After Vision Zero, San Francisco Looks to a New Approach to Traffic Safety

“Get off the sidewalk,” Diane Amato regularly shouts at the many people she said ride scooters and e-bikes on sidewalks in her San Francisco neighborhood.

They don’t always take it well. Amato said she has been “flipped off, called names, and threatened.”

Amato, who lives in the city’s northeastern District 6, was one of more than a dozen residents who showed up at the Land Use and Transportation Committee meeting on Monday to support the San Francisco Street Safety Act, the city’s latest effort to reduce severe and fatal traffic deaths in the city.

“Are we just going to continue to get injured and killed because pedestrians come last? Or will you pass the Street Safety Act and put the welfare of pedestrians first?” she asked the committee members.

The ordinance, which passed unanimously out of the committee on Monday and heads to the full Board of Supervisors next Tuesday, comes after the city’s Vision Zero initiative expired last year, falling far short of its goal to achieve zero traffic deaths by 2024. That year was the city’s deadliest under the program, with 43 people killed in crashes. So far this year, San Francisco has seen 20 traffic-related deaths.

Now, city leaders are looking to the Street Safety Act as a way to tackle the issue of traffic safety anew.

One way the act improves on Vision Zero is that it creates specific goals for different city agencies and mandates they work together, said Marta Lindsey, spokesperson for pedestrian advocacy group Walk SF.

“That is absolutely crucial,” Lindsey said, “because a lot of projects on our streets require different agencies’ approval or working together, and as soon as that starts to slow down, so does the progress.”

The legislation sets expectations for seven city departments, including the police, public health and public works departments.

Under the plan, SFPD would be required to develop and release a plan to increase traffic enforcement efforts on behaviors that are most likely to result in severe injury and death, such as speeding.

The San Francisco Fire Department would be required to release written guidelines identifying street designs and traffic calming tools it finds acceptable, and the city’s transportation agency would be required to develop a plan for redesigning streets identified on its high-injury network.

The law sets timelines for departments to deliver many of these requirements by the end of this year or next.

Many at Monday’s meeting agreed that city leaders need a renewed focus on street safety, given the rapidly changing transportation environment on city streets due to the rise of self-driving cars, e-mobility devices, ride-hailing services and delivery drivers.

“When I began bike commuting, I had to worry about cars,” said Lisa Platt, a resident of District 2, who said she had lost feeling in half of her face after a bike crash. “I still very much do, but now daily I dodge scooters and electric skateboards and bicycles riding on sidewalks because the bicycle infrastructure is incomplete or filled with delivery motorcycles whizzing by.”

With the help of state legislation, San Francisco has made some significant safety improvements to city streets in the last year. It was the first city in the state to implement a speed safety camera pilot, which automatically doles out tickets to drivers traveling more than 11 miles over the speed limit at 33 camera locations. The city has also moved to carry out the state’s new daylighting law, which prioritizes pedestrian visibility by preventing cars from parking in spaces before crosswalks.

Lindsey expects the Street Safety Act to receive unanimous approval from the city’s full Board of Supervisors at next week’s meeting.

But even if the law passes, the work won’t be over, she said.

“I think the Street Safety Act is the blueprint for success in the upcoming years,” Lindsey said, “and then it’s going to be a matter of holding these agency leaders to task on this.”