San Francisco’s Streets Are Still Deadly. These Advocates Want Lurie to Do More About It

More than seven years ago, Christian Rose was cycling down his usual route in San Francisco’s Richmond District on his way to a tune-up when the day he had long feared became a reality.

A car was barreling toward the bike lane on Arguello Boulevard. He yelled out, but the car hit him and sent him flying over its hood. His bike crushed and helmet scraped from the gravelly street, he landed on his right hip.

Rose was freshly through his emergency medicine residency at UCSF, and he said he had an immediate and sinking feeling that the hip that took the brunt of the impact was broken.

“Being an emergency physician training at San Francisco General, seeing tons of bike crashes, pedestrian crashes, car crashes, I used to leave those shifts sometimes joking … ‘Hopefully, today is not the day that I’ll come back to work before I’m supposed to,’” he said.

“So, just at the time I remember the sort of collapsing world of being like, ‘I expected this, I knew this would come at some point, and I just can’t believe it’s today,’” he continued.

The intersection where Rose was hit is on San Francisco’s high-injury network, which indicates streets that have the highest percentage of severe and fatal injuries from vehicle crashes, and where the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency said it should invest the majority of its resources to prevent future crashes.

Rose’s crash occurred three years into the city’s Vision Zero campaign, a 10-year effort to end traffic fatalities by making changes to infrastructure and driver behavior. That campaign officially ended in December, far from its goal. Now, transportation safety advocates are pushing Mayor Daniel Lurie and city officials to do more.

Eight years into Vision Zero, another cyclist was struck and killed less than half a mile north of where Rose was on Arguello Boulevard, at another intersection marked high risk.

Despite both crashes, the intersection at Cornwall and Arguello, Rose said, looked exactly the same when he rode past it Friday.

“Nothing has changed on the entire section,” he told KQED. “There’s only construction going on right now on the upper section, and the lower section hasn’t had any adjustments made either. There are no new traffic signs or anything in that intersection.”

A commitment to ending traffic deaths

In 2014, then-Supervisor Norman Yee, who had survived a crash himself in 2006, shepherded Vision Zero into San Francisco, promising to coordinate city agencies around creating safer intersections for pedestrians and cyclists, and redesigning city streets to curb crash deaths.

The policy’s first action plan the following year had lofty goals: implement safety treatments along at least 13 miles of roadways on the high-injury network each year; assess which speed humps or signage slowed traffic and prevented accidents most effectively; and slow road speeds.

When Vision Zero was introduced in San Francisco, the city struggled with an average of about 20 pedestrian deaths and hundreds of critical injuries due to vehicle crashes each year.

“The result of this collaborative, citywide effort will be safer, more livable streets as we work to eliminate traffic fatalities by 2024,” the plan reads.

Despite high hopes, when the policy sunsetted in December, it came at the end of one of the deadliest years yet on San Francisco streets.

Vision Zero expires with little to celebrate

“The biggest tragedy is that 2024 was the worst year for traffic violence, and particularly for pedestrians, it was the worst year for traffic deaths for pedestrians since 2007,” said Jodie Medeiros, the executive director of pedestrian advocacy group Walk SF.

According to the nonprofit, 24 people were killed in crashes while walking last year, including a family of four who were waiting at a bus stop when they were hit by a vehicle that veered off the road in West Portal and onto the sidewalk.

Collectively, 42 people died in vehicle crashes while walking, biking and driving in 2024, and hundreds were injured.

Medeiros said that since 2014, the city has made progress redesigning streets and adding traffic-slowing measures, including speed cameras that began to go online last month. But one of the reasons she believes San Francisco is continuing to have a high number of injuries and deaths is because policy change has moved at a glacial pace, and agencies aren’t collaborating the way they should.

“It’s important to know that the city is not organized. The agencies haven’t been well coordinated,” Medeiros told KQED.

At a street safety hearing in the city’s Land Use and Transportation Committee this month, the Department of Public Health presented traffic death and injury data from 2023 — the most recent the agency had completed, representatives told supervisors. Its most recent high-injury network map is from 2021.

SFMTA also revealed that it is lagging on safety improvements that were supposed to be complete along those streets last December, Medeiros said.

The next 10 years of Vision Zero

On the morning of the hearing, Medeiros and other traffic safety advocates gathered on the steps of City Hall to place white sneakers, flats and boots in rows in a somber protest. The 10 pairs of “ghost shoes” represented 10 people who have already died in vehicle crashes in 2025, since Vision Zero expired.

The group held signs calling out the lapse in street safety policy and urging Lurie to take up the task of reviving it.

