Ricardo Olea has worked on San Francisco’s streets for 30 years. He’s not a cop, a vendor, or a sweeper. Olea is a traffic engineer, and he’s been involved in some of the city’s most transformative changes.
One of his first projects was the post-quake demolition of the Central Freeway that opened up Hayes Valley.
He began work before SF had its Municipal Transportation Agency – it was formed after a 1999 ballot measure – but Olea now heads the SFMTA group in charge of roadway improvements, traffic permits, traffic signals, and more.
When he started in the early 1990s, SF was suffering more than 5,000 injury collisions a year. A decade later, the number of injury collisions dropped by nearly half.
Engineering helped. SF went through a modernization wave, upgrading street lights and streets themselves with early versions of bike lanes and pedestrian crossings that we now take for granted.
Broader changes helped too, Olea notes: cars added airbags and antilock brakes, laws required seat belts, and stigma grew around behaviors such as drunk driving. But safety numbers plateaued in the mid-2000s.
The bigger, more obvious changes have happened, says Olea, and now SF needs a “next step up” with newer infrastructure.
The Frisc asked Olea about SF history he’s witnessed from street level, the “failure” of Vision Zero, and more.
The conversation has been edited and condensed.
The Frisc: What’s one safety measure that didn’t exist when you began working for the city?
Ricardo Olea: Many locations didn’t have pedestrian signals. You just [went] by the red and green lights, but now we have countdown signals.
What did SF do that drastically cut injury collisions from 1990 to 2005?
San Francisco made a lot of investments in infrastructure that dated to the 1950s and ‘60s. This brought things like traffic calming and bike facilities. These initial investments are going to give you a greater reduction in crashes because you’re dealing with really obvious issues.
Why has such a radical reduction been so tough to repeat?
San Francisco is a mature city. We’ve done a lot of improvements over the decades, the hot spots, the things people recommend you do with the money.
[We’re now] doing the more medium or lower crash locations. That’s kind of a plateauing effect. You may be spending the same amount of money, but, just by the nature of the problem, you’re not getting the same improvement for every dollar. But you are going to get benefits.
In some spots collisions are stubbornly high. In two reports you’ve written — 2001 and 2023 — several of the same intersections or corridors still make the list. Among them: Gough and Market and 13th Street. What remedies can we apply in these areas?
The area bounded by Octavia Boulevard to 13th Street to the South of Market area is one of the city’s highest crash locations, and that’s partly a function of being where the city streets meet the freeway. It tends to concentrate a lot of traffic. We have tried various things over time: signal upgrades, signal timing changes, automated enforcement, road diets. Some have been successful.
And there’s been locations where we’ve upgraded infrastructure, but other locations [crashes] have popped up instead — like along Market and Mission in the SOMA area. We have a pending project — that also involves the state — planned for 13th Street and Mission and South Van Ness with a lot of investment that we hope will address some of the safety issues.
This year will likely have the second-highest traffic fatality total (34 to date) in the Vision Zero era after 2022 (39). We focus a lot on deaths. What do we miss by concentrating on this one issue?
It’s hard to draw big conclusions from just a couple of years of fatalities. We can’t point to something as the reason why there’s more fatalities now or two years ago. We’re left speculating about some larger societal factors. Is it a matter of vehicle design? Is it a matter of compliance or enforcement, like people not obeying laws? Is it a matter of distractions?
We believe the infrastructure is getting better. There’s more investment in the streets, but it’s not leading to a one-to-one relationship between investment and fatalities. That’s something that we need to figure out.
San Francisco did promise that by this year, we would get to zero fatalities. So a lot of times the narrative is, “‘Oh, well, you failed.’”
And so because, because that goal was set — a very ambitious goal in 2014 — a lot of the narrative for the past couple years has focused on this being the year that was supposed to be zero. So that has created a more recent narrative that the city doesn’t know what it’s doing or is ineffective. The real story is a little bit more complicated.
How so?
I think Vision Zero was successful in changing the mindset [in] cities around fatalities – not making them inevitable or something that just happens. But the idea that this is going to be quick or easy or San Francisco can achieve zero just doing things by itself? I think now we have a more mature understanding that this is a long-term commitment to continuously look at what we can do to improve.
Cities can do their part, designers can do their part, but to have ultimate success we’re going to [need] more cooperation from other parts of the system.
In three decades working here, what’s the biggest change you’ve seen?
I think that we’re celebrating 35 years of the transportation sales tax. It’s important to realize San Francisco is lucky to rely on this constant funding stream that can be tapped [for] safety improvements.
A lot of cities have trouble tapping into consistent funding sources, so they rely on competitive grants to make improvements. Having those funds available, and because it’s a sales tax, we can predict each year that we’re going to get a certain amount allocated. And voters having renewed that sales tax on two occasions allows us to make investments on a long-term basis.
What has the tax money bought us?
It allows us to get matching grants — state and federal money. So it’s a multiplier. For example, we were able to get a grant to improve traffic signals throughout the Western Addition, an area with a lot of older traffic signals. Changes like this reduce red light running and add pedestrian signals.
All those investments have resulted in documented safety improvements and will continue to do so. If we did not have a sales tax, if we had not had an SFMTA, if we were not making all these investments, I don’t know where San Francisco would be. The situation would be much worse.
Great story. The reasons for Vision Zero’s “failure” need to be examined along with ideas for how to move closer to the ultimate goal of much safer streets and highways. One editorial note: I love the vintage picture of the Transbay Terminal, but it must be from some time before 1991. I don’t have my own pictures to share, but the southwest corner of the intersection of First and Mission was “redeveloped” in the late ’80s, with that row of low-rise business (including the “Fun Zone” arcade) torn down and replaced by 100 First Street, which was completed in 1988.
Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated. About the date of the photo: You’ve got a heck of a memory. Olea himself provided it, so we’ll circle back with him to ask about the discrepancy.
Ending the central freeway at Market is why there are so many accidents. It would have been better to end it on Gough, 1 block past Market.