There's a new crosswalk at Duboce & Steiner/Sanchez — right in the heart of the Wiggle — and apparently this qualifies as news in a city that spends billions on infrastructure. Welcome to San Francisco, where fresh paint on asphalt is cause for celebration.

Look, crosswalks are good. Pedestrian safety matters. Nobody's arguing otherwise. But the fanfare around what amounts to some new road striping tells you everything you need about how low the bar has been set for city government delivering basic infrastructure. As one SF resident put it: "Damn, our standards for pedestrian infrastructure are so low."

It gets better. Multiple locals pointed out that there already was a crosswalk at this location — visible on Google Street View as far back as 2022. So we may literally be applauding a repaint. Your tax dollars at work, folks.

The Wiggle — that beloved bike route zigzagging through the Lower Haight — is genuinely one of the more chaotic corridors in the city. Muni trains, confused drivers, and cyclists who treat stop signs as philosophical suggestions all converge in a stretch that, as one local noted, "doesn't even count as a real intersection." The area absolutely deserves better infrastructure. But a crosswalk (or a refreshed crosswalk) is not the transformative investment this corridor needs.

This is the pattern with SF's approach to pedestrian and bike safety: announce the bare minimum, hold a community event, take a victory lap, and move on. Meanwhile, the actual hard decisions — protected bike lanes, real traffic calming, rethinking how cars interact with transit corridors — get studied into oblivion. Another resident summed it up perfectly: "Bare minimum painted infrastructure on what should be so much more."

We're not asking for perfection. We're asking for a city that can do more than paint lines and pat itself on the back. The Wiggle deserves a real plan, not a photo op. And taxpayers deserve to know why even the simplest improvements take years to materialize — and why, when they finally arrive, they might just be a fresh coat of paint on something that already existed.