In a letter Walk SF sent to Lurie the same day, advocates demanded that he finalize a new policy by July 30, and have an interagency traffic safety plan codified by the end of September for the five agencies responsible for carrying it out: SFMTA, the departments of public health and public works, and the police and fire departments.

“We feel like this is a fair amount of time for him to be in office, to understand the agencies, to understand the challenges, what’s worked, what’s not worked, and to really create and have a robust, thoughtful new Vision Zero,” Medeiros said.

The letter also lays out what Walk SF and Bay Area Families for Safer Streets, another advocacy group made up of crash survivors, want to see prioritized in the new policy.

One of their main focuses is speeding.

“Dangerous speeding is a risk factor,” said advocate Jenny Yu, whose mother was in a severe crash in 2011.

“She was crossing the street on Park Presidio and Anza in Golden Gate Park, and a driver was turning left, speeding,” she recalled. “The SUV struck her body and swung her body across the street.”

City data shows that 1 in 5 crashes are related to excessive speed, and as speed increases, so does the risk of severe injury and death. If a car traveling 20 mph hits a pedestrian, the risk of a fatality is 10%. If that car is going 40 mph, the risk surges to 80%.

“Now, there’s people going more than 20 miles an hour over the speed limit,” Yu said. “So speeding is definitely a factor that [the new] traffic safety plan has to have elements to address.”

Just this week, San Francisco released the data from its first month operating speed-monitoring cameras that are meant to ticket drivers traveling more than 10 mph above the speed limit on certain roads. About 20 cameras sent out a collective 31,000 warnings to drivers on high-injury network streets in April, SFMTA reported.

Once all 33 of the city’s cameras have been active for 60 days, the cameras will start administering tickets, which Medeiros said she believed can have a real effect on driver behavior.

She pointed to the success of similar technology in New York: “The cameras have reduced crashes, reduced speeds, and have been part of their program for Vision Zero,” she said.

Walk SF’s letter to Lurie also requests that the new Vision Zero policy lower the speed limits on all high-injury network and commercial streets by 5 mph by 2027 and pursue state legislation to reduce speed limits on residential streets across the city to 20 mph the following year.

It also reiterates the importance of redesigning high-injury network streets.

“A great example is to look at the Tenderloin,” Medeiros said. “In the current high-injury network map, every single street on the Tenderloin is considered a dangerous street.”

Over the last five years, she said, the Tenderloin saw speed limits reduced to 20 mph; added pedestrian safety zones and daylighting, which makes it illegal to park a car within 20 feet of a pedestrian crosswalk; and removed lanes from the widest streets with the worst speeding problems.

“These things were applied universally in the neighborhood. They were applied at scale. And what we’ve really seen is crash rates and close calls have dropped, and speeds have come down,” she told KQED.

For those results to be more widespread throughout the city, Medeiros said, there needs to be better collaboration and accountability between city agencies.

What has been missing so far, she said, is a mayoral administration that makes Vision Zero a priority.

“Vision Zero cities are where the mayors have embraced it and held agencies accountable for citywide change,” she said. “We are really looking at Mayor Lurie for taking a stand, embracing Vision Zero and holding these agencies accountable to make citywide changes to intersections and bringing down dangerous speeds and designing our streets for the most vulnerable people that are using them.”

‘In leading Vision Zero cities, it’s the mayors’

Vision Zero has plenty of promises that remain unrealized.

Miles of the high-injury network remain dangerous. Only 21 of the city’s 33 speed cameras have been set up, despite the original March launch date. And while safety advocates had championed taking cars off Market Street in 2020, earlier this year, Lurie announced that autonomous vehicle company Waymo would begin operating on the downtown thoroughfare.

The city also scrapped plans to begin enforcing daylighting in March, after California passed legislation requiring the buffer zones at all intersections in 2023. SFMTA said it would hold off issuing citations until it was able to paint red all of the curbs the daylighting law applies to, which it estimated will take 18 months.

“Who has been held accountable? I have no evidence that anyone has been held accountable for any of the safe street issues,” Rose said. “Someone has to ultimately be responsible for enacting the changes and making sure that they happen, otherwise it just falls on deaf ears.”

Advocates hope that person will be Lurie, who assured them at the unveiling of the first speed cameras in April that pedestrian safety is part of his public safety agenda.

“It’s been a leadership void on this, to be frank,” Medeiros said. “We really did advocate for this with Mayor Breed, and we’re back advocating this for Mayor Lurie … the ingredient that is currently missing is Mayor Lurie holding these agencies accountable in getting the work done.”