More than a decade ago, San Francisco adopted Vision Zero, a plan to reduce traffic deaths to zero by the year 2024.
In the year 2024, the number of people who died in traffic collisions in the city was considerably more than zero. It was 49 — higher than the number of people who died the year Vision Zero was adopted.
On Thursday, the San Francisco Government Audit and Oversight Committee — comprised of Supervisors Jackie Fielder, Danny Sauter and Stephen Sherrill — filed amended responses to the Civil Grand Jury’s findings and recommendations related to Vision Zero in a hearing led by Supervisor Sauter.
The impetus for the revamped Vision Zero resolution is a report titled “Failed Vision: Revamping the Roadmap to Safer Streets,” compiled by the Civil Grand Jury, the watchdog organization tasked with measuring the effectiveness of different city programs.
The report, released in June 2025, lays out the failures of Vision Zero so far, and urges three departments — the San Francisco Police Department, San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, and the Mayor’s Office — to adopt a range of recommendations.
These include increasing traffic enforcement, updating existing traffic-enforcement technology, developing a standard set of guidelines for making streets safer, and working with the Board of Supervisors on outreach to each district to explain the plan and its goals.
“Why are we doing this?” Kate Blumberg, the primary author of the report, asked the Government Audit and Oversight Committee, rhetorically.
Because, Blumberg added,“speed kills.” If a driver actually adheres to the 20 mph speed limit on many San Francisco streets, the likelihood that a pedestrian will survive being hit by their car is 90 percent.
If a driver is even going 10 mph over that limit, the likelihood of a pedestrian surviving a crash drops to 60 percent or lower.
Representatives of the San Francisco Police Department, San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, and the Mayor’s Office all accepted shared responsibility, and vowed to continue to work toward eliminating fatalities.
“I love the recommendation,” said Captain Peter Shields, of the report’s directive that the SFPD play a bigger role in traffic enforcement. “Having the support from the Mayor and the Chief ingrained into the officers is hugely important here.”
The report shows that from 2014 to 2022, traffic citations decreased by 95 percent, from more than 120,000 citations in 2014 to a little over 4,000 in 2022. In 2024, citations crept back up to 15,550.
Shields attributed the data on traffic enforcement to outdated technology and understaffing. SFPD has requested a better citation system, Shields said.
One failure of the system, he added, “is that “admonishments” (letting a driver off with a warning) do not get recorded.
Supervisor Jackie Fielder, of District 9, questioned this logic. If the admonishments were recorded, Fielder asked, would that bring 2024’s citation data closer to 2015’s?
“No, I don’t believe so,” Shields replied. “The number would be a little higher, but not apples to apples.”
Sophia Kittler, the Budget Director of the Mayor’s office, also credited the lack of traffic enforcement to “tremendous” understaffing at SFPD.
But data from the report says otherwise. It found that enforcement citations did not correlate with the number of officers in the department at a given time. In 2016, police staffing increased by 6 percent, the same year that the first big drop in citations occurred.
Interviews with police officers conducted while the report was being compiled also revealed anecdotal evidence that SFPD leadership was not holding officers accountable to performing this duty, leading to a culture where traffic enforcement is not valued as part of the job.
Shields emphasized that the SFPD now regularly sends out enforcement to collision hotspots.
“This is our priority,” he said. “We need the staffing and the equipment but we are ready to do the work.”
Shannon Hake, program manager for the SFMTA’s program manager, was next. Hake swiftly highlighted several actions SFMTA has taken in recent months to improve safety.
Among them: Since the SFMTA installed speed cameras earlier this year, the agency had distributed 300,000 warning tickets to speeding drivers since June, and 20,000 since August.
Hake also touted SFMTA’s efforts at “daylighting” — improving visibility at intersections by eliminating parking spaces that are close to street corners — at 2,000 intersections near schools. Hake promised to daylight the rest of the city next.
“Street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood,” said Hake. This project will be completed by the end of 2026, she added.
In 2026, Kittler noted, the Mayor’s office also plans to roll out an educational campaign to foster “community buy-in” for future traffic safety measures.
The vision for zero fatalities will require heavy lifting from all departments, Blumberg concluded. “These are all pieces of a puzzle.”
Approached afterwards, Blumberg displayed cautious optimism. “I’m hopeful,” Blumberg said. “Whether we’ll get to zero anytime soon, I don’t know. There’s a lot of obstacles. But I think the city is going in the right direction.”
We don’t need to spend money on an education campaign. What an embarrassment.
Drivers knows what to do at a stop sign, that they need a front plate, shading out front windows and obscuring rear plates are illegal, racing next to a Muni train while people are getting on/off is illegal and dangerous, unregistered cars aren’t insured even if you pay for the insurance, driving and use mobile devices and wearing noise canceling headphones while driving are also illegal.
