Can San Francisco Stop Traffic Violence? So Far, Efforts Are Failing

The last time Susan Civitts heard her brother’s voice was a phone call on Christmas. He promised Civitts that in the new year, he would come home to Pennsylvania to visit his sister and their family.

But around 5:30 p.m. on Jan. 4, Charles Albert Bollinger, 81, was struck by a car on Silver Avenue, just steps away from his home in San Francisco’s residential Portola District. Police said the driver fled immediately after the crash. Shortly after, Bollinger died of his injuries.

“He was a very special person,” Civitts told KQED. “He was my best friend.”

Bollinger’s death marked the city’s first traffic fatality of 2025, coming just days after the end of the deadliest year for San Francisco pedestrians in nearly two decades. The city’s 24th pedestrian was killed on the Great Highway on Dec. 27, only eight days before Bollinger.

A total of 41 people, including cyclists and motorists, were killed in traffic crashes in San Francisco in 2024. That’s the most since 2007, which also had 41 overall traffic deaths, 24 of which were pedestrians, according to the city’s publicly available data.

The worrying surge came despite Vision Zero, a decadelong initiative to eliminate traffic deaths on the city’s roadways by 2024. It’s clear something needs to change, and some observers hold out hope that new laws and automated enforcement coming this year could do just that — and revitalize the city’s commitment to Vision Zero.

“My hope is that 2025 is a pivot point,” said Marta Lindsey, communications director for Walk SF, a group that tracks pedestrian deaths and agitates for data-based, preventive approaches to reducing traffic violence. “Please, let this be the year we start to see the trajectory shift in a positive direction. It’s possible that we will see that change — if the city gets its act together.”

Throughout the Vision Zero initiative, some of the city’s most visible street changes have come in response to tragic deaths. Just last March, a family of four waiting for a bus in the West Portal neighborhood was killed by a speeding driver, a horrifying loss that briefly galvanized the city around the issue of traffic violence and spurred expedited safety improvements.

But for cities to rein in traffic deaths, advocates say, they will have to be less reactive and more proactive.

Lindsey and other proponents are encouraged by two moves in particular, set to roll out in the spring: automated speed cameras and a new daylighting law, which aims to prevent parked cars from obstructing drivers’ views at intersections.

These new policies, Vision Zero Network founder Leah Shahum said, are a good example of what happens when cities anticipate crashes instead of reacting to them.

“The sooner that a city can transition to incorporating that more proactive approach, the better,” Shahum said. “That’s where you’re going to see the big, big safety gains.”

Speed poses a deadly danger

When Jenny Yu talks about what happened to her mother in 2011, she uses the word “crash” or “collision” — not “accident” — because she and other advocates believe her mother’s life-changing injuries were preventable.

Yu’s mother, Judy, was walking to the beach when she was struck by a speeding 94-year-old driver turning left on Park Presidio Boulevard. Judy survived, but she suffered broken bones, a collapsed lung and a traumatic brain injury.

“She was a vibrant woman who really enjoyed being a mom and a grandma,” Yu said.

In the years after the crash, Yu started attending Walk SF community events and met others in the Bay Area affected by traffic violence. She learned about the connection between speed and safety: Speed was the No. 1 cause of all traffic crashes in San Francisco last year, according to the Municipal Transportation Agency.

In March, San Francisco will become the first city in California to turn on speed cameras, nearly a year and a half after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill authorizing the technology in six cities across the state. San Francisco will install 33 over the coming months, each in areas identified as having a high number of injuries.

Yu, a founding member of the Bay Area chapter of Families for Safe Streets, traveled to Sacramento with groups like Walk SF four times to fight for the cameras.

“This tool has been proven to help in other states and other countries,” Yu told KQED. “There’s a track record of this change that — if we’re willing to adopt it — has shown to save lives.”

Slowing down drivers, whether through speed cameras or street changes, would have a substantial effect on street safety. Last year, speed was responsible for a quarter of all fatalities in San Francisco — a figure that has reached as high as 40% in recent years. Statewide, more than a third of all traffic deaths are due to speeding and aggressive driving, according to data collected by UC Berkeley’s Safe Transportation Research and Education Center.

