Dan Brekke [00:01:27] But, you know, sometimes you’re going to parts of the city late at night maybe you want to get to fast where there’s you know, there’s not such easy transit. So, yeah, I drive. And how do I feel about driving there? I feel like I need to be very alert all the time.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:01:42] What about as a pedestrian? How do you feel about walking on the streets of San Francisco?
Dan Brekke [00:01:47] I generally take what I kind of think of as a New York approach to walking on the street. You just really have to be very aware of your surroundings. Is anybody running the red light? Is anybody making a left turn without looking? It’s kind of a fraught situation, especially when you see how many people are dying in traffic collisions.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:02:17] And the numbers are not pretty. 2024 was actually supposed to be the year that San Francisco had zero traffic deaths, right? With this goal called Vision Zero, a goal that was set ten years ago. But San Francisco did not meet that goal last year, did it?
Dan Brekke [00:02:35] No, it didn’t even come close. 41 people were killed in traffic collisions in San Francisco in 2024. That’s the most since 2007. And the really bitter irony of that is that that’s the highest number during the Vision Zero era. So it gives the impression that we’re going exactly backwards. San Francisco went through some bad years up through 2014, especially with pedestrian and cyclist fatalities. And so the city adopted this Vision Zero goal in 2014 with the explicit goal of eliminating traffic deaths and cutting severe injury crashes significantly. I think the evidence from around the United States and actually even the safer countries in the world suggest that it’s really hard to eliminate all traffic deaths. So people are doing a lot of soul searching and thinking about what needs to be done to really improve things.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:03:42] And at the same time, San Francisco has got a bunch of traffic safety projects in the works. Before we get into speed cameras in particular, what’s the status of some of those projects?
Dan Brekke [00:03:56] I’d say the biggest initiative that the city has going is called a quick build, a program where you have identified a real problem of safety at an intersection and you do something very fast. You send workers out there to maybe install plastic posts to guide turns, to control turns. There could be things like increasing the crossing time for pedestrians. That’s something you may have noticed. They set the walk signal to give pedestrians a head start so that they not only have a longer time. They get to start before the car traffic does. So all these things are adding up to some real results. There are fewer collisions, about 30% fewer collisions and injuries at these intersections where those treatments have have taken place.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:04:53] Well, with all that work happening, why then do you think San Francisco was so far from reaching its goal in 2024? Despite all all it sounds like all this stuff that the city is doing to try and improve traffic safety.
Dan Brekke [00:05:11] You know, I don’t think anybody can point to any single cause. People point to the size of vehicles. I mean, people are generally driving larger and somewhat heavier vehicles. Sometimes they’re they’re also tall. The combination of the height of vehicles and the weight has a way of increasing the severity of injuries. We’re also facing, of course, a cultural challenge. Jeff Tumlin, who’s the recently departed executive director of the Municipal Transportation Agency, he pointed to something else that’s going on. He calls it aberrant social behavior, that people are simply not obeying the rules. In fact, they’re doing the opposite. They’re acting recklessly.
Jeff Tumlin [00:06:01] We see this incredible increase in solo vehicle fixed object crashes, motorists driving 60 miles an hour on city streets and then running into a wall and dying or hit and run accidents at incredibly high speed.
Dan Brekke [00:06:18] And so far, we haven’t found an answer to how to control that kind of behavior.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:06:27] Let’s talk about speed cameras, because among, I guess, one of these long awaited projects that many people think and believe would really improve traffic safety are speed cameras. Why is this happening now, Dan?
Dan Brekke [00:06:45] Well, it’s something that traffic safety advocates have really wanted to do for a long time. So in 2017, former Assemblymember David Chiu, he’s now the city attorney for the city of San Francisco introduced a bill to allow a speed camera pilot in several California cities. And there was bitter opposition from police unions and others who felt like it was overreaching. But it was finally successful in 2023, and the governor signed the bill into law. So San Francisco and five other cities are getting speed cameras under what’s formally a five year pilot program. And the traffic safety advocates believe they’ll make a dramatic difference.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:07:44] These are launching in San Francisco in March. So pretty soon. How will they work exactly in San Francisco?
