A cyclist posted on the r/sanfrancisco subreddit this morning that they were ticketed at 6:30 a.m.for attempting to cross a red light at an empty intersection. “The officer was friendly,” they wrote “but he was saying that, starting today, police will be enforcing cyclists/mopeds/e-bikes/scooters heavily on Market St this entire month.”
Furthermore, the officer writing the citation added, the order to begin issuing citations to 2-wheeled vehicles on Market came directly from the mayor’s office.
Did the mayor recently order SFPD to go on the offensive against two-wheeled scofflaws riding down Market Street? The same Market Street that the mayor has begun to “invite” more commercial vehicles to make use of, shortly after taking office in 2025?
When contacted by Mission Local, Charles Lutvak, Lurie’s press secretary, declined to confirm or deny whether the mayor asked SFPD to focus their ticket-writing efforts on cyclists on Market, and told Mission Local to ask SFPD’s press office.
“It’s not limited to Market Street,” said Evan Sernoffsky, director of communications at SFPD. “And it’s not limited to cyclists.”
Rather, Sernoffsky said, SFPD is working with the mayor’s office on doing “high-visibility enforcement” on streets that are part of the city’s high-injury network, as part of Mayor Lurie’s Street Safety Initiative, an executive order that the mayor signed on December 10 of last year. “The goal is to save lives and protect the public,” Sernoffsky said.
When asked if the mayor’s office could confirm this account, Lutvak replied, “If that’s what PD said, then that’s what you should use.”
Krissa Corbett Cavouras, Communications Director at the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, said that she had not received any reports today of police officers writing citations to cyclists en masse on Market Street.
But it appears it will be ongoing. The high visibility enforcement will not last a month, Sernoffsky added. It will continue rotating through locations on the high-injury network indefinitely.
The most recent map of San Francisco’s high-injury network was published in 2022, based on five years of data (2017-2021). That map includes Market St, as well as virtually every major road in San Francisco, but does not completely reflect shifts in the design and use of certain city streets that have taken root in the years since then, like Slow Streets (launched in April of 2020) and Better Market Street (which closed Market Street to most car traffic beginning in January 2020).
When asked if this enforcement would include ticketing pedestrians and riders of non-motorized bicycles, Sernoffsky replied, “Anyone who is committing a traffic violation.”
An updated map of the high-injury network is due to be released in the next few months, said Sernoffsky, adding that he was not sure if SFPD was using the 2022 map, or an unreleased draft featuring more current data.