Drivers are not entitled to put people at risk so they can drive their cars however they personally see fit, and make sure they are undetectable so they can get away with it.
Giving out tickets is revenue generating. Our city needs solid revenue streams.
If Millbrae unapologetically gives out speed camera tickets without warning, then why can’t we?
Our city has a massively wasted budget, not a lack of revenue streams…
Giving out tickets literally costs more than it brings in. It’s not close.
They don’t do it for revenue reasons, they (used to) do it for public safety.
Unregistered cars are not caught by speed cameras. You’re giving the biggest problem group when it comes to unsafe driving a pass and putting the onus on those who are already following the rules, as if it weren’t expensive enough for people who follow the rules already. Think a little harder mama. Punishing all drivers for the 1% that causes 75% of the problem is 100% stupid.
SFPD could make its entire budget just enforcing traffic rules on Mission Street. The forced right turns off Mission onto Chavez and 20th? Ignored thousands of times a day. No left turn signs? LOL. I’m sure there are other thoroughfares just as chaotic.
It would be so easy for SFPD to do *something*.
Would it be effective to allow the citizens to report speeding, running red lights, failures to yield to crosswalks, and other dangerous driving? We could incentivize people to participate by giving them a portion of the collected fine. New York City does this with the idling-truck law, and the IRS has a similar program for tax avoidance. My understanding is that both have been wildly successful.
You can report it but unless sworn officers see it personally nothing can happen. They can put someone under investigation for something beyond traffic infractions but running stop signs and that sort of thing, no. Besides, you’d be reporting every single cyclist on the road as well. It’s the same rules of the road not being enforced and the same danger add. Truck idling and tax avoidance don’t really have a lot to do with it.
Yeah but cyclists aren’t as deadly. The article specifically states that speeds less than 20 MPH reduce fatalities to 10% or less. The vast majority of fatalities are because of cars. Honestly we should just ban those standing scooters. Those things are dangerous for the riders and pedestrians. Convenient, maybe, but I have never seen a person on one that’s followed a single traffic law.
This sounds like a good idea, but there are show stopping legal impediments to civilian initiated criminal prosecutions.
It wouldn’t hold up in court, but you could use video to show police where they need to set up enforcement in the future. The stuff about redistributing fines is hilarious squid game fiction stuff but my understanding is that Squid Game was wildly successful. Lol.
It doesn’t actually work like that and for good reasons.
A lot of things happened. The pandemic traffic enforcement holiday the SFPD took and still seems to be on. The increase in large vehicles with high and wide fronts that greatly increase the death and serious injury rate when pedestrians and other unarmoured humans are hit. The increase in aggressive driving, U turns in front of oncoming traffic, running red lights as rules and community norms just ebb away. The increase in cell phone obsessiveness and the distraction and irritation that that causes. I have never heard so many horns blaring in my 4 decades in SF as when someone doesn’t accelerate fast enough at a green light. The increase in double parking when there is ample curb space just in front or behind the address in question. The increase in delivery vehicles double parked because people don’t want to have to go to a store, they want it now without leaving the comfort of their own living room. Faster vehicles where the occupant is confident that no matter what happens, they are unlikely to die, so why stop for the yellow, just run the red.
Why does Blumberg say the limit on city streets is 20? Doesn’t she know that 25 is the default? And that you are allowed 10 mph or so on top of that?
Yes, Vision Zero failed. But doubling down on that won’t help. The simple reality is that the city’s residents value convenience, comfort and shorter travel times. And they are willing to accept that a few dozen people will die in accidents as a quid pro quo for that.
After all nationally Americans seem sanguine about the annual death toll on the roads, 35,000 or so. They care more about other issues.
insted wasting hundreds of 1000s of dollars on daylighting, curb-bulbouts, and other bs at safe corners, or lowering speed limits to 20 but never enforcing them, why didn’t they just have SFPD enforce traffic laws? Like aggressively? Pick a neighborhood, enforce the hell out of everything for a few months, then move on to another hood . see how that work?
We’d save moeny, get guns off the streets in traffic stops, and people would drive mroe safefly, ast least for a while.
Ten years, what’s the budget, I’m sure that couldn’t looked up, how many life’s saved, how many boondoggles to other countries taken.
