If you’ve been hoping for a new speed bump on your street, don’t hold your breath.
San Francisco transportation officials are suspending a popular, long-running program that allows residents to request street safety improvements in their neighborhoods.
The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency this week said it would be “temporarily pausing” its Residential Traffic Calming Program, citing “rising construction costs, record demand, and a challenging fiscal landscape.”
The move comes as the agency faces an anticipated $322 million budget deficit next year when federal and state one-time relief funds run out.
Since the launch of the traffic calming program in 2013, residents have been able to ask the city to install new speed-reducing devices, such as concrete islands, speed bumps (and humps), road markings and rubber road cushions, in their neighborhoods.
“A surge in applications during the pandemic — when the SFMTA made the process more accessible — has left a significant backlog of projects, many of which are now ready for construction,” the agency said in a statement, noting it would stop taking applications on July 1.
SFMTA has installed over 1,200 traffic-calming devices throughout the city since 2018, including more than 500 directly requested by residents, according to the agency.
“This work has helped advance San Francisco’s Vision Zero goals — and that effort continues, even as new residential applications are temporarily paused,” it added, referring to an initiative the city launched in 2014 to end traffic fatalities within a decade.
The policy officially expired in 2024, the city’s deadliest year in at least two decades, when 42 people, including 24 pedestrians, were killed in crashes.
The city’s Civil Grand Jury, a government watchdog group, last week released a scathing report — dubbed “Failed Vision”— that attributed the rise in fatalities in part to “critical failures” in traffic enforcement by the city’s police department, which in recent years has issued significantly fewer traffic tickets amid staffing shortages and new regulations.
The number of traffic citations issued by police in the city declined by nearly 90% from 2014 to 2024, according to department data.
“There’s a sense of lawlessness on the city streets, due to the almost complete lack of enforcement in recent years,” Jury Foreperson Michael Carboy said in a statement.
With eight pedestrian deaths in San Francisco so far this year, safety advocates urged the city not to give up on Vision Zero.
Marta Lindsey, a spokesperson for Walk San Francisco, a pedestrian advocacy group, said that while the city’s crowd-sourced traffic calming program was well-intentioned, the piecemeal approach was inefficient.
“I hope SFMTA catches up on this backlog, but then comes back with a better program that can be proactive and bring speed humps to entire neighborhoods where they’re needed instead of this ‘speed hump by speed-hump’ approach.”
Speed, she said, continues to be the number one cause of severe and fatal crashes in San Francisco.
“This threat is real. It’s outside our windows every day,” she said. “People are really seeing and feeling how out of control speeding is on our streets. And they want something to be done that’s concrete. Literally concrete.”
This report includes reporting from KQED’s Jasmine Garnett
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