Crash
The skating community has lost another classic skate spot to anti-skating infrastructure. Just this week, the San Francisco city government implemented speed bumps on Dolores Hill- the location of the famous (or infamous, depending on who you ask) Dolores Hill Bomb.
Every July, skaters from around the Bay area gather for a full day of rowdy hill bombs. The skating is wicked fast, the speed wobbles are terrifying, and the crashes are gnarly.
The implementation of the speed bumps comes as a result of numerous life-threatening crashes that have occurred over the past few years. Last year, a skater suffered severe brain trauma from a nasty crash. In 2017, tensions rose with the San Francisco police department after a skater and police car collided. This year, a skater and cyclist crashed into one another sending both individuals to the hospital. The cyclist tragically died two days later.
In response to the speed bumps and push back from the SF skate community, SFMTA director (San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency), Jeffery Tumlin stated that he regretted the necessity to add speed bumps and spoke highly of San Francisco’s legendary skate culture.
In a Twitter post, Tumlin wrote:
“SF’s streets are for mobility and joy for everyone. SF skaters, we need help elevating bystanders’ lives over your own risk. We have many hills. Work with us”.
What’s a skater to do when they get to the bottom of the hill to only then find out about these dots..? Use their brakes? Seems like they want to take more lives rather than save them.
Exactly, provide support instead of making it more dangerous! What’s a skater to do when they reach the bottom of the hill only to all of a sudden find out about those dots? Use their brakes? Haha well guess they want to take lives instead of save them
Good luck stopping skateboarders. All it will take is a propane torch and a scraper bar and those dots are gone. SF has hundreds of spots to Hill Bomb, move to a different location. It will continue, Skateboarders don’t give two FKS about your speed dots.
The cyclist in the collision died two days ago (on Sunday, July 19). That information could have been included in the article.
Per SF news, the “speed bumps” (actually rows of Botts’ Dots) were installed a day before the cyclist died and an SF official did mention that the cyclist had not died after erroneously reporting his death. It looks like this article was based on information from the weekend.