Newsletter

I’m excited to share our latest data analysis that focuses on a particularly contentious issue here in San Francisco. On Tuesday, voters will decide whether to continue allowing vehicle traffic on a two-mile segment of San Francisco’s Great Highway or permanently convert the roadway into the city’s newest oceanfront park.

Last week we launched a project that tracks vehicle crashes in NYC’s congestion pricing zone and shows the demographics of the surrounding neighborhood where each occurred. We created this in response to NY Governor Kathy Hochul’s abhorrent decision to cancel NYC’s much needed congestion pricing program which would have raised billions for public transit and removed an estimated 120,000 vehicles daily from clogging up Manhattan’s streets.

On Saturday, we launched our latest analysis, a deep dive into 19M SFMTA parking citations and 300K complaints over the past 15 years. This was a huge project that took 100s of hours over the past four months. The data is alarming, of the approximately 3,000 parking tickets SFMTA writes daily, only 5% are for violations that affect public safety such as blocking a sidewalk, bike lane, bus stop, safety zone or for abusing a space reserved for the disabled.

Over the past 8 months I’ve shared maps that show car ownership in relation to household income alongside how people commute to work. In May I painstakingly researched the 246 people killed by traffic violence in San Francisco since 2014 to remind us that these were our neighbors, who had friends and families that loved them, and not just numbers on a chart.

In May, I launched a detailed map of the 242 people that have been killed by traffic violence in San Francisco since the city instituted its Vision Zero program in 2014. I spent over two months scouring through hundreds of news articles trying to identify the victims and document the circumstances of each crash. I also wrote a detailed analysis that shows the crashes broken out by supervisor district, highlighting the blood on the hands of our elected officials who continue to ignore this public health crisis that has destroyed hundreds of families across San Francisco.

It’s been awhile since my last update and I hope this finds you well! I’m excited to announce that today my good friend Marcel Moran and I are launching a new platform to support advocacy for safer streets! The idea is simple, we’re asking people to tell us what they want to know and then we’ll go out and find the data, analyze it and build powerful interactive visuals that will help you pressure your elected officials to reduce our dependency on cars, improve public transit and make our streets safer for everyone.

It’s been awhile and I hope this finds you well. I’ve been mostly offline these past nine months and I wanted to share a personal update as well as an update on a few of my projects you may have been following. As you may have heard, I lost my younger brother Billy in September. He was just 40 years old and we were very close, only four years apart in age. My brother was a popular high school teacher in Hawaii where he taught AP English for 13 years.

I’m over the moon to share that we just scored our first win showing how Safe Lanes data can get safer infrastructure in the ground! Erin, one of our collaborators, has been documenting blocked bike lane violations in the Mission Bay neighborhood of SF and took the data to a property manager who agreed to request that the city convert five street parking spaces to 100 ft. of commercial and passenger loading.

It’s been an exciting and emotional past four months. Since August we together have documented over 5,000 blocked bike lane violations which are now in our public database of over 17K reports and 32K citations. Over 200 people are actively using Safe Lanes in 20 cities throughout the US. As we continue to welcome more people to the platform in our fight for safer streets I am constantly asking myself how can we use this data to drive change?

October was a whirlwind month that brought me to Denver and LA where I met with the wonderful folks at Bicycle Colorado & The Denver Bicycle Lobby who have both been amazing supporters of the work we’re doing at Safe Lanes. Today, as a matter of fact, we just hit 100 reports in Denver including these amazing specimens which underscores The Denver Bicycle Lobby's steadfast commitment to making their streets safer.

This Friday in San Francisco we’re organizing our first direct action to demand that the SFMTA respond to the data we’ve been providing them with for the past 4 months that clearly shows where and when illegal and dangerous driving is occurring in our city. The SFMTA is NOT sending their protective resources to the areas of our city that need it most. Valencia, Polk, Folsom and The Embarcadero are all major cycling corridors upon which thousands of San Franciscans commute daily and unless the SFMTA accelerates the installation of protective infrastructure and starts sending out Policy Control Officers to police these corridors, someone is going to get killed.