Veteran skaters who have organized downhill skating events say the yearly unsanctioned Dolores Park hill bomb need not end after this month’s police crackdown arrested 117 people, most of them teenagers.
It would be a trivial matter for San Francisco to sanction the hill bomb, they say, avoiding the costs to teenagers, parents and the city’s coffers.
“I can’t imagine that it would cost more than five grand to permit it and protect it,” said Kevin Reimer, a downhill skating world champion and owner of skateboard company Aera Trucks, who has organized several professional downhill skater events.
The city and young skaters appear to agree.
The Dolores hill bomb — largely organized by teenagers, who choose a date, create an Instagram post and send it to as many friends as possible — would be relatively easy to organize and officially sanction, said Reimer and others. It is, he noted, contained to a mere two-block stretch of urban road.
“That’s why I’m blown away,” he said. “Obviously, the onus is sort of on the skaters” to pull permits and organize the event, he said. “But that didn’t happen, and the city could have reached out and said, ‘Hey, I know this is going to happen, is there some way this can be safe for everyone?’”
‘I would love to see more applications for skating events‘
The city bureaucracy, for its part, says “yes.” Nick Chapman is the special events head for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, the man whose signature is affixed to every permit for a neighborhood block party, farmers market, or cycling race in the city.
“I would love to see more applications for skating events,” he said. “We would actively encourage applications and outreach from the skating community to see what we can do to facilitate skating in San Francisco.”
Chapman — coincidentally a veteran skater himself, who bombed San Francisco hills in the 1970s and has “the broken bones and the x-rays to prove it” — said the process is fairly straightforward but does require someone to take the reins, apply for a permit, and pay the costs: $1,200 minimum for the permit, plus any additional costs for rerouting transit, liability insurance, putting up “No parking” signs, installing safety barricades, hiring an ambulance or two, and requesting a police escort.
Those costs can add up: $600 a block for removing parking, Chapman estimated, perhaps $200-$300 each for plastic barricades, $150 an hour per police officer, and the ambulances — “those are very expensive,” he said.
Still, it would likely pale in comparison to the money spent paying hundreds of officers to break up the hill bomb by force this year and monitor the event annually: The San Francisco Police Department has declined to detail its expenses for the operation this year, but they likely ran into the tens of thousands, and the cost to Muni from teenage taggers was $70,000.
San Francisco has never seen a sanctioned skating race, Chapman said, but it has seen plenty of similar races — Mission Crit, the “high-speed, possibly injury-prone” fixed-gear cycling race in the northeast Mission that Chapman sees as the closest analogue; the high-speed Giro de San Francisco cycling race near the Embarcadero; the uphill Red Bull Bay Climb on Potrero Hill; or the BYOB Big Wheel tricycle race on Vermont Street.
“If it can be done safely and appropriately,” Chapman said, “we would certainly look at [the hill bomb].” He added that the city committee responsible for approving events does so “more than than 99 percent” of the time, as Chapman works with event organizers before they pull permits to ensure they have dotted their i’s and crossed their t’s.
City officials can themselves apply for permits, too, though it is unclear the District 8 supervisor would do so: Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, whose district includes Dolores Park, said he was “not sure” the event could be organized without disrupting neighbors.
‘There is always going to be hill bombing in San Francisco‘
Without exception, seasoned skaters said the actions taken by the city thus far were unlikely to deter the Dolores hill bomb. San Francisco installed raised pavement dots on Dolores Street in 2020, following the death of a 23-year-old cyclist, and did so again in June this year. This failed to stop the event, but did make the skateboarding more dangerous, participants said.
“By applying those to the ground, you’re all but guaranteeing skaters fall, at speed, on their boards,” said Reimer.
Liam McSpadden, 24, a 12-year skater and frequent downhill bomber in San Francisco, agreed. “The risk factor is really, really high now,” he said, referring to the dots on Dolores Street. McSpadden said he reached out to Mandelman’s office in 2020, but received no response.
Harry Ciabattini, another longtime downhill skater who has attended the hill bomb several times, said of the dots: “It does not stop you from doing the run. It does add another layer of making it unsafe.”
Instead of eschewing it, Aaron Breetwor, the brand manager at Comet Skateboards and a San Francisco skater, said city officials should understand downhill skating as an integral part of a famously hilly city.
“There is always going to be hill bombing in San Francisco,” he said. “The topography of this place is what draws people to it.”
Breetwor sympathized with officials’ wariness about what has been a dangerous event in the past — a skateboarding icon suffered a serious head injury in 2017, another landed in a two-week coma in 2019, a cyclist was killed in 2020, a man was stabbed last year — but said that, if officials are concerned about safety, they had to start making inroads into the skating community.
“If you want it to be safe, you have to create a culture of safety,” said Breetwor, who teaches a skating class to young kids at César Chávez Elementary. “If you want to change the culture, you have to make changes now and expect results 10 years from now.”
Younger skaters were also receptive to a sanctioned hill bomb.
Amire Lofton, 19, a past organizer of the event, said a sanctioned race would “be cool” and “make it fun again,” possibly bringing out the veteran skaters as in years past: “2017 was the best one, because that’s when all the older skaters were there. The OG-sponsored skaters were there, bombing.”
