Attn: All Hands on Deck to preserve car free spaces in San Francisco.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit to force the opening to cars of The Great Walkway, JFK Drive and MLK Drive have filed a Motion for a Preliminary Injunction forcing the City to open these thoroughfares to cars IMMEDIATELY.
The Motion will be heard in Dept. 302 on January 31, 2022 at 9:30AM.
The Open the Great Highway Alliance is hoping the Court approves their Motion because it would put cars back onto these currently car free spaces while the lawsuit is litigated.
Motion for Injunction Open Great Walkway CPF-21-517641
You can visit the SF Superior Court website and look on the Register of Actions for case CPF-21-517641. It will provide you with all the activity in the lawsuit to date.
The City has yet to make a formal appearance in Court; i.e. an response to the Request for a Writ of Mandate filed December 16, 2021.
Excerpted from San Francisco Chronicle Editorial 12.25.2021
JFK Drive is for people, not car commuters. Let’s keep it that way in 2022 and beyond
Before the pandemic, JFK was one of the most dangerous and deadliest streets in San Francisco. There were 91 crashes on it from 2014 through its 2020 closure. That’s mostly because 75% of people traveling on JFK had no intention of visiting the park; they were simply using it as a cut-through.
This would be a policy failure for any city; for a supposedly transit-first city like San Francisco, however, it was an inexcusable display of incompetence.
Few would object to a gentle street through Golden Gate Park that enables slow, but convenient vehicle access, especially for the mobility impaired, to the park’s amenities. But allowing the main thoroughfare of the city’s marquee park to become a high-speed commuter freeway — as it once was — was a gross and too-often deadly civic failure that can never again be allowed to repeat itself.
Excerpted from San Francisco Chronicle Editorial 9.19.2021
SF jumped the gun in its Great Highway reopening. That can’t happen at JFK
Anecdotally, traffic on Chain of Lakes — one of the ostensible reasons given for the need to reopen the Great Highway last month, after it had been closed to cars for most of the pandemic — appears as bad or nearly as bad as it was before the reopening. Cars also still appear to be cutting through Outer Sunset neighborhoods in search of shortcuts — in defiance of another rationale given for the necessity of reopening the highway.
Photos – Liz and Lee Heidhues
Lee's Perspective 