San Francisco Completes Redesign of West Portal Station After Tragic 2024 Crash

A year and a half after a devastating 2024 car crash that killed a family of four outside Muni’s West Portal station and shook San Francisco, city officials on Wednesday touted the completion of a long-awaited redesign of the streetscape.

The project features new barriers, a bike-share station and polka-dot street murals designating pedestrian zones around “the horseshoe,” the half-circle outside the station at Ulloa Street and West Portal Avenue. It is intended to provide safer and “more welcoming access” for the 5,000 daily riders who board at West Portal, according to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.

“In addition to it being safer, it is more beautiful. So you are standing on this great design that the folks at the MTA came up with, and I love it,” Supervisor Myrna Melgar, whose district includes the neighborhood, said as trains chirped in and out of the Twin Peaks Tunnel.

West Portal station is a key connection point in San Francisco’s transportation system. Three rail lines and two bus routes serving 55,000 daily passengers pass through the station, where the tunnel links the light rail lines to the Market Street Subway, according to the SFMTA.

Melgar, who recently authored the city’s new Street Safety Act, and former Mayor London Breed asked SFMTA to reconfigure the intersection last year after the tragic crash on March 16, 2024.

That was the day driver Mary Fong Lau, then 78, struck and killed a family waiting for a bus to the San Francisco Zoo. The victims were identified as Diego Cardoso de Oliveira, Matilde Moncada Ramos Pinto and their two young sons, 1-year-old Joaquin Ramos Pinto de Oliveira and 3-month-old Cauê Ramos Pinto do Oliveira, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

Prosecutors said Lau, who was charged with felony vehicular manslaughter, was driving her Mercedes SUV between 65 and 72 mph at the time of the collision. Lau pleaded not guilty in July, according to the San Francisco Standard.

The crash drew public outcry over the stop’s lack of street safety improvements and renewed criticism over the city’s failure to curb pedestrian traffic fatalities under the Vision Zero initiative, which expired at the end of last year.

In response, transit officials proposed safety upgrades to the intersection, which have rolled out slowly throughout the year.

Some local businesses and residents opposed the plan, saying safety improvements would restrict car traffic. Melgar, SFMTA staff and members of the West Portal Merchants Association all addressed the controversy over the changes at the event, which speakers said was — somewhat — resolved through compromise.

“When you go to mediation, you come out a little unhappy, a little happy,” said Kerry Riordan Sykes, a West Portal business owner and neighbor who served on a committee approving the changes. “And that’s kind of how we came out with this. But overall … if the goal was … holistically, to make West Portal safer and the traffic calmer out here, has that goal been reached? Yes.”

The project drew to a close just days after the city’s 13th pedestrian fatality this year. On Oct. 4, 30-year-old Binod Budhathoki, a Nepalese immigrant, was crossing Cortland Avenue at Anderson Street when he was struck by a hit-and-run driver, according to San Francisco police and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Budhathoki was walking home from a celebration of Dashain, one of Nepal’s most important festivals, at the time of the crash, according to a GoFundMe campaign launched by the Non-Resident Nepali Association of California.

Perla Rosario Henriquez Ulloa, 21, of San Francisco, was arrested and charged with felony hit-and-run, hit-and-run incident that results in death, vehicular manslaughter, destroying or concealing evidence and basic speed law, according to the SFPD.

Last year, 24 pedestrians were killed in vehicle crashes, the highest number in nearly two decades.

KQED’s Sarah Hotchkiss contributed to this report.