportation agenda: to deprioritize cars. (The driver in the crash has been charged with vehicular manslaughter and her attorney said her car “just took off” before the crash.)
“The way in which the initial plan was dropped on us in April was appalling,” Von Rock said. “It was clearly politically motivated and everyone knows it.”
The backlash successfully slowed the plan, sending SFMTA back to the drawing board to hear more community feedback. The proposal the agency approved Tuesday incorporates the input from that process.
The approved streetscape changes will affect a 10-block area, about double the original size, in an effort to take a more holistic approach to neighborhood safety instead of focusing narrowly on the area near the crash.
Those changes will include speed bumps and concrete islands to slow traffic in the neighborhood, as well as a rerouting of traffic patterns.
While some transportation advocates said during public comment that the approved plan is too watered-down to be effective, Will Baumgardner, a West Portal resident who served on the community committee that worked with the SFMTA on the latest proposal, sees the drawn-out process in a different light.
“There’s a lot of good, meaningful improvements in this plan,” he said. “Not everybody’s happy on both sides, and that’s the sign of a good compromise.”