After Vision Zero, San Francisco ‘overhauls’ approach to tackling traffic violence (KQED)
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About every 15 hours, someone is rushed to San Francisco General Hospital with severe injuries from a traffic crash — a rate that medical experts describe as a public health crisis.
Building on months of efforts by the Board of Supervisors, and following the passage of the Street Safety Act, San Francisco launched a citywide overhaul of how it handles traffic safety after its Vision Zero policy expired in 2024. At City Hall, Mayor Daniel Lurie announced an executive directive that formally links police enforcement with public health data and transportation engineering.
The move creates a unified command structure to address the rising number of severe injuries and fatalities on city streets and aims to bring higher levels of commitment and accountability to the issue within the city government.
“The injuries from these accidents and crashes are some of the hardest things I’ve ever seen as a doctor,” said Dr. Christian Rose, an emergency physician at San Francisco General Hospital who spoke at the ceremony. “If you were hit by a vehicle going 40 mph, that’d be the equivalent of falling off of a five-story building.”
The announcement followed a number of recent tragedies on San Francisco streets. Earlier this month, a 72-year-old staff member at Self-Help for the Elderly was killed in a crash in the Russian Hill neighborhood, at Mason Street and Broadway. And on Sunday, a 1-year-old was struck and killed by a car in Hayes Valley, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
“Everyone deserves to feel safe on the roads,” Anni Chung, Self-Help for the Elderly’s CEO, said. She noted that seniors make up a large portion of pedestrians in neighborhoods like Chinatown and the Tenderloin that are at high risk for traffic incidents.
The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, the Department of Public Health and the San Francisco Police Department will co-chair the new Street Safety Initiative Working Group. While these agencies have collaborated in the past, Lurie’s order mandates a higher level of coordination and requires senior leaders from each department to meet regularly to align their strategies.
Lurie framed the city’s initiative as a more aggressive implementation of the “Safe System” approach, of which zero deaths on the roads is the goal. Lurie said the policy directs streets to be built to handle human error, managing vehicle speeds so that common mistakes don’t become fatal tragedies.
“Too often, traffic injuries are the result of predictable patterns and preventable conditions,” Lurie said. “This initiative will make streets safer for everyone … In San Francisco, safety is non-negotiable.”
