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Comment by evmar | Hacker News Reader

Looks like SF averages about one person killed by a car every ten days or so, though bikers are a relatively rare proportion of them:

https://sfgov.org/scorecards/transportation/traffic-fataliti...

(Edit: this comment came out more heartless than I intended! I think this story is a real tragedy. I was just connecting it to the larger tragedy of car culture.)

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Apparently SFPD issues traffic citations on average of 10 times per day. Gee, I wonder what happens on our streets when we stop enforcing the law?

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/heatherknight/article...

https://transpomaps.org/san-francisco/ca/sfpd-traffic-enforc...

SFPD needs a dedicated bike enforcement team. Ticket unsafe riding, helmets for minors, etc. We can then expand that to enforcement of things bike people complain about like cars parking in bike lanes.

Putting cops on bikes would be a great start.

Giving the cops great bike equipment seems like an amazingly creative way to fund the police. Get them the best e-bikes.

Putting cops on human powered bikes instead seems like a great way to keep them in the required physical condition to enact an arrest without shooting someone.

I recently learned that cops can’t drive after fleeing vehicles in SF.

I looked into this because I saw multiple instances of cars driving insanely fast near me, and soon after seeing cops with their lights on. These cars were doing 45+ in a residential area where max 30 or 25 would be appropriate.

That's the same as the city I live in - end result is kids on motorcycles flying around city streets as +30mph over the speed limit, blowing past red lights and going the wrong way down streets.

I can't imagine some sort of high speed chase would be a better situation but I'm not certain that alternative is an order of magnitude worse; seems like it might be marginally worse.

Is the law that they can't ever do it or that they can only do it if said person is a danger to others? The cops in WA bitch and moan about similar restrictions, but the law explicitly allows them to drive after fleeing suspects in those exact circumstances they are worried about.

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