Bernal Heights is built on the slopes of a hill, and our neighborhood is home to several of the steepest streets in the City. So it should come as no surprise to anyone, really, that runaway cars and trucks are a very real danger here.
Last Friday, a runaway truck caused some havoc on Treat Street just south of Precita Park. Thankfully, no one was hurt, and property damage was minimal, but it could have been much, much worse.
Neighbor Christian shared this report from the scene:
Just another afternoon on the steep incline of the 1500 block of Treat Ave. The truck missed our house by 24″.
The tree was the only thing that stopped it; Otherwise we would have had a living-room filled with other people’s Amazon diapers and music.
Afterward, the block was filled with stories of past runaways. Somehow this truck without brakes threaded the needle between Eddy the dog, a neighbor’s steps, and her car, missing all, and came to rest in the poor tree.
PHOTO: Courtesy of Neighbor Christian
Bernalwood 
The runaway number of delivery vehicles on our streets is trashing the neighborhood. What do we really need that can’ t be bought on Cortland or Mission or Bayshore?
Right! Let’s start a petition!!
An almost infinite number of things.
Near the top of my list: Jobs for delivery truck drivers.
We live in an unsafe world…
There was that crane that took out a bunch of cars on Nevada years ago.
http://jalopnik.com/394507/look-out-its-a-runaway-crane
ATTN: FUF
Another great reason to plant street trees!
Lucky it wasn’t one of these runaway streetcars.. like this one from 70 years ago: http://opensfhistory.org/Display/wnp32.0038.jpg
OMG, that was reeeally bad!
Notice the trash rate adjustments and the extra cans Recology wants people to have? Well, deliveries from Amazon and others have become SO big that homes today are putting out nearly double the trash of just 5 years ago. While much of it is recyclable cardboard, some of it is a lot of plastic bags (wrappers) and strange plastics that are not recyclable. So, I guess people might think twice about the few dollars saved by ordering online versus the extra trash they’ll have to put out and the possible delivery truck crashes.
This crash was clearly an outlier. Add all of the truck trips per day, or month or year in Bernal. Now figure what percent ended in brake failures or crashes of any sort. A tiny percentage.
It’s news BECAUSE it’s rare.
We’ve had a few runaways on Treat in the last 10 or so years. There was the time when a tow truck unhooked a BMW, without setting in the parking break, it went rolling and crashed into the house right above where this truck crashed (and took out several other cars in the process); and then there was the runaway van whose parking brake failed, rolling backwards stopping only after it knocked over a telephone pole. And while not a runaway, an older (late) neighbor lost control of their car and crashed into the 2 houses just below this one.
Nothing as spectacular as that crane crash in Nevada, though. I talked to the guy who got his classic caddie crushed, he loved that car and said he had just finished restoring it a few months back.