California Street Safety Project

Jamie Parks, Livable Streets Director

Michael Rhodes, Transit Priority Team Lead

Overview

¢ The California Street Safety Project proposes to improve safety for those traveling on California Street from Arguello Boulevard to 18th Avenue

¢ California Street is part of the city’s Vision Zero high-injury network, the 13% of city streets that account for 75% of severe and fatal collisions

¢ This section of California has had 73 injury collisions in five years — 7 involving pedestrians - In addition, 35 Muni-involved collisions

¢ This project is part of the Vision Zero Quick-Build Program that will immediately implement treatments to improve safety on streets with historically high rates of injury-related collisions

What Is a Quick-Build?

Traffic safety improvements that are:

¢ Easy to implement ¢ Lower cost ¢ Adjustable/ reversible

Design, construct, and evaluate more nimbly

Quick-Build Improvements

Typical quick-build improvements include:

Lanes are too narrow for buses and other wide vehicles. Multiple lanes of traffic contribute to speeding and collisions.

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Narrow lanes lead to frequent collisions. This is a sample of mirrors knocked off of parked vehicles on California Street.

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¢ Daylighting: Red painted curbs at intersection approaches to improve visibility for all road users (completed)

¢ Higher visibility zebra-striped continental crosswalks (completed)

¢ Updated pavement markings (completed)

¢ Modify roadway configuration from 4 lanes to 3 with center turn lane (road diet)

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Planned Street Layout

California Street - Existing

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¢ Reduces speeding and risk of collision by reducing the number of lanes

¢ Wider lanes provide room for safe operation of Muni and other traffic

¢ Fulton: Road diet reduced collisions by over 40%

e 25th Avenue: Road diet reduced collisions by 20%

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Daylighting increases visibility

¢ Daylighting increasing sightlines for people driving and walking

¢ This treatment has reduced collisions by 14% in other locations in the city

How we're evaluating the project

Evaluation Criteria

Collision History

Yielding Behavior: Are vehicles yielding to pedestrians with the proposed improvements ?

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Average Vehicles and Speed: Has the number of

Measuring any traffic vehicles changed on California or on parallel streets? 6 ; ‘ g y Has there been in a change in vehicle speed? diversion to side streets

MOBILITY

Transportation Counts: Has the number of vehicles, pedestrians and bikes changed at the intersection?

Muni Performance: How has Muni travel time performance changed with the road diet?

TRANSIT

Community outreach

¢ Community open house and public hearing in November 2019 attended by over 75 people

¢ Notices posted along California Street

¢ Project updates by email

¢ Meeting notification in Supervisor Fewer’s newsletter and Richmond Review

¢ Meetings with local stakeholders

What did we hear from neighbors?

Overall themes: ¢ Support for improved pedestrian safety ¢ Concern about traffic congestion

* Concern about traffic diversion

Addressing traffic diversion

¢ Based on community feedback, we collected additional data to

verify initial analysis 25,000 vehicles per day Max for road diet

Average Daily Traffic Volumes

¢ Results confirm California's capacity to handle traffic without significant diversion after 4 to 3

lane conversion 16,000 vehicles per day

California Street ¢ Strategies for ensuring traffic isn't diverted to side streets: - Closely monitor diversion during evaluation —- Make additional adjustments if needed (e.g. signal timing changes)

Schedule and Next Steps

December 2019 February 2020

April-May 2020 May 2020

Late 2020

Fall 2022

Implemented initial safety elements

Implemented daylighting

Implement road diet Begin 2-year evaluation period Report on initial results of evaluation

Report on final results of evaluation

Example Project Evaluation

Pilot Project Evaluation Key Findings

LOADING BEHAVIOR

+ The proportion of people loading in the bike lane decreased Passenger vehicles represent the majority of from 60.5% to 0.7% with the implementation of a double parking post pilot separated bike facility and more designated loading zones

+/ - Double parking still occurs in vehicle lanes, but decreased from an average of 14 to 8 vehicles per peak hour after the pilot was implemented. The median loading time for double parkers decreased from 4.6 minutes to 24 seconds

of commercial vehicles are loading in designated loading zones

Lessons Learned and Next Steps

+ Preliminary findings from the pilot were positive and show that the protected bikeway and curb management changes have improved traffic safety, significantly reducing conflicts between vehicles and bikes (i.e. dooring, double parking, and parking maneuvers).

+ Although these findings are encouraging, mixing zones and double parking remain an issue. The project team will explore design changes to address these challenges, including replacing mixing zones with separated signals and additional physical barriers. Signal separation was implemented at Valencia and Duboce streets in early August 2019.

+ The project team will share the final project evaluation report in fall 2019. The report will also inform a quick- build project on Valencia Street from 19th Street to Cesar Chavez, which has similar physical constraints as this pilot area. This quick-build is anticipated to be completed by spring 2020.

For more information, visit sfmta.com/valencia

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Street Design by Block

Funston to 9t* Avenue

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9th to 5¢*h Avenue

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<— West to Ocean East to Downtown ==>

5 Avenue to Arguello Boulevard

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Indicates number of parking spaces removed by daylighting. §Now red curb if not indicated, total parking spaces remain unchanged. Existing red curb

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<— West to Ocean East to Downtown ==>