Community Outreach - L Taraval Improvement Project
Community Outreach and Community Engagement
Taraval Street is the vibrant commercial street of the Parkside District and a major transit corridor served by the L Taraval Muni Metro rail line. Taraval Street is a high-injury corridor, with 46 pedestrian injury collisions in 5 years. Of these collisions, 22 included riders boarding or alighting the L Taraval. The L Taraval Rapid Project advances the City’s Vision Zero goals by addressing the causes of these collisions through boarding islands, sidewalk extensions, and other pedestrian safety improvements. The proposed changes, including traffic and parking modifications on Taraval Street, will promote the City’s Transit-First Policy by improving transit travel time and reliability.
Early Implementation Period
Beginning in the summer of 2015, the SFMTA conducted extensive public outreach to solicit input that helped shape the proposed L Taraval Rapid Project, including public meetings, door-to-door outreach, focus groups, surveys, mailings, and ambassadors on trains and at stops. Community members expressed a range of views on stop removal,
Stakeholders within the project area have been extensively involved throughout the outreach phase for the project, ensuring that the needs and concerns of the community have been heard and incorporated into the project design wherever possible. Numerous adjustments to the project as a result of community input are included in the current project proposal.
The project’s outreach process included three open houses, door-to-door merchant outreach, multi-lingual surveys, rider outreach on trains and at stops, a series of focus groups comprised of key stakeholders, meetings with neighborhood and merchants groups, and a letter summarizing the project mailed to over 16,000 addresses within the Sunset and a survey taken by over 1,200 stakeholders has shaped nearly every aspect of the proposed L Taraval Rapid Project.
The feedback received throughout the outreach process influenced the project design in many ways, including restoring multiple stops proposed for removal, reducing the number of traffic signals proposed, replacing chicanes with pedestrian bulbs, and developing the Passenger Loading Zone Evaluation.
Specifically, the following scope of the project was modified through community feedback:
- reduction of traffic signals from up to eleven to five
- reduction of transit stop removals from seven in each direction to five and four in the
- outbound and inbound directions, respectively
- replacement of traffic chicanes with pedestrian bulbs at two intersections
- relocation of the 19th/Taraval inbound transit boarding island to nearside of the intersection
- introduction of two additional locations for high-level accessible platforms
The proposed modifications, the L Taraval Rapid Project, are recommended for inclusion in the upcoming infrastructure rehabilitation of Taraval Street that will replace track, overhead wire, sewer and water infrastructure and streetlights, planned for construction in 2018
Staff continued to receive feedback from merchants, riders, and residents after the implementation of initial improvements and proposed several transit stops and parking management changes to further enhance the project based on this input and extensive analysis. These additional modifications were approved by the Board in December 2017 and April 2018 and implemented earlier in the year.