Editor:
City officials and agencies like SFMTA say westside traffic isn’t worse and that the data proves it. But when you dismiss the people living the experience, such data stops mattering. This isn’t a debate about traffic data.
I posted on Nextdoor asking how the Upper Great Highway (UGH) closure has affected people’s lives. Within days, I received 72 responses – far too many to include here. You’ll find the same stories across social media.
A divorced mom in the Outer Richmond used to rely on UGH to bring her kids to their dad’s in the Sunset. That once-simple routine is now a maze of speed bumps and stop signs through Golden Gate Park, 19th Ave and residential streets.
“Driving through Golden Gate Park, Sunset and 19th Avenue is so frustrating that I started doing all my errands in Marin. I go to Costco in Novato and Whole Foods in Mill Valley. It’s crazy, but faster.”
Another parent used to enjoy peaceful drives with their disabled son on the way to the Pomeroy Center. Now it’s gridlock and stress.
“It’s taken a sweet experience and turned it into a stressful chore.”
Another therapeutic pool user called the “new park” hazardous:
“Bikes, dogs, strollers and seniors all crammed together. It’s not safe for people who can’t move out of the way quickly and they shouldn’t have to.”
From tradespeople to workers, the stories continue:
“Try getting around that area to do service on people’s property. Longer travel, less parking. Makes for a higher overhead.”
“I left my job partly because the closure added 30 minutes to my commute to Burlingame. I also rarely shop in the Sunset anymore.
One neighbor reports:
“We now have big rigs and steady rush hour traffic on 21st Avenue. There are three preschools here it’s dangerous. What used to take me 11 minutes to Daly City BART now takes 30+.”
Others cite poor roads and motion sickness:
“The added time isn’t even the worst part. It’s the constant stop-and-go and bumpy roads. Our family gets motion sickness. It’s miserable.”
An Outer Parkside family shared how the closure has upended life for their elders:
“Our family includes three very senior members. They can’t walk on the beach unless we drive them – it’s too dangerous. They used to drive to Mt. Zion for appointments but now need help or Uber rides. They stopped going to their favorite Richmond markets. That weekly ritual, after 30 years, is gone.”
These aren’t isolated complaints. They reflect a growing crisis in livability on the City’s west side.
Many residents are voting with their feet, shopping and working elsewhere. The UGH closure isn’t just a traffic issue. It’s an economic one. When people avoid entire neighborhoods, small businesses suffer.
Our experiences matter. Our lives matter.
Please Vote YES on A
https://www.recallengardio2025.com
Wendy Liu
Categories: letter to the editor
Richmond Review/Sunset Beacon 
Recall Westside Traitor Joel Engardio. OPEN THE GREAT HIGHWAY!
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So your position is that the Chronicle’s independent study is lying? The city’s data is lying? Google Maps is lying? Apple Maps is lying? Waze is lying? You’re arguing that we shouldn’t listen to any of that, but instead we should make all our data-based decisions in this city based on some internally-inconsistent anti-park anecdotes you cherrypicked?
Opponents of Prop K had five months and $264,000 to convince the city that traffic would be a disaster. They failed to use any of that time or money to present any data, and the voters rejected their argument. And now, more than an entire year after Prop K was introduced—to say nothing of the five entire years people have spent debating this exact issue—we now know that the data and studies aren’t on your side, and the best you’ve got is a cherrypicked collection of complaints from Nextdoor that raise more questions than answers?
After five years of this debate, just as soon as the data is in and it doesn’t agree with you, now you conveniently argue that “this isn’t a debate about traffic data.” What are we even debating here if not traffic data? You lost the traffic data argument, so you only want to debate traffic vibes now?
If the goal is to address actual traffic concerns, then by all means let’s work constructively on that. Cars going too fast on residential streets? Let’s collect real data (Walk SF has radar guns they loan out for this) and push the city to address problems. But that’s not nearly as much fun as blaming the park for every bit of traffic in the city on nextdoor I guess.
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This comment perfectly shows the cold, data-obsessed mindset that’s driving a wedge between Engardio and the people he’s supposed to serve. It’s full of quick-fire questions and “gotcha” facts—but it completely overlooks the real struggles of thousands of Sunset residents whose daily lives have been made harder by longer commutes, lost access to vital roads, and constant frustration.
Just because you’re having a good day doesn’t mean everyone else is—and that kind of thinking is painfully self-centered. Ironically, his claim about his own “good commute” is exactly the kind of cherry-picking that dismisses the very real, varied experiences of families, seniors, and workers who rely on routes like the Upper Great Highway to get through their day.
