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Day Around the Bay
Who was it who said "never work with children or animals?" Well, whoever you are, Bevan Dufty's proving you wrong, as he proudly announces that he's united the two famously-warring factions in San Francisco politics and worked out a compromise about who gets to use Duboce Park.
Duboce Park currently prohibits off-leash dogs -- though you'd never know it from watching the labrador and shepherd mixes gamboling bucolically on the grass there. (Full disclosure: as a devoted dog aunt, we have personally off-leashed one of the very best dogs in the world at Duboce -- maybe even just last week! Sorry, Supervisor Dufty!)
Parents and dog owners have been arguing for years now about whether they could fence off an area of the open space so kids and dogs could play unimpeded by the other. As SFist Jon says, "The dog owners were all 'when you're a dog owner/you're a dog owner all the way/from the first poop-a-scoop/To your last walk of the day' while the parents have been all 'when you're a parent/when the baby's spit hits the fan/You got parents around/cause you're a family man!' and threatening to start a rumble tonight." (Who knew SFist Jon loved musical theater?)
After 40+ hours of meetings, all sides have agreed that there will be no fence, but the park will be informally divided into three zones: a playground with dog restrictions; an on-leash dog section, and an off-leash dog section. Now, maybe we're just being naive here, but was it really that hard to come up with that? (Apparently one small group of hardcore dog fans wanted the whole park to be off-leash, but ultimately came around to the compromise.)
Picture from the Friends of Duboce Park website
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Hey, Rita (or anyone else), isn't it scary having your dogs off leash so close to the N tracks?
Maybe it's just because SFist Franny's a bit of a bolter, so I'm paranoid, but so many dogs seem to run dangerously close to the N when they're playing at Duboce park.
How do you avoid smooshed pooch there?
A few months back, we wrote about how we pictured the debate as a musical.
The off-leash section is technically fenced in, though the fence is nothing more than a pair of wires strung between decorative bollards, and only serve to keep in the dogs who are well behaved anyway. Though if this makes parents feel safer, then so be it, this is an issue driven by fear more than fact and we're looking forward to the new foot path which improves Muni access.
As for the N-Judah tracks, the dogs seem to be much more aware of approaching trains than the children we see from time to time playing off-leash outside the fenced off children's playground.
We'd love to see Muni completely redo the train stop so it's safer and easier to board (currently boarding an inbound train means walking onto into the street and into oncoming traffic for those who need to pay their fare), perhaps turning both Duboce Park and Duboce and Church into high-platform stations with NextBus and all the amenities.