Friends and family members of traffic victims on the streets of SF left flowers and other mementos on City Hall’s steps. (All photos by the author)

Back in mid-November, 100 people gathered at San Francisco’s sixth annual World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims to grieve those who have been killed in traffic collisions.

Along the steps of City Hall, attendees left flowers amid rows of empty shoes symbolizing those who died in the city since the start of Vision Zero in 2014.

Walk San Francisco and San Francisco Bay Area Families for Safe Streets (part of the Families for Safe Streets national movement) organized the event, gathering donated shoes from the public for the memorial.

Pedestrian advocates insist that car crashes and collisions are not random “accidents,” but instead the result of dangerous street design and traffic behavior throughout the city.

The advocates are calling on leaders and officials to help prevent future traffic deaths by lowering speed limits on high-injury streets like Geary, Bush, and 19th Avenue; launching a data-driven speed management program to pinpoint dangerous spots and corridors; and by expanding “left-turn calming,” rubber bumpers strategically placed in certain intersections to slow traffic.

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Board of Supervisors president Norman Yee pays tribute at the World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims. Yee knows firsthand how dangerous SF’s streets can be — he was crossing a street and hit by a car in 2006.
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Rows of sneakers, boots, and sandals on the steps of City Hall represent those who died in traffic collisions since 2014. This year alone, 23 people have died.
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SF Bay Area Families for Safe Streets used the memorial event to highlight the dangers of traffic to pedestrians. According to Walk SF, car speed is the main contributor to severe and fatal crashes on city streets.
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Among those memorialized included Tess Rothstein, who in 2019 was struck and killed while biking along a busy corridor South of Market.
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Before a crowd of around 100 people, Walk SF’s Jodie Medeiros and others read the names of 187 individuals lost to traffic violence in our city. At times it was difficult to hear over the roar of nearby cars.
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All photos are by Emily Huston, a writer and photographer in San Francisco. Find more of her work at https://emilyhuston.github.io/

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