Imagine you’re walking along Lake Merced Boulevard, where the 45 mph speed limit is among the highest in San Francisco. It’s evening, the time of day most crashes occur. While you’re crossing four lanes of traffic at a signal, a driver hits you head-on. What are your odds of survival?
According to ProPublica’s analysis, if you’re 30 years old, the likelihood of surviving the vehicle collision is just a flip of the coin at 48 percent. Those odds considerably worsen if you’re 70 years old, down to just 17 percent.
However, at 20 miles per hour, your chance to see another sunset would improve dramatically: 30-year-olds would be almost twice as likely to survive (97 percent), and 70-year-olds more than five times as likely at 87 percent.
Although San Francisco adopted a Vision Zero policy six years ago to eliminate traffic fatalities by 2024, the city’s prevailing road design ignores evidence that speed kills.
The resulting deaths are no accident. Last year counted 29 people dead on SF’s roads and hundreds more critically or severely injured. A 2019 city report cited unsafe speeds as the second most common reason for vehicle collision, right after driver failure to yield in a crosswalk.
Lowering speed limits to 20 mph citywide would be the first step — but far from the last — to stop traffic deaths that are all but preventable.
There’s already a movement underway to slow down San Francisco streets: A 20 mph limit and other big changes are coming in the Tenderloin, one of the most deadly neighborhoods for pedestrians. Expanding the scope of this safety experiment will take bold leadership plus some help from out of town.
Twenty in the Tenderloin
Although political will behind “20’s plenty” is gaining momentum, officials will face steep legislative hurdles along the way. Current state law effectively hamstrings the city’s ability to make sweeping changes, despite the uproar from tragedies like the deadly New Year’s Eve hit-and-run that killed two women on the sidewalk.
That’s not to say San Francisco won’t rise to the challenge. SFMTA, the agency governing traffic rules, has found loopholes to devise a few workarounds. Last October, SFMTA reduced speed limits from 35 mph to 25 mph on five blocks of Geary Boulevard located near senior centers, capitalizing on a state code technicality. The move is a small but important step toward Vision Zero; since 2014, seniors have accounted for a third of all traffic fatalities.
If you take 100 people in line at the DMV and ask the 15th least prudent driver how fast they would like to drive, that’s where we’re required to set the speed limit.
SFMTA executive director Jeffrey Tumlin
Now comes a test that could set the stage for wider changes. With an SFMTA board vote in March, the city could institute a 20 mph cap in the Tenderloin. The agency also plans to bar cars from making right turns on red at certain intersections as early as next month.
The downtown neighborhood with the highest concentration of seniors and children in the city has a deadly distinction: Every one of its streets is on the High Injury Network, the 13 percent of San Francisco streets that account for 75 percent of fatal traffic collisions.
“The work we did in the Tenderloin was sort of pushing up against the loopholes in existing state law and focusing on the concentration of seniors and senior facilities in the Tenderloin,” SFMTA executive director Jeffrey Tumlin told The Frisc. “I’m not sure there are any other places we’re legally allowed to set the speed limit based on safety outcomes.”
State versus local authority
To slow down streets, California’s vehicle code will need a major tune-up. Countries with declining rates of pedestrian fatalities like Australia, the Netherlands, and Sweden engineer maximum speed based upon the likelihood of the human body to survive impacts from cars. California relies on the 85th percentile rule, which sets the limit based on the speed at which 85 percent of motorists drive at or below on any given road.
“It is illegal in California to set speed limits for safety,” Tumlin said. “Instead we effectively crowdsource speed limits based upon the convenience of the least prudent of drivers. If you take 100 people in line at the DMV and ask the 15th least prudent driver how fast they would like to drive, that’s where we’re required to set the speed limit.”
The 85th percentile rule was originally developed in the 1960s for rural conditions — long stretches of uninterrupted roadway. Decades later California’s transportation network has grown more urbanized, struggling to serve people who walk, bike, and ride scooters, as well as drive a motor vehicle. Although road conditions have changed dramatically, the method for setting speed limits essentially remains static.
