If you’re on the street but not in a car, it’s not really safe out there. San Francisco has failed to curb street injuries and deaths despite a high-profile pledge 10 years ago. Now a top SF official says it’s time for California to step up.
Atop the list of solutions is reducing vehicle speeds, which is the crux of legislation announced Wednesday by SF state Sen. Scott Wiener. SB 961 would require all cars and trucks manufactured or sold in California starting in 2027 to be equipped with technology to prevent them from traveling more than 10 mph over the speed limit.
Speed is the cause of over one-third of traffic deaths in California, according to the state Office of Traffic Safety. The technology in question — called a “speed governor” — would rely on onboard cameras or GPS to determine a street’s posted speed limit and issue drivers a warning through audio, visual, or vibrational queues. The car would also be impossible to drive at excessive speeds.
A widely cited Automobile Association of America study shows that a person struck by a vehicle going 25 mph or slower has a less than one in four chance of severe injury or death. Those odds rise to a three in four chance in severe injury or death when a car is traveling 40 mph or higher.
This isn’t just a local or state problem. Pedestrian deaths nationwide are at a 40-year high.
Capping vehicle speed makes sense to safety advocates like Robin Pam, an organizer with KidSafe SF. In fact, it’s already been implemented in other modes of transportation: “We don’t let e-bikes go over 20 miles an hour, and e-scooters are limited to 15 miles an hour,” Pam tells The Frisc.
Lot more than zero
San Francisco and several cities that signed on to Vision Zero — a global program to eliminate traffic fatalities — have hit a wall trying to meet this goal. In SF, severe injuries due to crashes rose from 3,457 in 2021 to 3,610 last year, according to the SF Municipal Transportation Agency.
This year marks a decade that the city has been part of Vision Zero, and officials are scrambling to bring safety measures to the remaining third of the high-injury network — the 12 percent of SF streets where most crashes happen.
But some of the city’s riskiest roads include Park Presidio Boulevard, 19th Avenue, and others that are actually governed by the state and lack basic safety infrastructure for people biking, riding transit, or walking.
Wiener’s legislation, dubbed “Complete Streets,” is his second attempt to make the state’s roads safer. Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a similar bill in 2019, saying the transportation agency Caltrans didn’t need the legislative pressure. In the ensuing years, though, the situation has become more perilous, spurring SF’s state senator to put a new bill together. He also has introduced a companion bill, SB 960, to require Caltrans to outfit roads with curb extensions, transit islands, bike lanes, and other safety measures.
While these measures could close an important gap in efforts to reduce deaths and injuries, San Francisco already has several low-tech solutions at its disposal to make streets safer, one of which is road diets.
Losing lanes
For safer streets, driver behavior must change. There’s a growing body of evidence showing that road diets — for instance, removing lanes of car traffic to make room for pedestrians and bicyclists — are an effective way to slow traffic.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health studied more than 1,100 randomly selected segments of streets with similar characteristics in seven U.S. cities for two years, starting in 2017. They found that narrower lanes on streets reduced the number of crashes.
San Francisco has its own diets, and officials say they’re working. This past year on Battery Street, engineers added a two-way protected bike lane at the expense of a vehicle lane during non-rush hours. SFMTA measured car and bicycle volumes in the months before and after the project’s debut; the average vehicle speed decreased by 1 mph, while bike volume increased 85 percent.
A South Van Ness quick-build project, completed in 2022 from 13th to César Chávez streets, removed one lane of traffic, leaving three lanes, one of which is a center turn lane. SFMTA found that car traffic between 16th and 17th streets dropped 28 percent in morning and evening peak periods. Between 22nd and 23rd streets, vehicle volume dropped 12 percent. Bike volume increased 10 percent in both segments, and average vehicle speeds dropped 4 mph.
What’s more, the same 2011 AAA study that showed high auto speeds increased rates of serious injury and death also noted that every 1 mph decrease in speed lowers the chances of collisions 2 percent to 7 percent.
Not all road diets have the same impact. For example, Jones Street in the Tenderloin went from three one-way lanes to two to make room for pedestrian safety measures like painted safety zones. Nevertheless, bike volumes decreased 17 percent, and average vehicle speeds did not change, while traffic volume increased 4 percent.
People who oppose road diets have cited the possibilities of extra travel time and more congestion on neighboring streets. So far, road diets on Battery, South Van Ness, and Jones have not caused longer drives or congestion spillovers, according to SFMTA. Davis Street, near Battery, saw a 22 percent drop in average weekday car volume. Close to South Van Ness, Capp and Shotwell streets did see a bump in traffic volume but not travel time; speeds along these nearby streets remained under 25 mph. (Caveat: These data sets are limited. SFMTA makes measurements in days leading up to the road change, then again after. There are not yet long-term studies for these sites.)
That said, lane reduction makes more people feel safe enough to bike and scoot along streets, according to Walk SF communications director Marta Lindsey. “It’s one of the most powerful strategies out there for slowing people down,” she tells The Frisc.
She notes that Walk SF would like to see more aggressive street design, and points to the upcoming road diet for Oak Street along the Panhandle as a bright spot.
But advocates say many of SFMTA’s safety plans along the 50 miles of high injury streets that don’t yet have modifications are less ambitious, especially the one-way, multilane corridors such as Harrison and Gough streets, where cars run at highway speeds. “Whether you’re on 9th Street in SoMA or Bush or Pine, people walk on those streets,” says KidSafe’s Pam, adding that “there’s no place for high-speed streets in the city.”
One of these high-speed streets is Franklin, where Sherman Elementary School educator Andrew Zieman was killed by speeding cars that went out of control.
In December, SFMTA said it was considering a road diet for Franklin between Broadway and Lombard streets and would release a timeline this spring. When asked for an update, SFMTA spokesperson Michael Roccaforte said it would post “recommended next steps” soon, and that SFMTA staff is “reviewing a broad toolkit to build in the measures that have already been installed that focus on improving safety at intersections.”
A risky intersection
The rollout of Wiener’s legislative proposals took place yesterday at one of the city’s dangerous intersections: Park Presidio and Anza Street. (Park Presidio, along with 19th Avenue, Lombard Street in the Marina, and Van Ness Avenue are state highways designed to usher cars through the city quickly. They are, no surprise, also among the city’s most dangerous streets.)
At this spot 13 years ago, Jenny Yu’s 62-year-old mother was permanently injured by a car as she crossed Park Presidio. Yu, a member of the national advocacy group Families for Safe Streets, shared the painful account to support Wiener’s effort. “Pedestrians become collateral damage when so many people are speeding,” she told the crowd huddled under a shade structure to get out of the rain.
SB 961 would direct Caltrans to set four- and 10-year performance targets for putting street safety measures in place, and to streamline the approval process for pedestrian and bicycle safety and transit priority measures — including rapid bus lanes, as seen on Geary Boulevard and Van Ness.
These measures won’t help SF meet its safety pledges by the end of 2024, but they could make the state more of a help than a hindrance in reducing injuries and fatalities.