Here's something you don't hear often enough: a San Francisco city program that actually works, and a city government responding by doing more of it.

The Market Street Safe Corridor program — which deploys trained street ambassadors to de-escalate situations, connect people with services, and generally keep the peace without defaulting to 911 — has cut emergency calls in half along the corridor. Commuters say they feel safer. That's not a press release metric. That's real.

So the city is expanding the program to Powell Street, one of the busiest pedestrian corridors in the entire Bay Area and a stretch that, let's be honest, has seen better days.

We'll give credit where it's due. Street ambassadors represent exactly the kind of lean, targeted intervention that fiscal conservatives and civil libertarians can both get behind. You're not deploying cops to every uncomfortable sidewalk situation. You're not building another $50 million navigation center that somehow never seems to navigate anyone anywhere. You're hiring people — many of them with lived experience of the streets themselves — to show up, be present, and actually talk to people.

The cost-per-outcome here almost certainly beats the alternative. Every 911 call that doesn't happen is a police response that doesn't need to happen, a dispatcher freed up, a potential escalation avoided.

That said, we'll stay skeptical until the Powell Street numbers come in. Market Street is one environment; Powell, with its dense retail, tourist foot traffic, and BART station choke points, is another. The program will need adequate staffing, clear accountability metrics, and — this is SF, so we have to say it — actual follow-through on funding.

Expand what works. Track the results. Don't let this become another promising pilot that quietly balloons into a bureaucratic jobs program with no measurable outcomes.

But right now? This looks like a win. We'll take it.