Goal to prevent traffic deaths in S. F. by 2024 not going well
When the driver of the Mini Cooper pulled over without signaling into the bike lane on North Point Street, right in the path of Jane Natoli’s bicycle, her only thought was, I’m going to die here.
Natoli smashed into the passenger’s side mirror and door and fell to the ground, breaking a bone in her left index finger. The Jan. 12 crash was the third time the Inner Richmond resident, who cycles as her primary form of transportation, collided with a car in San Francisco. But she considers herself lucky: Friends have broken their shoulders and injured their necks, and she’s well aware that cyclists are killed by cars on the city’s streets.
“These are real people, they’re not data points,” Natoli said. “It’s clear we need to do more and we need to do it quicker. We are not going to reach our goal at the rate we’re going.”
That goal is eliminating the city’s traffic deaths by 2024, a 10year plan initiated in 2014 called Vision Zero. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency has struggled over the past few years to meet the goal and even the pandemic — during which traffic dropped — hasn’t helped as much as expected. The San Francisco Police Department reported 463 traffic injury collisions under shelterinplace from March 17 to June 30, compared with 1,002 in the same time last year. The numbers don’t include hospital
records, so the total count could be higher.
But 21 people have been killed so far this year, only slightly lower than last year’s 29. Shelterinplace initially eased congestion, although car use is again rising, but driving speeds have increased, according to reports provided by Inrix, a locationbased data collection company.
“We’ve done some things that we’re really proud of, and yet we see far too many fatalities still on our streets,” Tom Maguire, the transit agency’s Sustainable Streets director, told its board in a meeting Tuesday. “We are not on a trend line that suggests we’re going to get to zero by 2024.”
As of Sep. 30, there were 19 traffic fatalities, compared with 23 during the same time period last year. Two more people were killed last week.
During Tuesday’s meeting, a dozen residents and transit advocates challenged the board to reign in increasingly aggressive driving and fund proven ways to make streets safer, including more daylighting, which removes visual barriers within a minimum of 10 feet of a crosswalk, and protecting intersections, such as by adding a concrete island at the corner, which slows turning cars.
Olivia Gamboa, a doctor at Kaiser Permanente San Francisco and board member of the nonprofit Walk SF, said she’s treated multiple senior citizens, and once a cancer patient who was too weak to cross the road in time, who’ve been seriously injured when hit by cars.
“I know that you know how to make our streets safer,” she told the board. “This is not a technical puzzle. This is a moral imperative.”
Alvin Lester, founding member of San Francisco Bay Area Families for Safe Streets, said Vision Zero hasn’t yet brought promised changes on many of the city’s deadliest streets, including where his son, Arman Hakeem Lester, was killed in 2014.
“I believe Vision Zero is still the right solution, but it can only succeed if the city quickly and systematically redesigns streets to protect people and put a stop to rampant dangerous driving,” Lester said in a statement.
Some agency officials said shelterinplace was the prime time to make big changes, but that would cost money that the pandemic-pummeled agency doesn’t have right now.
Board chair Gwyneth Borden argued that “preserving life is worth sacrificing for.”
The SFMTA’s director of transportation, Jeffrey Tumlin, said there was “no excuse” for pedestrian injuries and fatalities, but pointed out the agency faces hard fiscal choices in the near future.
“In order to allocate more resources to safety, we’ll have to cut Muni, we’ll also have to tap our reserves, the same source of funding to pay for basic operations once ( federal) funding runs out in December,” he said. “I’d be delighted to do that if I was confident we would still be able to pay the salaries of our staff 18 months from now.”
In Tuesday’s meeting, the agency analyzed problems and how to fund possible fixes. The most common driver violations that caused fatalities were failing to yield to rightofway at crosswalks, running a red light and speeding.
More than 70% of severe and fatal traffic injuries occur on just 12% of city streets, called the highinjury network by the agency. This year, the most people – eight – were killed while walking. Around 41% of pedestrian collisions occurred in a crosswalk and nearly 40% involved a leftturning driver. Older people are especially vulnerable, with 41% of victims last year over the age of 65.
Speed is the biggest factor in traffic death— dropping it by 10 mph is proven to halve the chance someone dies in a crash, agency staff said. When shelterinplace orders hit, city traffic congestion decreased, but average speed spiked on freeways, and rose slightly on inner streets, according to data from the San Francisco County Transportation Authority.
“COVID19 has led to fewer trips, but more speeding, so I’m thinking about 2020 being particularly more worrisome,” said Leah Shahum, director of the nonprofit Vision Zero Network. She challenged the city agency to reduce the speed limit, which is largely 25 mph.
The agency doesn’t have the authority to do so on all roadways without a rigorous process dictated by the state. Automated speed enforcement with surveillance cameras is also illegal in California. The agency is working with elected officials to change these laws.
Until that happens, the agency turns to engineering solutions, said Ryan Reeves, program lead for Vision Zero. The agency has daylighted 500 intersections, improved signals that led to a 50% reduction in collisions in the South of Market area and lengthened crossing times and gave pedestrians a head start in nearly 70% of crosswalks in the highinjury network. Future possible solutions include dropping the speed limit to 20 mph in the Tenderloin and banning more turns on red lights.
The agency is seeking millions to implement more of these methods, but its budget crisis could balloon if no more federal funding comes in. Advocates say the city can’t afford to delay action.
“If we want to consider the carnage on our streets as a serious thing that we can’t accept,” said Jon Winston, who serves on the agency’s pedestrian safety advisory committee, “then we’re going to have to make sacrifices concerning speed and how much traffic there is.”