For pedestrians:

S.F. unveils a plan to make streets safer.

Almost as if scripted, a delivery truck trying to beat a red light veered around the corner at Fifth and Howard streets at lunchtime Thursday, sweeping through two crosswalks just as Donte Greer stopped to talk about the dangers of being a pedestrian in San Francisco.

“See — that’s what I’m talking about,” said Greer, 37, a pharmacy technician who’s taking a class at nearby Heald College. “They’re running lights, cutting corners, everything. Especially during the commute. You have to be more aware, more conscious.”

Down the block moments later, a couple of pedestrians scrambled for safety as a tour bus took a wide turn — over the sidewalk at Fifth and Mission streets.

No one was hit in either of those incidents but they point-

ed out the hazards of being a pedestrian in San Francisco on the day Mayor Ed Lee announced a plan to invest millions to build safer intersections, and supervisors and pedestrian advocates called on city agencies to develop a Vision Zero strategy to eliminate all fatal vehicle collisions in 10 years.

Despite an international reputation for being a great walking city, an average of three pedestrians a day are hit by cars and trucks in San Francisco. Last year, 21 pedestrians died after being struck by vehicles, one of the highest totals in years. So far this year, three pedestrians have been killed in collisions.

Girl’s death a catalyst

Since 6-year-old Sophia Liuwas struck and killed in a crosswalk near Civic Center on New Year’s Eve, city officials have announced campaigns to make the streets safer for pedestrians, efforts advocates have called inadequate.

On the steps of City Hall on Thursday, Lee gave his support to Walk First, a city program that will invest $17 million to make 170 intersections — many in the Tenderloin and South of Market — safer for pedestrians. That figure, which is money the city already has set aside, would increase to $50 million and cover 265 intersections if voters approve a package of transportation taxes and fees scheduled for the November ballot.

But making all needed improvements would cost $240 million, and no one’s saying where that money will come from.

“That’s the big question,” said Nicole Schneider, executive director of Walk SF, a pedestrian advocacy group. “It will require the city to be thoughtful about where its priorities are.”

But Schneider praised the city’s investment and the Walk First strategy, which uses data gathered from collisions and pedestrian surveys to identify dangerous intersections and devise specific safety strategies.

“It’s a smart investment that will fix our most dangerous streets,” she said.

Key sites identified

Ed Reiskin, transportation director for the Municipal Transportation Agency, said the focus will be on “highimpact, low-cost pedestrian improvement projects at key locations of concern.” Improvements on streets will include such things as narrower traffic lanes, pedestrian refuge islands, sidewalk extensions at intersections, speed humps, traffic signal timing changes, turn bans, new mid-block crosswalks, more pedestrian countdown signals and flashing lights at crosswalks.

Police Cmdr. Mikail Ali, who heads the MTA’s traffic enforcement efforts, said Thursday at a meeting of the Board of Supervisors’ Neighborhood Services and Safety Committee that the department issued 43 percent more traffic citations in January than the year before. That total increased by 6 percent in February, he said.

Schneider said those efforts should go a long way toward the Vision Zero goal of no traffic fatalities by 2014. But it will take more, she acknowledged.

“For a long time, we’ve been creating transportation systems where people are encouraged to speed,” she said. “Now we have to go back to the drawing board. It’s going to take not only changing engineering and street designs, but changing our culture.”