Early data suggests that the traffic-safety measures made after a driver killed a family of four waiting for a bus outside the West Portal branch library in March 2024 have been effective at making the streets around the intersection safer.
Since changes were completed in September last year, according to a new report from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, speeding is down, traffic collisions are down, and injuries are down — and sales tax revenue is up.
Traffic collision rates in the half-square-mile area around the crash site — which was located on a major transit corridor, within a block of the West Portal Muni station — went down 60 percent from October 2024 to March 2026 compared to a similar window of time before the project went through (October 2022 to March 2024).
The number of traffic collisions resulting in serious injury in the area dropped from 6.7 per year to 2.7 per year after the changes, SFMTA added.
The first proposal, however, diverged from the initial plan. Following the deadly crash in March 2024, District 7 Supervisor Myrna Melgar said that another family had been hit by a car nearby a year earlier; in that case, the father had lost his legs.
“I want metal, concrete bollards on the side of bus shelters, intersections that are known to be dangerous like this,” Melgar said at the time.
A month later, Melgar and then-Mayor London Breed put forward a plan to do exactly that. The city it added bollards protecting the bus stop and proposed converting the section of Ulloa Street, where the crash had occurred, and the section of West Portal that connected with it, to transit-only.
Those changes were, ultimately, not implemented after pushback from some residents, including the West Portal Merchants Association, which was concerned that the proposed changes would be bad for business.
The bench where the family was sitting was removed immediately after the crash and never replaced. The bus stop, and the sidewalk around it, remain much the same.
The deaths of Matilde Ramos Pinto, Diego Cardoso de Oliveira, and their two children spurred the redesign, and the report says as much. But Melgar said that asking how the modifications would have protected them specifically is asking the wrong questions.
“The report is not ‘Did we do the improvements that would have prevented this family from getting killed?’” Melgar said. “The report is: Do the improvements that we did have made this intersection safer for people going through the intersection? Have they made it better?”
The crash that killed the family of four, said Melgar, was “bad luck.” The driver swerved onto the sidewalk in a large SUV while going 70 mph.
“Nothing would have prevented this family from being killed, short of this person not doing the reckless driving that she was doing,” Melgar added.
Post-redesign, Melgar said the area around the West Portal Muni station is “clearly safer.” Fewer cars are moving through the transit corridor, and the ones that do go more slowly.
By SFMTA’s observations, fewer than 1 percent of the drivers on Ulloa and Vicente streets are going five miles per hour or more over the speed limit.
On Wawona southbound on weekdays, only 7 percent of drivers were speeding, compared to 19 percent before the changes were made. At West Portal station, 75 percent fewer drivers made illegal U-turns.
Also according to the report, 70 percent of the people surveyed in the area after the changes said they felt safe at Ulloa Street and Lenox Way, compared to 50 percent earlier. And there are concrete bollards and bike-share docks protecting pedestrians walking to and from the station itself.
“There’s a lot of different things that are helping to slow vehicle speeds and make pedestrians more visible,” SFMTA deputy spokesperson Michael Roccaforte said. Roccaforte said that SFMTA will continue speaking with the community near West Portal Station to see how they are adapting to the changes.
“It’s a great start,” Roccaforte continued. “But, of course, there’s always room for further improvement.”
““Nothing would have prevented this family from being killed, short of this person not doing the reckless driving that she was doing,” Melgar added. ”
This is a lie. Ulloa is FIFTY FEET WIDE. You can drop an entire West Portal house in the intersections and still have room to drive around it. If Ulloa had the lane and parking width of any other street in the area, even ones with Muni tracks! a driver could not hit 70mph without (relatively) safely wrecking among parked cars instead of children.
Melgar wants credit for these modest improvements, but she deserves nothing but derision for her role in watering down the West Portal and now Ocean Ave projects at the behest of business owners who don’t even live here.
It would be easier to make changes if SFMTA didn’t have a propensity for turning our city streets into garish transportation facilities.
?Bad luck? Sup Melgar stated the crash that killed the family of four, was “bad luck.” The driver swerved onto the sidewalk in a large SUV while going 70 mph. How is this bad luck? Sup. Melgar’s statement is so outrageous it’s to the point that she indicates a bias toward the defendant. The defendant chose to drive that fast with criminal, reckless disregard for the safety of herself and others, failing to follow the law. It was totally **forseeable** that the incident would happen under these horrific conditions, *NOT* bad luck. The family at the bus stop was minding its own business just waiting for the bus. Shame on you Sup. Melgar.
