For years, San Francisco has held out hope of eliminating traffic deaths by the year 2024, a pledge taken last decade called “Vision Zero.” Unfortunately, the city is nowhere close to zero. In some respects, it’s gone backward.
Severe injuries due to crashes rose from 3,457 in 2021 to 3,610 last year, according to a report from the SF Municipal Transportation Agency. “We’re either doing too much of the wrong thing or not enough of the right thing,” the agency’s board member Steve Heminger said at a Nov. 28 meeting.
Nearly a decade into SF’s Vision Zero era, city officials are taking stock of what’s worked, what hasn’t, and — perhaps more important — understanding the limits of their powers, and how to expand them.
For safety advocates and others, the realization feels like it’s late. (Heminger was speaking last month at the inaugural meeting of SFMTA’s Vision Zero committee.) To be clear, San Francisco is not alone. Most U.S. cities that have taken the pledge — including Los Angeles, New York, and Portland, Ore. — reported that they have “hit a wall” in their efforts to bring traffic fatalities down. In fact, road deaths reached all-time highs over the last two years in most locations.
Yet the movement, which started in Scandinavia more than 25 years ago, has transformed street safety across Europe. Sweden cut its traffic deaths in half over the first 20 years, and Norway’s capital Oslo, with nearly 90 percent of SF’s population, had only one traffic death in 2021. San Francisco had 27 in 2021, then jumped to 39 last year — the highest of its Vision Zero era.
Stateside, only one city has hit zero: Hoboken, N.J., which hasn’t had a fatality in four years.
Officials know what works to reduce crashes: closing streets or entire neighborhoods to cars, physically separating bicyclists from moving vehicles, lowering automobile speeds.
San Francisco has tried all these things to some degree. But there are roadblocks to safer streets. One is heated opposition, once the idea of safer streets (who doesn’t like that?) develop into concrete proposals that restrict or ban cars. Think of the fights over some of SF’s slow streets, or closing off parts of JFK and the Great Highway.
Another bottleneck, which is related to public pushback, is the process SF employs in the name of community input, impeding SFMTA plans from the drawing board to the pavement. “Is it more important to get stuff going to see how it works, [or] to do the 67th community meeting?” SFMTA board chair Amanda Eaken tells The Frisc. “It is a matter of life and death.”
What’s more, SFMTA is dealing with staffing shortages, like every other city department, that slow down everything from planning to deployment.
As the city approaches the self-imposed deadline that it won’t meet, there has been more urgency to improve streets. Some big changes are indeed on their way. Speed cameras are coming, thanks to a major push by SFMTA and safety advocates for a state law that passed in October. Also, other measures including turn restrictions will be more widely deployed after a successful pilot in the Tenderloin.
In the short term, the vast majority of street-level changes are happening with fast fixes. In February, more than half of the high injury network — the 12 percent of streets where the majority of crashes happen — had no traffic-calming measures. Now, SFMTA reports that only a third of the high-injury streets, some 50 miles, still need upgrades. But some advocates worry these improvements are more for show and have little effect on driver behavior.
‘Straws and paint’
The city’s street safety goals go hand in hand with its climate goals. SFMTA has noted that private cars and trucks are the biggest local contributor to greenhouse gasses. To coax as many people as possible from their vehicles, other transit modes must improve. Less congestion means better air quality, and it also means safer, less crowded streets.
To that end, Eaken says the agency is devoting a lot of resources to an expanded bike network, dubbed the Active Communities Plan. A final version is due in mid-2024. As The Frisc has reported, many would-be bikers won’t make the shift until they feel as safe riding on two wheels as they do in four-wheeled cars.
One major artery of the new bike network, Valencia Street, shows how difficult the plan will be. SFMTA created center-running bike lanes along eight blocks of Valencia, a design never tried in SF before. It’s only a one-year experiment, but it was deployed over the objections of an overwhelming majority of the community. (Just last week, merchants protested, blaming the design for lost business. Bicyclists have reported near-crashes and bad driver behavior.)
While weaving through contentious opinions and disputes, SFMTA is also dealing with a financial crisis. “We’ve lost 40 percent of our capital budget,” noted SFMTA executive director Jeffrey Tumlin at last month’s Vision Zero hearing. “All we can afford are straws and paint.” (SFMTA is expecting revenues from the current $1.4 billion to drop now that federal COVID emergency funding is running out.)