Some California lawmakers recognize the need for change. Two state Assembly members, Laura Friedman of Glendale near LA and Phil Ting of San Francisco, introduced AB 2121 in 2020 that would have been the first step in jump-starting the process of reevaluating speed limit protocol.
After the bill was tabled due to COVID, Friedman is trying again with AB 43. Her spokesperson said the new bill will give local governments more authority to set their own speed limits as well as follow recommendations from the state’s Zero Traffic Fatalities Task Force report that speed limits should “prioritize the safety of all road users.” If successful, the bill could be signed into law in late 2021. Until then, SF’s plans for a citywide 20 mph speed limit are tied.
Illegal designs
Even if SFMTA installed a 20 mph limit on every street tomorrow, without enforcement the measure would do little to change driver behavior. Falling short of installing a cop on every corner, ensuring compliance will require automated speed cameras. Although cameras have been proven to help prevent speeding across 142 communities in the United States, they’re not yet legal in California.
“Many of the best design techniques are still illegal,” Tumlin said. “We do what we’re allowed to do.”
SFMTA has again had to get creative. They’ve started retiming lights on one-way streets to 20 mph, which forces vehicles to travel in sync with the green lights if drivers want to pass multiple intersections.
A veteran cab driver can vouch for that approach. “On certain streets where the traffic signals can control the speed, then you have a sort of self-enforcing mechanism,” said Evelyn Engel, a taxi driver for 14 years and executive board member of the San Francisco Taxi Workers Alliance.
Sometimes, Engel added, you need the police to step in. “In other areas you do need enforcement on the ground, I believe. Especially for people who are really exceeding the speed limit. They need to be stopped within a few blocks. They’re just so dangerous.”
‘Planning for the people’
“The plan that has always been around is making the streets best for cars and not for people. That needs to change,” said Curtis Bradford, a Tenderloin community organizer who has witnessed friends and neighbors lost to traffic violence in his neighborhood. “We need to start planning for the people in the Tenderloin, not for the cars coming into the city.”
The 20 mph cap in the Tenderloin will not slow down cars without coordinated changes in road infrastructure. The California Zero Traffic Fatalities Task Force overwhelmingly agreed that “changing a road’s infrastructure is the most important factor to reduce vehicle operating speeds.”
SFMTA also plans to bar right turns on red to better safeguard people in the crosswalk. Bradford called for other infrastructure fixes in the Tenderloin, like raised crosswalks, and changing one-way thoroughfares into two-way streets. (Even installing a single speed bump can reduce average speeds by 2.7 to 3.4 mph, studies in Denmark and the U.S. have found.)
In light of SFMTA facing a $68 million deficit due to the pandemic, Jodie Medeiros, executive director of pedestrian advocacy group Walk SF, stressed the need for quick, cheap fixes. “Changing a sign to drop down the speed limit is a lot cheaper than, say, putting up a red light camera that costs $250,000,” she said.
Other cities like Portland, Oregon (20 mph), and Seattle (25 mph) have moved to reduce speeds citywide. If San Francisco can’t follow their lead and California law doesn’t change, the culture of driver convenience over the loss of human life will prevail.
“We all need to know why we’re slowing down. The person crossing the street could be a grandmother. It’s definitely somebody’s brother or sister. That person has possibly children to care for,” Medeiros said. “We need to be mindful of what it means to drive in San Francisco. It might take you 30 seconds longer, but that could save a life.”
Unlike a scooter, an e-bike, or almost any other motorized vehicle, cars do not possess a speed governor as a requirement of their manufacture. Instead of designing cars for safety, we task the government with forcing drivers to ease up on the gas. Judging by the 3,600 people who die and more than 13,000 who are severely injured every year in California crashes, transportation agencies are not going far enough. Whatever must go up must come down, speed limits included.
