Safer streets is choice S.F. must make
On the evening of March 18, a usually busy West Portal intersection was unusually quiet.
The street was closed to hold the vigil for Diego Cardoso de Oliveira, Matilde Moncado Ramos Pinto and their two young children, the San Francisco family killed after being hit by the driver of a speeding sport-utility vehicle just two days earlier.
Despite hundreds of people filling the street in front of the public library branch, you could hear the sound of the Muni train on West Portal Avenue and the sound of the wind passing through the trees. People grieved mostly in silence. But then friends of the family arrived. They began placing photos of the victims with flowers, stuffed animals and a white stroller. They hung photos on the letters that spelled out “SF GRIEVES.”
What had happened in West Portal became all too real as we got glimpses of the sweet faces of Joaquin, 2, and Cauê, 3 months. Sobs began to fill the air.n
I share this because our whole city needs to feel, even for just a moment, the shared heartbreak, humanity and vulnerability with what happened in West Portal. Because it’s happening all too often.
Four other San Francisco pedestrians have already died in 2024. Every 14 hours on average, a traffic crash sends somebody severely injured to San Francisco General Hospital. Over the weekend, another pedestrian was taken to the hospital after a driver crashed into a pole at a bus stop near Golden Gate Park. According to a witness, the pole grazed a young boy and came within inches of a teenage girl.
Cars, trucks and SUVs can become deadly weapons in an instant, especially when a driver is speeding — the leading cause of traffic crashes in San Francisco. And while the people inside vehicles have never been safer, people outside are even more at risk as vehicles grow bigger, heavier and more powerful.
But it doesn’t have to be like this. While the threat is complex and challenging, there are solutions to protect us no matter how we’re getting around.
San Francisco is already using many of these. In the past decade, San Francisco adopted Vision Zero — a data-based, systems approach to preventing traffic crashes — and it has brought many solutions to our streets, especially in the past five years.
Some of the widest, deadliest streets have been redesigned, including removing travel lanes to calm traffic. Speed limits have been lowered on 44 miles of streets, and there are more than 30 miles of low-traffic Slow Streets. People can enjoy car-free spaces on JFK Promenade in Golden Gate Park, the Great Highway, in McLaren Park and Market Street. There are 46 miles of protected bike lanes and over 20 miles of Muni priority bus lanes. The entire Tenderloin neighborhood now has 20 mph speed limits, and no-turn-on-red and pedestrian safety zones at every intersection. The Vision Zero Quick Build program, which has dramatically improved how fast street redesigns happen, is a model for other cities. By the end of this year, all of the city’s most dangerous intersections will have lights timed to give pedestrians a head start and more time to cross. And just last week, the Metropolitan Transportation Agency presented its proposed list of 33 locations to pilot speed cameras in early 2025.
And yet traffic deaths and severe injuries
haven’t gone down, and pedestrians continue to make up the lion’s share of victims in San Francisco.
Meanwhile, New York City, the first city in the United States to adopt Vision Zero (San Francisco was second), just had the lowest number of pedestrian deaths on record — in more than 100 years.
What is New York doing differently? It applies solutions faster, at a broader scale and in a more layered way. Speed limits have been lowered citywide, and around 2,500 speed cameras are enforcing these limits. And there is a pilot for speed limiters in city vehicles. A small but powerful example: turn calming — placing rubber bumpers or posts in an intersection so drivers must make turns more slowly — is installed at nearly 1,000 intersections and has led to a 33% decrease in severe pedestrian injuries. New York City also has much more transparency, interagency collaboration and metrics driving Vision Zero forward.
We need that in San Francisco, and
there isn’t a moment to waste. Vision Zero must get the focus, funding and full authority needed to succeed.
Traffic safety has been far down the priority list for too long. When babies and children are being killed, this is unconscionable. It’s also frustrating because Vision Zero is about saving lives and becoming the city we want to be. Safe streets make our neighborhoods stronger, healthier, more equitable and more joyful. They are an economic recovery plan and a climate plan wrapped into one that gets more people out in their neighborhoods in sustainable ways.
Yes, a safety-first plan for our streets may mean it will take a couple more minutes to cross town in a car. But this is an easy tradeoff to save lives and move our city in the right direction — because we should all be safe when we walk out our front door each day in San Francisco.