Tumlin is referring to the agency’s “Quick Build” program, which began in 2019 as a way to rapidly change a streetscape with tools that are fairly easy to put in place — and to remove, if either the solution isn’t working or the changes warrant more permanent infrastructure.
But ripping up streets and laying down new concrete and asphalt costs more money, which means SFMTA will lean heavily on Quick Build projects for now. Safe streets advocates take issue with this emphasis for a couple reasons. First is a data problem; there’s not enough.
For instance, the city database maintained by the Department of Public Health that tracks collisions has been lagging months behind and at times this year has been unavailable. Stephen Braitsch, who founded a street-safety data platform and relies on city data, calls it “unacceptable.”
“There’s zero emphasis on data and making data-informed decisions that will make a difference in safety,” adds Braitsch.
SFMTA spokesperson Stephen Chun says that the agency does collect data for each Quick Build project before and after implementation. The results help determine whether and where to make changes if needed. Braitsch counters that it’s not detailed enough and wants to see the impact of every project on vehicle speed, economic activity, crashes, and more.
Road diets and daylighting
According to consultancy Fehr & Peer, hired by SFMTA to analyze high-injury intersections, most of the upcoming quick fixes should include high-visibility crosswalks (wider stripes and bright colors) and daylighting (car-free curbs within several feet of an intersection).
Safety advocate WalkSF says the recommendations aren’t enough. “Updating traffic signals, daylighting, and high-visibility crosswalks won’t change the way people are going to speed on streets,” WalkSF executive director Jodie Medeiros tells The Frisc.
Medeiros prefers fixes like road diets, which reduce car traffic lanes and add bike lanes or wider sidewalks. She named a few fast, one-way corridors like Franklin, Harrison, and Gough that could use a slimming down. This fix is technically a Quick Build, using easy-to-deploy materials, but they take more time due to the “design and outreach process,” according to SFMTA’s Chun. The agency will consider Franklin for a road diet between Broadway and Lombard streets, he adds. A timeline for this additional work is expected next spring.
In the aftermath of a death in 2021, when a driver speeding down Franklin pinned an SFUSD educator against a building, officials made changes to the street. A road diet was not included, but SFMTA did install slow turn wedges and high-visibility crosswalks and studied their impact. While most drivers heeded the right-turn restrictions, the changes haven’t slowed traffic or promoted more yielding to pedestrians.
In addition to the progress on the high injury network, 17 corridors across the city — not assessed in the Fehr & Peer report — are scheduled to receive upgrades by the end of 2024, including the recently completed work on Bayshore Boulevard, where a parking-protected bike lane and other features were installed.
Capital battles
Not all safety tools have been in SFMTA’s control. Only in 2021 did state lawmakers pass a bill, AB 43, allowing cities to lower speed limits to 20 mph along streets where at least half the property use is restaurant or retail. SF has implemented this on 56 streets so far.
This year brought another capital victory. State legislators passed AB 645, letting six California cities including San Francisco pilot a speed camera program. At the November Vision Zero meeting, Tumlin said the agency spent “years of fighting” just to get “one tiny program” in the speed camera pilot, and criticized a state apparatus that “refuses to legalize every single traffic control tool.”
WalkSF’s Medeiros says she went to Sacramento four times to make sure “legislators heard from, saw, and understood what [speed cameras] meant for street safety.”
One measure that doesn’t require changes in Sacramento is no right turn on red. SFMTA ran a pilot in 50 Tenderloin intersections; a majority of drivers obeyed the restriction, reducing close calls with pedestrians. There was also a 70 percent reduction in cars blocking crosswalks and intersections.
SFMTA will expand no right on red to high-congestion neighborhoods including Chinatown, South of Market, and the Financial District, but has angered some advocates by not committing to a citywide ban. Several U.S. cities are debating a ban, while only New York City has put one into effect. SF’s Board of Supervisors called for a citywide ban in October, initially proposed by Sup. Dean Preston, but SFMTA is not obligated to implement one.
Now that SF seems to have pinpointed measures that might actually work to reduce street deaths and injuries, officials need to move fast to put them in place. At the same time, the next phase of this work should not overpromise: Even if we can’t get to zero, San Francisco should make streets safer places to walk, bike, and drive.