Thank you to all the commenters who are doing the lord’s work and pushing back on these, quite simply, nonsense statements from SFMTA and Melgar.
I have a hard time believing the data from SFMTA painting such a rosy picture. Aaron Nakashima (Akit) regularly posts himself at the intersection of Ulloa and West Portal, uploading video after video of drivers blithely ignoring the No Left Turn and Do Not Enter signs. Guys, we’ve given it two years. It’s time to do the right thing and shut this intersection down entirely to private autos. If this single measure that would hugely increase safety and speed up the Muni Metro somehow qualifies as ‘political pandering’ then I will happily campaign for anyone who wants to engage in full-time political pandering.
One would think that having your customers losing their lives would also be “bad for business.”
It’s well documented all over the developed world that urban small business owners tend to widly overestimate the proportion of their customers who reach their business by car, most likely because the business owners themselves tend to disproportionately rely on cars (for work outside of standard business hours, large shipments/deliveries, etc) and are obliviously projecting their own personal transportation habits onto their customer base.
The urban geography of West Portal is all but perfect for a European-style car-free pedestrian shopping promenade, and it should go without saying that being located on the only such promenade in the city would be *insanely* good for the foot traffic of just about any small retail storefront.
This story lacks a traffic-calming or crash expert (or just research from a crash-safety report!) commenting on Melgar’s assertion that “nothing” would’ve prevented the crash. We should know if common-sense concrete bollards or other infrastructure (such as they use in NYC) would’ve significantly cut the car’s speed if not stopped it outright.
It would be cost prohibitive to build bollards at every bus stop. An entirely free solution would be to allow people to temporarily store heavy metal objects on top of the bus stops. The city can even charge people temporary storage fees, and the bus can simply stop in the roadway to pick up passengers. Since only slightly more than half of MUNI bus drivers even bother to pull into the bus stop anyway, there will be minimal impact.
If anyone spends any time near that intersection, which my family does almost daily on the train, one would see the perilous journey a pedestrian must take to cross.
It is a sport. We can literally count the cars that ignore the signs and red paint and just go straight through the intersection. The cars that make left and right turns onto West Portal with pedestrians within inches of their bumpers. These are drivers who aren’t even looking for pedestrians. No head on a swivel. No making eye contact.
Maybe instead of putting Flock cameras everywhere else (at a time when so many cities are literally ending their contracts, but whatever), the police can put some officers and cameras at that intersection and start giving tickets. Not warnings. Really expensive tickets.
This is a massive failure of analysis. There is no way that the silly, incredibly minor changes that were made at this intersection made traffic collisions go down 60% in the HLAF SQUARE MILE area around the intersection? Is Mission Local and author Boehm merely doing stenography for the SFMTA? Can we please do a little analysis here?
Please actually compare traffic collision changes at West Portal to a comparable transit hub that did NOT have any pedestrian safety changes. THAT will ACTUALLY tell you whether the West Portal changes did anything. The 60% drop could just be a statistical fluctuation since the number of traffic incidents in that area is probably small.
Also, Melgar is a liar. Concrete could have prevented the family of four from being killed. Giant CONCRETE bollards surrounding the bus stop would have slowed the SUV, protected intersections in the area with CONCRETE islands would have prevented the SUV from being able to go 80 mph in the first place, chicanes and protected bike lanes and bulb outs WITH CONCRETE would narrow the street and further make it impossible to go fast. Melgar is an idiot, and she is culpable for the deaths in her district because she’s watered down safety features so much.
The SFMTA is cowtowing to businesses who don’t want to see any change that would ultimately benefit them. It’s gross and unconscionable.
Darn, so much for my cutting-edge super-genius data science research project on New York City’s staggering infinity% increase in airliner-on-skyscraper collisions from 2000 to 2001, followed by its equaĺly staggering 100% decrease from 2001 to 2002.
Too much driving to WP. 3 MUNI Metro lines converging here; #48 (and #57?) bus lines serving it. Until Americans get out there cars–especially in densely-populated neighborhoods, we will still have a corpulent society and congested-with-traffic neighborhoods. When they are congested many drivers seek “advantages” by running stop signs, speeding to beat lights, etc.