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Alexis Madrigal: Welcome to Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal. If you look at a chart of per capita traffic deaths since the year 2000 for wealthier countries like South Korea, Australia, Canada, the U.K., and the U.S.—pretty much everywhere—you see massive declines from the turn of the millennium until 2014. But after that, something major changes. While those other countries have seen traffic deaths continue to go down, our traffic fatalities start to go up, so that by now, we’re a clear outlier.
That’s a national problem, but you might imagine San Francisco would be better. After all, the city committed to Vision Zero back in 2014, a concept that originated in Sweden that set out the goal to end traffic deaths. And yes, San Francisco’s per capita traffic fatalities are some of the lowest in the nation. But if you look at fatalities per vehicle mile traveled, San Francisco becomes the worst performer out of the Bay Area counties.
In particular, there’s been a spate of pedestrians killed by drivers over the last couple of months. So we’ve made progress, but there are still places to go to make our roads safer. Here to tell us about them, we’re joined by Jodie Medeiros, who is executive director of the advocacy group Walk San Francisco. Welcome.
Jodie Medeiros: Thank you, Alexis. We’re glad to be here.
Alexis Madrigal: Great to have you. We’re also joined by Viktoriya Wise, who’s director of the streets division at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. Welcome.
Viktoriya Wise: Good morning. Good to be here.
Alexis Madrigal: So let’s start with you, Jodie. A pedestrian was killed last Friday—that’s six deaths in six weeks, we think. What happened?
Jodie Medeiros: At Walk San Francisco, we really believe that nobody should risk their life just walking down the street. But in San Francisco, as you mentioned, three people are hit every day. And behind every serious crash—whether fatal or not—are families whose lives have changed forever. These are incidents that are preventable.
With six pedestrians killed in six weeks, including a child, that’s really a call for action. Annually, pedestrians make up over half of traffic deaths. These are people simply walking, and they’re bearing the biggest burden of the city not managing this like the crisis that it is. That’s why Walk San Francisco exists—we center our work on the people impacted by traffic crashes.
Alexis Madrigal: When you look at this, Viktoriya, it’s hard to get any statistic in a large city down to zero. But it’s obvious that pedestrian deaths are still happening a lot right now. Where do you start? Do you go to a map of the most dangerous places and say, “Okay, these are where we need to go”? How do you approach it?
Viktoriya Wise: First of all, let me just say it’s been a devastating six weeks or so. It’s really hard to have people die on the streets of San Francisco. And where I start is with the philosophy behind it—thinking about our culture and the fact that we’ve come to accept pedestrian fatalities and severe injuries as a kind of cost of driving.
Our goal in San Francisco, and in many cities, is to reduce and ultimately eliminate all fatalities. I don’t want any of us—or any of the listeners—to get a phone call saying your family member, your spouse, your child has been in a severe crash or, God forbid, has died. All of our work is centered around preventing and minimizing these crashes.
From a high-level perspective, we want to reduce those numbers. And while we can talk about progress and data, where we do start is with data. Last week, the city published a high-injury network map. That’s 13% of streets where 78% of fatalities and severe injuries happen. So we know the dangerous streets we need to focus on.
Alexis Madrigal: We’re talking about San Francisco’s efforts to improve pedestrian safety. We’re joined by Viktoriya Wise, director of the streets division at SFMTA, and Jodie Medeiros, executive director of Walk San Francisco.
We’re talking about streets that feel unsafe or could use traffic calming or other measures. Is there one in your neighborhood? You can give us a call: 866-733-6786. What’s happening there, and what would you like to see done? Again, 866-733-6786. The email is forum@kqed.org.
Viktoriya, I want to come back to Vision Zero. It was adopted in 2014. Do you think it helped the city make progress? And was it effective to set such a difficult goal?
Viktoriya Wise: I think it absolutely helped the city make progress, and it was effective. First of all, we’ve had a lot of learnings from Vision Zero. We started out focusing on engineering solutions, enforcement, and education campaigns, but we’ve learned a lot in the last decade.
In particular, we’ve learned that people make mistakes—that’s inevitable. So how do we build systems that mitigate the impact of those mistakes? Over the last decade, we’ve adopted what’s called the Safe Systems approach. We look at the systems we put together: roadway design, post-crash care, vehicle design, and human behavior—like not driving drunk, wearing a helmet, or not riding scooters on sidewalks. And of course, speed, which is the number one factor in fatalities and severe injuries.
Bringing all of that together is how we’re approaching the next decade. It’s now a nationally recognized best practice. In San Francisco, we’re moving in that direction collectively—with policymakers, the Board of Supervisors under the leadership of Myrna Melgar, and our mayor, who issued an executive directive last December for a Safe Streets initiative.
Alexis Madrigal: Jodie, from your perspective, some of the things Viktoriya mentioned—like redesigning cars—are difficult for a city to accomplish. How would you prioritize making the city safer for pedestrians?
Jodie Medeiros: There are two things the city has done recently that point to real progress. I agree with Viktoriya—Vision Zero is a work in progress. Now that we know what works, we need to double down.
In 2019, SFMTA started an innovative “quick-build” program. This is about redesigning streets that were built for vehicles so they work better for people walking, biking, and so on—using lower-cost materials to test designs before making them permanent.
In the Tenderloin, over six years, 100% of streets received these treatments, and pedestrian-involved collisions have been reduced by 30 to 50%. That’s real progress. In 2019, there were four pedestrian fatalities there; in 2025, there were zero.
The second thing is speed cameras. Walk San Francisco and our partners at Families for Safe Streets spent ten years pushing for legislation in Sacramento. We finally passed it so that six cities in California can implement them.
Alexis Madrigal: Why was that so hard?
Jodie Medeiros: Legislators didn’t initially see it as a solution. But we knew from other cities—and from data—that it works. We had to refine the legislation over time. Now California has one of the most equitable and fair speed camera laws in the country.
Unfortunately, we’re limited in how many cameras we can have—San Francisco has 33, Oakland has 18, and Los Angeles will have up to 250, based on population. But they’re working—speeds are coming down.
Alexis Madrigal: How do you measure that, Viktoriya?
Viktoriya Wise: We track data from warnings and citations, and we also collect field data—like from those tubes you drive over on the road. We’ve seen a 78% reduction in speeding. That’s about 40,000 people reducing their speed. And as I mentioned, that’s critical—because it’s physics. The faster you go, the more likely a pedestrian will be severely injured or killed.
Alexis Madrigal: Right—it’s mass times velocity. And we’ve got larger vehicles now—trucks and SUVs that sit higher, which people may like individually, but collectively they’re more deadly in crashes.
Viktoriya Wise: That’s right.
Alexis Madrigal: We’ve got a comment from a listener. Carlos writes: “Perhaps the most important variable in pedestrian safety is momentum. The faster the traffic, the deadlier the incidents. Less congestion—like during the government shutdown—could lead to higher speeds. Could that explain the recent increase in fatalities?”
I’m guessing you wouldn’t attribute it to just one cause?
Viktoriya Wise: That’s right. It’s a combination of factors. But the listener is correct to point out what we saw during COVID—people drove faster and got used to that behavior. Over time, we have to look at trends and dig into the data.
We’re working with the Department of Public Health using the new high-injury network map to understand not just where crashes happen, but why—what time of day, what conditions, and so on.
Alexis Madrigal: That’s SFMTA’s Viktoriya Wise. We’re also joined by Walk San Francisco’s Jodie Medeiros. We’ll be back with more right after the break.