Vision Zero is a failure just about everywhere and it is mind boggling that people try to fix it. A google search on queries like “analysis of vision zero united states” or “vision zero failure” will bring up many articles and reports of the form “(A) Vision Zero is a failure (B) there are a million unsubstantiated excuses we can provide for this failure THEREFORE (C) let us double down on Vision Zero”
If this was a really great policy, you might expect some places to succeed and a few others to fail because they didn’t do it right, but you ought to see some signal that the policy is a good idea. Most advocates will point to Oslo and its success. But we just haven’t been able to replicate that in the U.S. (or Canada I believe). The US is not Scandinavia, our cities mostly evolved with the automobile and roadways—who knows why it doesn’t work here, but the evidence shows it doesn’t. When I looked at the data for San Francisco it appeared that traffic fatalities and accidents declined year-over-year at a steady pace (from a high in the ~ 90/yr rate) since the early 1990s. That steady decline was halted when Vision Zero was implemented in 2014.
There are peer reviewed papers that analyze data from dozens of cities testing whether the accident rates after Vision Zero started are statistically different from before Vision Zero. Only 2 out of 68 cases showed a statical difference, and because of the way they did the statistics that may not mean anything either (their approach inflates the likelihood of false positives). Bottom line is that the paper shows Vision Zero is a failure across the US. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19427867.2022.2116673?src=recsys
” The US is not Scandinavia, our cities mostly evolved with the automobile and roadways…”
So did Scandinavia’s. They chose to correct that mistake starting about 30-40 years ago. One needs only to look back as far as the 1970’s to see the stark difference between then and now in cities like Amsterdam.
Just because something sucks now doesn’t mean it can’t be fixed.
Move to Scandinavian paradise, leave the SF working class out of your gentrification idealism, thanks hippies.
One issue that I’ve not seen resolved that has played out in the Mission is how a corridor is included in the high injury network. Apparently, SFMTA uses the total number of deaths or injuries, not the rate.
So a street that is a bicycle boulevard that might have a larger number of injuries or deaths, such as Valencia, gets included even though the injury rate is probably much lower than other corridors due to the enormous denominator.
It is that metric that set into motion the disaster that was the center running bicycle lane that had to be rolled back. It is that metric that needs to be revisited and transformed into an injury rate metric.
Every death is a tragedy. But there are diminishing returns to how far we can engineer our way to safety. Lowering injury rates is a win that saves lives.
Traffic enforcement has been the key missing piece for decades. SF Bicycle Coalition declined to advocate for SFPD enforcement of auto CVC violations for years. SFPD considers the job optional.
When I co-managed 2003’s Prop H, police reform, one of my intentions was to create space for those on the losing end of SFPD’s enforcement discretion to take seats at the policymaking table and amend the general orders to force SFPD officers to do our bidding instead of theirs.
In addition to people of color facing police violence, I’d wanted to see pedestrians and/or cyclists take a Police Commission seat to do the heavy lift of conforming SFPD enforcement on the streets to a public health intervention driven by DPH data, policing the violations most likely to injure or kill.
That has been 22 years now. I’m not holding my breath.
Cyclists are the #1 group when it comes to not enforcing rules of the road, however. There are more stop signs and lights blown on 2 wheels than 4 by orders of magnitude. Yet as you note when one of them wins the risk jackpot, that statistic is also added to the “need to act now” pile just as if it were any other accident. That’s insane. Just like the older lady who hit the family of 4 at a Bus Stop in West Portal at speed (when she either mixed up the pedals or got her foot caught, or whatever happened) was USED by WalkSF and other fake money pit groups to randomly change left hand turns on a nearby street, as if that actually solved the problem?
It’s madness. These people have no common sense throwing millions at everything other than the root causes of the actual issue. Without enforcement of the 1% of outliers that police can actually catch doing big%’s of the unsafe driving, you’re just wasting millions to engineer solutions to problems that don’t actually exist. We need to get non-profits that gorge themselves at the trough out of this process, it should be strictly from a technical engineering standpoint that we ever make changes, and not for emotional BS reasons like “Vision Zero” is literally founded upon. What a charade. Get the non-profits’ actually-for-profit agenda out of the way, job 1.
Anyone who has lost a friend or family member to a crash with a driver understands what Vision Zero means. If you haven’t, I hope that stays true of you.
So often, dangerous behavior is in order to save a few seconds or a couple of minutes on a driving trip.
How many minutes are lost when someone is killed?
For someone who is middle-aged, it’s about 20,000,000.
What about the time lost with their family members?
Their friends?
Others whose lives would be affected positively by this person?
What if they are a parent or a grand parent – how many minutes lost to pain? How many to milestones not able to be shared?
How many minutes saved on any one trip is worth those hundreds of millions of minutes put at risk?
Zero.
Thanks to those on the Grand Jury, and to the electeds, with vision.
And to those who have no choice but to drive, I hope you have a comfy seat, functioning climate control, and a pleasant companion or some good music to listen to. May we all enjoy the ride.