Speed can also make a significant difference in a pedestrian’s chances of surviving a crash. A person hit by a car traveling at 35 mph is five times more likely to die than a pedestrian hit by a car at 20 mph, notes a guide by the National Association of City Transportation Officials.

In addition to the cameras, San Francisco is experimenting with lower speed limits, which will be proposed on 11 more streets this year. The strategy stems from AB 43, a law passed in 2021 that gives local governments the ability to lower speed limits that were previously set by the state.

Until AB 43 took effect, California required cities to set speed limits by using the 85th percentile rule. It’s defined as the speed below which 85% of drivers were already going on a road, which, in theory, should be what they consider to be a safe speed. Caltrans calls this measure “the single most influential indicator” of what is safe and reasonable.

“It’s like setting a curfew based on when a teenager comes home,” Lindsey said.

The 85th percentile did not take into account pedestrians, cycling traffic, schools or any other conditions that might make the speed limit unsafe. AB 43 allows local governments to consider those factors.

Most of San Francisco’s streets have 25 mph speed limits, though some are higher. Lake Merced Boulevard, for example, is 35 mph and 40 in some sections, even near schools. In a 2022 survey, Walk SF documented numerous drivers exceeding 50 mph.

While not a silver bullet, lower speed limits are already making an impact in the Tenderloin — the neighborhood with the highest number of children in the city. Despite having one of the lowest rates of car ownership, every street in the neighborhood falls on the high-injury network.

Jaime Viloria, a Tenderloin resident and organizer with San Francisco Transit Riders, said neighborhood mobilization around infrastructure has helped reduce crashes and pedestrian deaths.

“In a dense neighborhood, we don’t have a lot of open space,” Viloria said. “The streets are open space.”

Making pedestrians more visible to drivers

After California’s new daylighting law took effect this year, making it illegal to park within 20 feet of the vehicle approach side of a crosswalk, San Francisco will begin issuing tickets on March 1, regardless of whether or not the curb is painted.

While the new law has drawn some frustration for reducing street parking, experts on urban design and transportation have celebrated it as a way to rethink public space.

“Street space is really, really precious in a city like San Francisco,” said David Zipper, a senior fellow at the MIT Mobility Initiative. “It’s worth asking: If we care about safety in the city, should we be using that space to store private property — which is what automobiles are — or should we be using it to create safe spaces for those who are walking and biking?”

Proponents frequently point to Hoboken, New Jersey, a city of 60,000 people that hasn’t had a pedestrian death in more than seven years. After an elderly resident was hit and killed by a van in 2015, the city limited street parking in its daylighting efforts, part of its commitment to Vision Zero.

On Silver Avenue in Portola, daylighting might have saved Bollinger’s life. Cars are frequently parked in front of the intersection, neighbors said, making it difficult for drivers to register pedestrians crossing on both sides.

Michelle Tsang, whose family lives above the unmarked crosswalk, said she avoids crossing there when she can.

“A lot of people assume that the cars will stop for them,” said Tsang, 22. “There’s not many stop signs on this part of the street, so sometimes you see cars going really fast.”

Too fast, said Steve and Therese Heller, who live next door to Bollinger and his son. While they were shocked to learn about Bollinger’s death, they weren’t surprised that the fatal collision happened at that corner.

“The visibility there is just really poor,” Steve Heller said. “No one thinks it’s an intersection.”

A nationwide struggle with traffic deaths

For all the efforts to make San Francisco’s streets safer for all, there are some factors that lie outside local control.

Although traffic fatalities nationwide have declined in recent years, the numbers overall remain at what U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg called “crisis levels” in a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration report from September.

One key reason is that cars are bigger and faster than ever before. SUVs and pickup trucks — which have themselves steadily added pounds and inches — now constitute more than four out of every five new cars sold in the U.S., up from just over half in 2013, even as national household size steadily declines.

“We reward car manufacturers who make their vehicles more like tanks,” outgoing SFMTA Chief Jeffrey Tumlin told KQED’s Forum this month. “And that, of course, simply exports the safety problem to more vulnerable road users.”

While SUVs may be safer for the person behind the wheel, research has shown them to be much more dangerous for everyone else on the road, including other drivers. Children are eight times more likely to die when struck by an SUV compared to lighter and smaller cars.