Eriberto Jimenez, 16, who was arrested on July 8 alongside the other teenagers, agreed, saying an event with “paramedics there, ambulances there, handing out helmets, instead of rows of cops with riot gear” would make the hill bomb safest.
Ciabattini, a longtime downhill skater and participant, admitted it would be “difficult to say you could throw this event perfectly and have everyone be happy,” as it’s “an outlaw event thus far, where a literal kid in high school makes a flier and everyone shows up.”
But San Francisco officials have always had the option of attempting outreach and sanctioning the event, he said.
“No one does that, and then it’s just Amire again making the flier on Instagram.”
So the city should sanction an event that carries serious risk of injury to its participants? One of your interviewees even brags he has“the broken bones and the x-rays to prove it (that he has participated in the hill bomb)”. Even if the city hands out helmets at taxpayer expense, they don’t make skaters immune from injury. Yes, the SFPD could have handled it in a way that fit with San Francisco values of compassion and tolerance, but this series of articles on the Hill Bomb seems to verge on advocacy for the skaters rather than objective journalism. Your otherwise fine and valuable publication seems to be suggesting that any group popular enough, cool enough, can just go on social media, announce a street takeover for a given high risk activity, and expect the city to accommodate them. I really think you’ve crossed the line from straight journalism to advocacy on this story.
SF encourages cycling as a mode of transportation. While cycling like skating is a relatively safe mode of transportation, there are occasional serious injuries. The only reason why SFPD cracked down on skaters is that they can’t escape as fast as cyclists and are in general not willing to fight back. For now, at least. After encounters with lawless “law enforcement,” that is probably going to change.
I don’t buy what you’re selling, Marcos. The whole appeal of Hill Bomb is that it is dangerous — watch those skaters careen down the hill and risk life and limb. Will they fall? Cycling is not that. Most cyclists are traffic, going from one destination to another. The hill bomb is a thrill ride on city streets.
I’m very supportive as long as the City and the City’s taxpayers are indemnified against any liabilities when someone gets hurt, or for property damage. The sponsors will need to provide that insurance.
Are taxpayers indemnified from civil rights judgements against the city from SFPD’s lawless arrests, or are taxpayers going to be able hit up the SFPOA, SFPD brass under who’s watch this atrocity transpired, cops involved in their personal capacities to recoup the losses?
Corruption convictions for city leaders are coming down, with trials ongoing. Businesses are going bankrupt. We have an open-air drug market and higher ODs than ever.
But this is where Mission Local puts its resources.
I like this new comment voting system.
Your moderators in the past have let commenters like Marcos spout whatever leftist drivel they like, while deleting comments from anyone who suggests that laws should be followed and SFPD are not all evil.
Now you’re seeing how the public feels. It’s good for you. Good for us as well.
It at least let’s us downvote silly grandstanding like this hahaha
It amazes me that all the folks calling for a city-sanctioned Dolores Hill Bomb event, including the author of this article, fail to note that for the city to do so would require: 1) all participants to wear helmets, kneepads, and elbow guards (not negotiable); 2) signing a liability waiver if over 18, or signed by their parent or guardian if a minor, as city cannot sanction any event that carries such high liability without it; 3) abiding by “rules of the road”, especially placing barriers to keep skaters and spectators apart (there were numerous incidents where skaters and spectators nearly collided; 4) self-policing against troublemakers who are there to tag, create chaos, and flout the rules. The theme of this article seems to be “It would be a trivial matter for San Francisco to sanction Hillbomb.” I submit that it would be anything but trivial. I’m in favor of a sanctioned event, but only if it can realistically be done following these city requirements. I am 100% against Hillbomb if it cannot be conducted safely and with respect for the law and our neighborhood. It cannot be allowed to continue as an “outlaw event” with no rules, which truth be told is a large part of its appeal. Please convince me otherwise. Let’s talk about how realistic it is to legalize it under the conditions cited above given the anarchic, rule-free nature of the event.
Joe: Another thing you got wrong in your article. The road dots that SFMTA installed were not meant to stop skateboarding. I frankly don’t know what they were meant to do, since they were installed just one block down from 20th St., which is where Hillbomb usually starts. So the skaters simply started their run one block down from 20th, at Cumberland. Had the intent been to make it impossible to skate down Dolores, SFMTA would have installed additional road dots at 19th and at 18th, thereby denying the skateboarders enough roadway to skate down. Also, the road dots MTA installed three years ago on Dolores between 21st and 20th are completely useless for deterring skateboarding since they were installed above where Hillbomb usually starts. I don’t know what SFMTA was thinking.
Do the cops have the choice of not disclosing how much they were paid for their Hill Bomb work; or was the decision to do so or not made arbitrary by convoluted City rules and processes?
Do automobiles need permits to gridlock traffic as happens on the daily, or are skaters the only ones who need a permit to congest a street with skateboards for a few hours one day each year?
Done with the skaters! This activity is so juvenile and ridiculous -not to mention the disruption , danger and damage they cause. Just grow up and get a life!