San Francisco is playing catch up with its California brethren and has finally decided to post closure notices on restaurants considered to be health hazards.

Mission Local reports the president of the Health Commission also promised to propose further policy changes to boost restaurant inspections and help diners more easily find a restaurant’s health score.

That don’t mean much.

Dr. Rajiv Bhatia, San Francisco’s director of occupational and environmental health, said,

“We serve the entire population of the city,” underscoring the need for information regarding health code compliance to be made publicly available.

After the meeting, Bhatia said he would advocate for more transparency within the food safety inspection program, including posting inspection scores within five feet of a restaurant’s entrance — which is the policy in cities such as Los Angeles and New York.

In 2004, Supervisor Chris Daly advocated a letter-grade system for restaurant inspections, which Los Angeles and now New York use. The system would have ranked restaurants by a series of letter grades from A to D, based on health code compliance, and would have required them to post that grade in plain view. The executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association at the time called the grades “scarlet letters.”

The ordinance faced stiff opposition and was ultimately defeated. The present scoring system was a compromise resulting from that effort, Bhatia said. The system offers more granularity into a restaurant’s health code practices, he said, but conceded that “scores are imperfect.”