Meanwhile, studies have shown a correlation between the surge in sales of larger vehicles and a staggering increase in pedestrian fatalities in the United States between 2000 and 2023.

Annie Fryman, director of special projects at the Bay Area urban policy think tank SPUR, said that the explosion in the size of vehicles, coupled with an increase in erratic driving since the pandemic and a lack of SFPD traffic enforcement, has been a deadly combo.

“It’s been a perfect storm,” Fryman said.

Data collected by city-owned vehicles reveal a dangerous accountability gap with speeding and erratic driving within the city’s fleet. In 2016, the city launched a telematics program to install black boxes in a number of city vehicles. This program followed a deadly string of crashes involving public employees and contractors and was spearheaded by former Supervisor Norman Yee after he was hit by a car.

While the program led to initial reductions in driver speeds, progress flagged as the pandemic took hold. By 2021, the city’s report shows a jump in speeding incidents over 80 mph, with thousands every day. The report also shows a backlog of more than 1,700 vehicles slated for telematics that did not have the boxes installed. Little progress and underutilization of these findings have led to hundreds of collisions each year, according to recent reporting by the San Francisco Standard.

This kind of technology has been successfully implemented in pilots in New York City, where fleet management and safety have been a pillar of Vision Zero.

“You don’t actually need every car on the road to have it to get the safety benefits,” Zipper said. “If only one car has the technology, that vehicle is probably going to be able to slow down vehicles behind it that might otherwise be driving recklessly.”

In the coming years, San Francisco should expect little from the federal government on reining in traffic deaths, advocates say. The Trump administration is likely to oppose regulations of the auto industry, and some of the new standards proposed by NHTSA — like one requiring that new passenger vehicles be designed with risks to pedestrians in mind — may get rolled back.

“If we want to see road safety improve in a city like San Francisco,” Zipper said, “I would encourage residents to look to their own leaders in City Hall and to perhaps look toward Sacramento and to not expect much of anything by way of a tailwind to come from Washington.”

Zipper and others in the transportation and urban design community believe that part of the problem is embedded into American ideas about road safety: the principle that everyone shares responsibility for preventing injuries and deaths on the road. The idea of “shared responsibility” is built into the “safe-systems approach,” the guiding paradigm of American roadway safety, which draws from Vision Zero.

While seemingly anodyne, Zipper argues that this principle subtly obscures who is responsible for causing the vast majority of collisions — drivers.

“If we actually want to save lives and reduce crashes, then we need to really put the spotlight on who has disproportionate power to save lives,” Zipper said.

Roger Rudick, the editor of transit-focused Streetsblog SF, put it bluntly: “We can talk about shared responsibility when somebody rides through a crowd and kills 14 people with a bicycle.”

What comes next in SF?

With a new mayor — and, soon, a new director of the SFMTA — the city would seem to be at a natural inflection point in its push to tackle traffic fatalities. Six safe streets activists interviewed by KQED all agreed this opportunity would be missed without meaningful action from city leadership.

“It’s really not up to the MTA,” said Stephen Braitsch, a data engineer who maps streets’ data. “For us to achieve Vision Zero, it’s a political decision — full stop.”

Though new Mayor Daniel Lurie didn’t mention safe streets in his inauguration speech, many are heartened by the appointment of former MTA official and influential urbanism expert Alicia John-Baptiste as the city’s first-ever chief of infrastructure, climate and mobility.

“Alicia knows how to solve these problems,” Rudick said. “What it’s going to require is for Mayor Lurie to give her the ability to do it.”

Yu and other advocates, in the meantime, will continue pushing legislators for change.

In September, Newsom vetoed a first-of-its-kind bill proposed by state Sen. Scott Wiener, which would have required alerts in cars to caution speeding drivers. Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA), which became mandatory for all new cars sold in Europe last year, warns drivers every 10 miles that they exceed the speed limit.

Yu is undeterred. After her experience taking her fight for speed cameras to Sacramento, she knows these campaigns can take multiple attempts. The Bay Area chapter of Families for Safe Streets is also helping chapters in other states push for similar legislation.

“Even if it’s just one less family that experiences this tragedy,” Yu said, “that’s worth it to us.”