Well surprise, frustrating drivers by turning driving into an obstacle course of speed bumps, mistimed lights and double mis-directs isn’t making things better. More recently they’ve ratcheted things up by adding seas of traffic posts. Which might look great in birds-eye drawings, but turns to pure confusing clutter when viewed from street level. Other misdeeds: Choking or closing arterials, which is pushing traffic on neighborhood streets. Right turns made artificially tight, pushing drivers into oncoming traffic. In addition, you can’t turn in 2nd gear any longer when driving a manual. (For those unfamiliar, the syncromesh of your usual manual transmission is set up so you can’t easily engage 1st unless you’re rolling up to a stop or red light).
All this adds up to an assault of distractions that draws drivers’ attention away from safely navigating the city. Where you used to be able to pay attention to sidewalks, you’re now consumed by simply having to make sure you’re not hitting stuff that’s placed in your way. If you were from out of town, driving in San Francisco was always a challenge. Now you’re just bound to hit something somewhere somehow.
And there’s more: The dark season is upon us, it is high time they finally bring in arborists to clear the many tree canopies that block street lights. Also, turn these lights up from the current dim, so the street, crosswalks etc are illuminated properly.
Traffic deaths will likely decrease when people stop relying on the “walk” sign then cross the road while looking down at their phones. Scanning left & right and generally being more aware of the environment will surely save pedestrian lives.
Foisting this principally on “speeding” drivers is ridiculous. Speed is ONE factor in road safety. Mailing out speed camera tickets to drivers for going 13mph over the limit (arbitrary number) when they were mid-block on a multi-lane street with no other vehicles nearby and certainly no cross-walks is really dumb and just puts more strain on already-tight wallets.
The city should just put more traffic cops in high incident areas and let them use human discretion.
Yeah and in 2008 Newsom promised to end ‘homelessness’ in ten years in San Francisco. Politicians can’t stop lying and making impossible promises Then they make ridiculous excuses….and say …THEY JUST NEED MORE MONEY.
The “non profit” part of this is the corruption nobody sees even in plain sight. The politicians have just become “moderate” on the whole “integrity” thing, that’s a thing of the past now. The donors that own the politicians also run the “non” profits, and they don’t run them just to break even – it’s a scam and nobody even looks.
Well, you can try to take action that will make a difference, or you can embark on a vindictive campaign to demonize anybody who drives a car. Beyond that, you can dehumanize folks by framing it as “cars vs. people”, as if cars don’t have human beings inside. Follow that with a bunch of white plastic poles that promote confusion and dangerous, illegal traffic maneuvers. Then you can assume that as long as you’re making it painful to drive a car in SF, then you’ve succeeded in defeating the Dark Side. Along the way, pretend that public transit doesn’t really exist unless it’s a wannabe New York subway. Finally, you can hang a bunch of “no right turns on red” signs everywhere that are widely ignored.
It may be stupid, but by golly you’ll feel better about yourself, especially if you’re a wealthy bicycle rider.
Campers,
I’ve said this before but nothing happened.
What’s up with that ?
I thought the Mayor read ML chats.
lol
There are many towns and cities all over the world where the streets are too crooked or steep for driving fast and no one gets killed.
To approximate that result the City should install Safeway height traffic bumps at every intersection where there are traffic lights.
If it is dangerous enough to warrant a traffic light it should automatically warrant a speed bump.
You don’t have to wait til someone is killed.
Course, cycle daredevils and road show circle drivers won’t like it.
Can’t please everyone.
SF would get a World wide rep for slow driving.
go Niners !!
h.
“Newsflash, wasting millions trying to appease cyclist groups is wasting millions.”
The number of casualties climbs, they demand more millions. Brilliant scam, WalkSF.
Lurie won’t do anything. Likes cars too much . Now that he opened market to private cars (yes, waymo cars are private), the war on pedestrians will become supercharged
Found the jobless (non-profit) anti-car online crusader who uses perpetual victimstance to try to get millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars completely wasted.
Let’s be honest here. Tenderloin, Mission, etc, have a high number of addicts and mentally impaired people stepping off the curb without looking, jaywalking, crossing mid-block, crossing against signals, etc. It’s easier to see them during the day, but in the middle of the night, not so much! Furthermore, we have Millennials and Gen Z staring at their phones and walking with their earbuds, unaware of their surroundings. I guess parents never taught them to stop at the crosswalk and look both ways. We also have delivery drivers on scooters, bikes and cars with complete disregard for any traffic laws. And, from time to time, you get old people unable to operate a motor vehicle, making mistakes and running pedestrians over.
So stop your zero vision progressive propaganda, and if you really want to solve the problem, for once in your lifetime, be objective and write about what truly causes these accidents!