Derek Wiseth has lived by the bottom of an incline on Fulton Street for decades and while he cherishes the proximity to Golden Gate Park, the location has had its adverse effects — like the time he woke up to find a car had blown past Arguello Boulevard to launch off a parked vehicle and gotten lodged in a treetop. “People have always sped,” Wiseth told SFGATE on Monday.
Since the intersection of Fulton and Arguello is prone to reckless driver behavior, the site was one of 33 locations that San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency chose to install speed cameras at last year. The intersection then recorded the highest number of speeding violations — almost half of the average daily total violations — but that’s starting to drastically change.
SFMTA released its latest batch of data from the cameras to the public May 1 and its leaders were delighted by the results. “The new data shows that cameras have been very effective in getting people to change their behavior and slow down in the corridors where we’ve installed them,” Julie Kirschbaum, SFMTA’s director of transportation, said during a board of directors meeting on Tuesday.
Before the cameras started issuing warnings and fines, the agency said it logged over 45,500 counts of speeding across the 33 locations. That’s been cut down to under 6,000 — a nearly 80% decrease in the number of vehicles speeding 10 mph or more…