Mid-Market Madness, Continued

No sooner did we post a story about a man, apparently curled up on a boarding island on mid-Market rolling under an F-Market & Wharves streetcar, did we see this post from SFist pop up, showing a disturbed woman attacking an F-line streetcar (No. 1079) at Fifth and Market, and then herself being attacked viciously by another woman. Here’s one of the two eyewitness cellphone videos that appears on the SFist post.

Thank goodness for the presence of mind of the streetcar operator, who kept the car stopped and only left the controls to chase off the jerk who took advantage of the situation to casually tag the car’s windshield. It’s all on the video.
As we mentioned in our last post, Market Street Railway is committed to working with SFMTA to improve safety for F-line streetcars, operators, and passengers along the line, especially in mid-Market. We’re also committed to helping the Mayor’s economic revitalization plans for the area by showcasing the F-line streetcars as an efficient, attractive transit connection to attractions in both directions.
But as anyone knows who has tried to walk mid-Market Street in broad daylight, let alone nighttime, scenes like this have to become less common for the area to reach the goals the mayor has set for it.
We admit it: we were too PC (politically correct) in our earlier post, where we lumped in folks like this with those immersed in their own cellphone or earbud worlds as “people who are disoriented or distracted in one way or another.” The cellphone and earbud crowd can indeed endanger themselves, and vehicles, by obliviously stepping into traffic when they shouldn’t, but that’s nothing compared to people who seemingly have no idea where they are or what they’re doing. And in this video, we have two such, fighting each other, with a jerk tagger on top of it. All in broad daylight on Market Street.
Seeing this video reminded me of a personal experience a few weeks ago that I had chosen to ignore: walking to a meeting at SFMTA headquarters and being verbally threatened out of nowhere by a man at Tenth and Market who followed me up the street screaming the most personal kinds of profanities and waving his fists. Again, not an uncommon sight on mid-Market.
If this sort of thing isn’t somehow addressed, the current realities of mid-Market may be its future realities, no matter how much effort property owners and the Mayor’s Office make.