Last year, when the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) proposed raising revenue through stricter parking enforcement, Stephen Braitsch wanted to understand the impact on safety. Through his work as a data storyteller, he uncovered that nearly all parking fines – 92 percent — were for street cleaning and expired parking meters: fines that don’t improve public safety.
Only a sliver of fines were punishment for blocking sidewalks, crosswalks, and bike lanes.
Braitsch is the creator of Transpo Maps, where he shares data visualizations to shed light on the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of San Francisco’s efforts to improve street safety and public transportation. His work has gained notice among transit advocates and public officials as SF has failed to curb pedestrian and cyclist fatalities, despite a longstanding pledge to do so.
Now, as SFMTA deals with a fiscal crisis, Braitsch wants to provide better information to voters who are likely to weigh in on funding measures and hold SFMTA and other agencies accountable.
Braitsch’s latest work isn’t about San Francisco, but it’s relevant to the city’s situation. He has collaborated with Portland, Ore.-based science educator and researcher Anne McHugh to study Portland’s recent street improvements funded by a 2020 gas tax. (Portlanders voted on May 21 to renew the 10-cent-per-gallon tax.) Out of 120 sites that received upgrades, Braitsch and McHugh examined the 24 focused on pedestrian and bike safety: Did they work as intended?
The Frisc reached out to the researchers to hear what lessons SF could learn from Portland – not just on the streets themselves, but also in the way officials share information and communicate about the inevitable disruptions that come with street changes.
This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
The Frisc: Let’s start with Portland. The upcoming vote was one reason for the project, but what else drew you to it?
Anne McHugh: I’ve lived in Portland for 20 years and haven’t focused on issues like transportation. I saw how Stephen was doing database storytelling, and once I’d settled on the ballot measure, I was interested in what the first two rounds of funding looked like.
Stephen Braitsch: Anne’s the person in Portland, and I was interested in what data we could get and what it might tell us. I’m an advocate for data transparency, and I thought this project could be a way to push for that.
What in the Portland data was different from SF?
SB: Portland didn’t have car crash data, whereas we pull data from [the SF Department of Public Health], and crashes are recorded quarterly. In Portland, all we had were 911 calls, so crash data had a longer latency. We were able to get two-year-old data.
So SF comes out ahead here?
SB: Yes.
You found only eight of the 24 Portland sites you studied showed a reduction in vehicle crashes. What did you notice at those sites?
SB: When we visited and photographed the 24 sites, I noticed much of the infrastructure was painted sharrows [where cars and bikes share use of the lane] and bike lanes. So Portland is relying mostly on signage and paint rather than physical materials.
So SF comes out better here too?
SB: Quick Build has given [SF] the chance to experiment with physical materials, and they’ve used them in a number of places. But I want to stress that we looked at only the 24 sites [that] met our criteria: they were complete and brought pedestrian and bicycle safety measures. Some of the projects funded by the gas tax had nothing to do with safety for walkers and riders.
Let’s talk about public perception and outreach. How should city officials make a closer connection between a safety element, like a bike lane, and tax money or other public spending?
SB: There’s a big opportunity here. When people see street construction or new infrastructure like a bike lane going in, and maybe no parking, or a sidewalk temporarily closed or a bus stop temporarily moved, they might get annoyed. The agencies involved need to communicate and follow up after a project is completed, because that’s a golden opportunity to demonstrate the benefits to the community as time goes on.
Do you see this happening in SF?
SB: No. The SFMTA is struggling with public perception right now. There’s been a lot of anger at it for various reasons for years.
What’s one reason?
SB: There’s a serious lack of transparency from not communicating the impacts of work that’s done. One thing that we would like to do with this analysis in Portland is show voters how their money is being spent. The receiving entity of something like a ballot measure should communicate how the funds are being spent and show the impact on quality of life. SFMTA won’t do that.
But there are examples of SFMTA studying the impact of projects, like the California Street road diet in 2021 or an interim look at the Valencia bike lane.
SB: I know SFMTA currently does some data analysis on random projects, like the California Street project. However, much of what I’ve seen them share is buried on page 40 of some PDF that the average person will never see. It’s not complicated to collect the required data, visualize it, and tell a story around it, as you’ve seen me do with my work.
If you think about it, most interactions people have with SFMTA are through parking tickets, tows, fare inspectors, and capital projects that are over [budget], which can be catastrophic for small businesses and leave lasting scars – as we saw during the construction of the Van Ness [bus rapid transit], Central Subway, and, most recently, the Taraval Improvement Project. So the average person’s interactions are negative.
They need to put data out about projects: anything that requires tax funding from voters should be reported on in a very public manner. Remember Prop A, the measure that failed, but barely? The agency could have done a better job communicating how similar measures have improved people’s lives, and how this could have helped do the same.
[Note: Prop A, a municipal bond on the June 2022 ballot, would have meant $400 million in transit improvement and street safety projects.]
SFMTA says it doesn’t have the staffing to do assessments across all their projects. Is it just a matter of not enough people, or are you taking issue with their methods and data choices?
SB: SFMTA spends an obscene amount of time conducting public outreach during the design phase of every project to be as inclusive as possible, yet they spend hardly any time or energy measuring the impact of each project after they are completed.
When a protected bike lane is installed they should be showing, via interactive charts on the project’s webpage, the impact on bicycle ridership, vehicle crashes, and emergency response times. If the bike lane is on a commercial corridor they can pull sales tax receipts and analyze footfall traffic to get a rough sense of the impact on nearby businesses.
What’s been the biggest takeaway for you working on this Portland project?
SB: A fundamental reason why so many U.S. transportation agencies are cash-strapped is because much of the public sees them as mismanaged bureaucracies with little financial oversight who do not have the public’s best interests at heart. The central part of this project is to help transit agencies — Portland, SFMTA — communicate to the public how their funding is being used to make a difference in their lives.
Kristi Coale covers streets, transit, and the environment for The Frisc.
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