Numbers can never show what it feels like when a senior can no longer drive independently to a doctor’s appointment, or when a parent is stuck in traffic, worried about being late to pick up their child. It can’t capture the stress and disappointment of promises broken.
When leaders and their defenders treat these struggles like “Nextdoor complaints” or “traffic vibes,” it’s no surprise so many feel unheard and invisible. That kind of dismissal breaks trust—and it breaks communities.
This isn’t just a debate about numbers. It’s about whether our leaders see us as people with real lives, real worries, and real needs. We deserve leaders who listen, who care, and who put people before data points.
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I don’t think it’s cold to say people with a factual basis for their arguments are going to get a better reception. If you’re going to argue that we shouldn’t have a park because needing to drive on a different street for one portion of a 7 mile trip to Mount Zion is the reason a senior can’t drive independently to a doctor’s appointment anymore, that argument is going to be more persuasive if you explain why. It’s an entirely valid feeling to have—feeling like you’re losing your independence and mobility and your world is getting smaller is terrifying. I have empathy for anyone with that feeling; it’s just not immediately clear why that feeling means this particular stretch of land should be a road and not a park.
And I think you know that data makes your point more persuasive, because in the very same sentence where you criticize me for being “data-obsessed,” you make a data-driven claim yourself: the “constant” experience of “thousands” of Sunset residents. The word for “I determined what a specific number of people are experiencing and how frequently they’re experiencing it” is “data.”
Numbers can’t show what those things feel like, but they can show the size and severity of a problem and the effects of a potential solution when arguing for a particular outcome. Because otherwise I can just play the same game. Numbers can never show what it feels like to stand at Sunset Dunes and watch the sunset along with your neighbors. Numbers can never show what it feels like to watch your kid master the pump track or play the piano next to the ocean. Numbers can never show what it feels like to push a relative along the Pacific coast in their wheelchair. What makes these feelings any more valid than yours? At the end of the day, we’ve got one public space and a conflict about how to use it, and we used the mechanisms we have in our democracy to try to convince each other of our positions and make a decision. I’m sorry that decision was not the outcome you wanted, but that’s not the same thing as not being heard.
I 100% agree with you that some people do feel unheard and invisible in this moment. But people opposed to the park have, over the past five years: successfully pushed city officials to put cars back on the Great Highway on weekdays, filed a lawsuit, opposed the weekend pilot legislation, ran the Yes on I campaign to try to make it 24/7 cars and no park, filed a city appeal, filed an appeal of that appeal, filed an appeal of that appeal of that appeal with the state, ran the No on K campaign, opposed the outcome with the California Coastal Commission, protested the park opening, filed another lawsuit, ran a recall petition drive, and are now running a recall campaign, to say nothing of all the other letter-writing campaigns, public hearings, op-eds, rallies, car parades, etc.
That’s quite a lot of being heard. That’s certainly not the same thing as feeling heard, but I’m not convinced that saying “the data doesn’t matter” is likely to persuade people of your position. There’s that old courtroom adage “If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell.” Saying the “data stops mattering” when you can’t muster any to support your argument sure feels like we’re down to the pounding the table phase of this whole thing. Far be it from me to deny anyone a good yell, but I personally want to live in a Sunset where we work with each other productively to improve our community—even when we may disagree on what that looks like—than one where we keep pounding the table and yelling.
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Life, Love, and Parenting from a Data Purist’s POV
Being a data purist isn’t just a hobby—it’s a lifestyle. When it comes to relationships, it means measuring affection by the frequency of text messages, the percentage of timely replies, and whether the partner’s emotional support scores above the median on a feelings spreadsheet. Romantic dinners? Only if the calorie count and budget align perfectly with predictive models of relationship satisfaction.
Parenting? Forget the messy chaos of hugs and tears. Every tantrum is logged, timed, and categorized. Sleep schedules are optimized to the millisecond. Milestones are tracked not by joyful memories, but by graphs and trend lines. Because if it’s not quantified, did it even really happen?
And sure, data is crucial in medicine, education, and science, good data saves lives, improves schools, and pushes society forward. But when it comes to the pulse of a community how it feels to live there, to navigate daily challenges, to find your place data can only tell part of the story.
Collecting perfect, objective data on complex human experiences like neighborhood traffic or quality of life? Nearly impossible. Meanwhile, thousands of neighbors share their lived realities every day frustrations, joys, fears that no spreadsheet could fully capture.
So while data purists obsess over perfect numbers and “objective” facts, the rest of us live in a world where feelings, trust, and community matter just as much if not more.
Maybe the real question isn’t how many cars pass by per hour, but how many people feel heard, respected, and cared for. And that’s a metric no radar gun or app can measure.