Dan Brekke [00:07:52] So these have to be stretches of roadway that have a history of collisions or are in a safety zone, for instance, around schools. One of the areas that’s going to have speed cameras is a couple of blocks away from KQED, it’s on 16th Street between Bryant and Potrero, which is, you know, there are some, you can see cars racing along there sometimes down. There and the other 32 locations, they’ll be there with signs. The way the cameras actually work is they will record your speed. They’ll take a picture of your license plate. If you’re going 11 miles an hour or more over the speed limit, then you’re going to qualify for a ticket. The registered owner of the car will be cited by mail and the fines are going to start at $50 and they move up to $500. If you’re recorded going 100 miles an hour or more. Another difference between the speed cameras and the traditional way of getting tickets is if a police officer stops you and writes a speeding ticket, that is something that potentially goes on your driving record. Right. It can be a point on your driver’s license and that can have big implications for insurance rates. And even, depending on how many points you rack up, whether you can renew your driver’s license.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:09:22] What about data privacy? I mean, what happens with those photos of people’s license plates after they’re taken?
Dan Brekke [00:09:29] The first privacy measure that’s part of this law is that the cameras are not capturing drivers, images, driver’s faces. They’re only capturing the license plate. So that way you’re not, you know, doing something like facial recognition to try to tell who somebody is. Records of the speeding infraction and can be retained by the locality that captures the the license plate up to 120 days.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:09:59] And I know San Jose is one of the other cities getting these speed cameras. Oakland as well. But why speed cameras? Do we know anything about how effective these actually are at improving road safety?
Dan Brekke [00:10:14] Traffic safety advocates believe they’ll make a dramatic difference. And that’s partly because police officers have been writing many fewer tickets in recent years, going back, say, 7 or 8 years. You could point to different factors. For instance, there’s lots of other priorities for police forces, and many of them are understaffed compared to their historical levels. There are some people who believe they’ve walked away from the responsibility of of writing tickets, but police departments deny that on a blanket basis.
[00:10:50] So speed cameras are a way of, you know, automating the process. The cameras are just there. You advertise their presence, you advertise, you know what the you know, the speeding thresholds are and what the fines are. And you hope that it will actually control driver behavior. Now, these cameras have been used in several other cities. And I have to say the results are mixed. Philadelphia, for instance, put speed cameras into a very heavily traveled and dangerous corridor called Roosevelt Boulevard and actually saw a huge decrease in speeding in areas around the cameras. Chicago has a very extensive and aggressive speed camera program. You qualify for a speeding ticket as soon as you go six miles an hour over the speed limit. Chicago has issued a huge number of tickets, but overall fatalities have not really dropped that much.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:12:01] I mean, Dan, how hopeful are people in San Francisco that this will actually help the city get closer to that, that vision of Vision Zero?
Dan Brekke [00:12:12] Well, I think the traffic safety advocates, you know, people like Jody Medeiros at Walk San Francisco are very hopeful.
Jodie Madeiros [00:12:21] We’re pretty confident that these are going to be game changers for San Francisco.
Dan Brekke [00:12:26] Speeding is a major factor in injury and fatal collisions. And anything you can do to control speeding is going to help in the long run is is the thinking there. And and I think even though the results in other cities are somewhat mixed, there is some evidence that backs that assumption up.
Jodie Madeiros [00:12:50] So 33 cameras really focused on 24 seven, making sure that people are drivers are not speeding and really making San Francisco a safe speed city.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:13:07] Clearly, the city is still very far off from from its goal of a Vision Zero. And it does sound like these these cameras can help start to make a dent in that. But what ultimately do you think it’s going to take to achieve this vision of Vision Zero in San Francisco, Dan? Because I have to imagine that as long as we’re all driving cars and we live in this car centric world, this is going to be something where we’re we’re going to deal with.
