We recently attended two congressional debates between State Senator Scott Wiener and Supervisor Connie Chan. The first debate was held at the St. John Armenian Apostolic Church on October 5, with roughly a hundred people in attendance.

This was a neighborhood debate sponsored by several community organizations, including SHARP and StopCrimeSF. Public safety and transportation were major themes in this debate, with questions centered around topics like policing, Muni funding, and safer streets. Rather than recap the entire debate, I wanted to highlight a few exchanges that stood out, specifically on the issues of street safety and transit.

In response to a question on pedestrian safety, Wiener brought up a recent incident in our neighborhood at Arguello and Anza (in Chan’s District), saying “It should not take five years to implement a pedestrian safety project.”

A week before the debate, Streetsblog reported on the death of Yuan Jun Zhu, an 80 year old who was killed by a driver while crossing the street at that intersection. In their investigation from a year earlier, they had written about delays to the Arguello bicycle safety project that may have improved safety at that intersection.

What’s interesting is that Chan actually helped fund the ironically named “Arguello Quick Build Bicycle Safety Project” in 2023. Earlier in the debate, during a question about infrastructure and accountability, she said we should only release funding for projects when they meet deadlines and budgets, and we should have public hearings to monitor progress.

This made me wonder what Chan had done to hold SFMTA accountable for the delays on Arguello. I put together a timeline of the project’s progress so far and compared it to what is on the project’s webpage.

At the current pace, it appears that it will indeed take 5 years to complete a pedestrian safety project. According to SFMTA’s quick build program page, the timeline for a quick build is supposed to be measured in months.

In response to the same question about safety and stakeholder input, Chan brought up road closures and Slow Streets. She said she didn’t believe closing a road would make pedestrians or cyclists safer. She argued that investment in traffic calming and street design should come before considering Slow Streets.

Wiener defended the Slow Streets, pointing to earlier debates over how San Francisco uses its streets. He mentioned the past fight over whether to rebuild the Central Freeway or take it down and the removal of the Embarcadero Freeway. He said the waterfront is now “one of the absolute gems of San Francisco.” He also made it clear that he supported both the JFK Promenade and Sunset Dunes, calling it a success and “definitely a disagreement between the two candidates in this race.”

Another point of disagreement was on the question of who should pay for transit. Chan said voters would have to “hold our nose” and support the regional transit sales tax, arguing that corporations and wealthy people should contribute more. Wiener pointed to his work securing emergency state funding and authoring the legislation that allowed the regional measure to move forward. He argued that a business-tax version would not have passed the Legislature or received the governor’s signature.

I think Chan had a fair point. I ride Muni regularly and will of course always vote to save it. I just find it strange that whenever there is a measure that suggests taxing businesses or the wealthy to help pay for a budget shortfall, there is a big marketing campaign listing all the reasons it’s a bad idea. But when the proposal is a higher sales tax that would also impact people already struggling, my Instagram feed is bombarded with ads about how urgently we need to save transit.

Getting to the debate was a lesson on pedestrian safety and infrastructure of its own. I took the 44 bus to the debate, and immediately noticed the walk from the bus stop to the church where the debate was held didn’t feel particularly safe. There were some blind spots and not many crosswalks in the area. After the debate, I was waiting at a stop that seemed hard to see from the road. Sure enough, when the 44 came, it passed me without stopping, leaving me stranded. I later did some research and found that the area near the church around Clarendon Avenue is part of SFMTA’s 2022 High Injury Network.

The High Injury Network map identifies streets where there is a high concentration of severe and fatal traffic accidents. It turns out Clarendon also has a Quick-Build project, which started in 2023 and is scheduled to be completed in 2027. The page says there have been some improvements implemented already, but after seeing how long things are taking on Arguello, I again question what “quick build” means.

I thought it was a little funny that I was the only one waiting at the bus stop after a debate about pedestrian safety and transit. Here I was standing in the dark about to vote to raise my own taxes to save the agency that still hasn’t finished the safety project at the very stop where I was standing. The bus had just passed me by without stopping, and there was nothing I could really do about it.