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Why the Data Purist’s Demands Are Absurd, Dangerous, and Just Plain Wrong
What Mr. Data Purist is really asking for isn’t better evidence it’s a surveillance state in miniature. A world where every human being is reduced to a GPS blip and a spreadsheet entry, stripped of context, emotion, and dignity.
Imagine the working parent driving her kids to school and then heading to work. In this dystopia, she’s not a person with responsibilities and struggles she’s a “data point” in a quarterly report. And her kids? Also tracked, logged, and rendered as tiny dots on a map. Strangers would have creepy amounts of access to every facet of their lives where they work, where their kids go to school, who their friends and families are, where they eat, shop… everything.
Nothing matters unless it’s measured, and everything measured must be tracked. It’s an impossible, unethical demand dressed up as “objectivity,” designed to erase any human story that threatens the data purist’s endgame.
What He’s Really Demanding
To satisfy this appetite for “numbers,” he’s essentially asking for:
To do this, you’d need:
Why It’s Wrong
This is not “good-faith research.” It’s building a permanent surveillance system under the guise of transportation planning. And once this data exists, it’s ripe for abuse, hacking, or mission creep.
The Endgame
This isn’t about neutral data or truth. It’s about demanding impossible, invasive evidence so human stories can be dismissed, the park closure justified, and anyone who disagrees painted as “emotional” or “irrational.”
Meanwhile, the people actually living with the consequences are too busy dealing with life to pander to these bad-faith demands. The sensible path is to accept that human experiences are enough! Not build a surveillance state to settle a park debate.
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“So your position is that the Chronicle’s independent study is lying?”
Is that too impossible to imagine given Sam Singer’s current employer?
Really?
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Jeff Bezos sat in a meeting with his senior leadership team, listening to the scratchy, looped music of Amazon’s customer service hotline for ten long minutes.
This was during the very early days of Amazon. His team were getting a lot of angry complaints from customers who had called the service hotline and been made to wait for ages. But the head of customer service insisted, week after week, that the hotline was working fine: the data showed most customers were getting through within sixty seconds.
Bezos was sceptical. So when the executive presented this data again at the weekly business review, Bezos suggested they call the hotline there and then. They did, and then waited in silence while nobody picked up. It must have been excruciating (I’m feeling bad for the executive just typing about it). But it prompted Amazon to investigate more deeply, and on doing so they found that the problem was real – they just hadn’t been measuring the right thing.
The experience led Bezos to coin an aphorism: “When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.”
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I’m extremely confused how me saying that we should work together as neighbors to solve neighborhood problems based on the facts together has been somehow been twisted into bizarre claims that I’m calling for the installation of surveillance cameras in everybody’s homes. It is indeed ironic that the large language model used to generate these comments is, in fact, the unfeeling algorithmic machine that you claim I am.
Facial recognition cameras in everyone’s homes? The recall people are so weird and off-putting.
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Let’s be clear no one actually believes you want cameras in everyone’s homes. The point is that the level of “proof” you’re demanding to acknowledge the impacts of the Great Highway closure would only be possible with surveillance-level data collection. That’s why people raise privacy concerns when “perfect data” is held up as the only valid form of evidence.
And as for the “AI-generated” remark this is exactly the kind of deflection that avoids engaging with the substance of what’s being said. The concerns here are real: the data you’re relying on often comes from agencies with clear policy agendas, and it doesn’t capture the full human impact. That’s why many residents want lived experience to be valued alongside statistics.
It’s not “weird” to point out that a road closure has disrupted commutes, increased neighborhood traffic, or made life harder for working families. What’s truly off-putting is dismissing your neighbors’ experiences simply because they can’t hand you a spreadsheet to prove them.
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I drove the Great Highway every day to take my kids to school in the Richmond. When UGH was closed, this commute increased by a minimum of 8 minutes, which included not only the slower transit across the Sunset but also crossing GG Park in a less efficient way. The return trip was often longer since the 19th/Sunset Ave routes are more volatile that UGH ever was. Multiply this by several trips for pickup/dropoffs and the UGH closure has sentenced my family to be in the car for at least an extra 1/2 hour per day.
UGH closing was a big change. There are naturally winners and losers associated with this change, and the losers in this case are westside working families with significant driving in their everyday routine. The denial of the Engardio/Sunset Dunes/Bicycle Gestapo side to admit their actions have had significant negative consequences to a large group of people has been shockingly dishonest, and shows the contempt that these people have for me, my family, and people like us. Just like a crazy Fox News uncle at Thanksgiving, it is hard to know if they truly believe what they are spewing or if it is just a means to an end.
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