San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie announced Monday that he is issuing an executive directive launching the Street Safety Initiative, based on the Street Safety Act passed by the Board of Supervisors last fall. The policy package replaces the city’s 2014 “Vision Zero” policy, which has at best shown mixed results.
Lurie addressed reporters on the front steps of City Hall this morning, along with District 7 Myrna Melgar, the principal sponsor of the board legislation, which passed in September without his signature.
The directive also directs the publication of data and expands enforcement tools to encourage safe operations of cars, e-bikes, and scooters.
“No matter how you get around our great city, walking, biking, driving, or riding transit, you should be able to do so without fearing for your life. Street safety means a child can walk to school, a senior can cross the street with confidence, and drivers can get home at the end of the day,” he told the crowd. “Unfortunately and tragically, every year, dozens of people are killed, including children, and hundreds more suffer serious life-changing injuries on our streets. Too often, traffic injuries result from predictable patterns and preventable conditions. In the last decade, we have made meaningful progress. On corridors where we’ve made targeted safety upgrades, collisions have dropped. Pedestrian injuries have fallen by more than a third, and near misses are down. But it is clear that our work is far from finished.”
While progress may have been meaningful, it’s also been frustrating. Under Vision Zero, San Francisco continued to see traffic deaths, with occasional upticks, due to ongoing challenges with enforcement and behavior change. In selected areas, identified as part of a High Injury Network, there have been some successes, but traffic deaths overall remain persistent. Just on Sunday alone, a 4-year-old boy was killed in Hayes Valley in a collision at Hayes and Webster streets, and a hit-and-run driver collided with a cable car on Van Ness Avenue, injuring three people.
The new policy is based on a Safe System Approach, as recently adopted by the federal Department of Transportation, which aims to eliminate fatalities and serious injuries through a multilayered system that creates safer environments where human error won’t result in fatal outcomes.
“Traffic safety cannot rest on one agency,” the mayor continued. “It requires a coordinated effort from every department…. Our first 100-day actions will launch quickly, establishing a multi-departmental working group, cochaired by the SMTA, the Department of Public Health, and the Police Department.”
The directive also directs the publication of data and expands enforcement tools to encourage safe operations of cars, e-bikes, and scooters.
“This is a blueprint for what we need to do,” Supervisor Melgar told reporters. “The mayor has now taken it to the next level by making it an executive directive…. Departments will follow the map and work together to ensure public safety is a priority…. I am so grateful for the partnership with MTA, the support of the MTA Board for DPW, for the fire department, and for making sure that the infrastructure that we are building together makes sense and also keeps us all safe.”
San Francisco Police Commander Luke Martin, head of the department’s Special Operations Bureau, outlined the enforcement aspects of the plan.
“We are focusing enforcement on where it matters most — on those violations that have historically shown to cause serious injuries or fatal collisions, and on those city corridors that historically have seen severe collisions. This is not about issuing citations for the sake of issuing citations. This is about changing behavior that may not feel dangerous in the moment but can cause real harm,” he said. “Our officers are combining target enforcement with high visibility, education, and collaborating with all of our city partners, to ensure this goal of safer streets. When people see officers on the street, when the streets can be more predictable, when dangerous behavior changes, lives are saved.”
Anni Chung, director of Self-Help for the Elderly, spoke in support of the new plan and urged quick implementation.
“The area around Mason, Broadway, and Pacific was considered the priority area for transit agencies to pay more attention to because of the high percentage of minority residents that live there, over 85 percent from the minority communities, mostly Chinese. 48 percent are low income, 24 percent are elderly, age 65 and older, and 77 percent have no car, meaning that they must walk across the streets frequently,” she said. “The city must do everything it can to improve street safety by installing more crosswalks and traffic lights in these equity neighborhoods.”
Lurie outlined a series of actions to be undertaken under the plan, including implementation of high-visibility enforcement within 100 days; development of a plan “to promote and enforce safe e-device [such as electric scooters and bikes] operations and parking” within six months, and release of an updated, data-driven traffic calming program within the year.
Dr. Christian Rose, an emergency medicine practitioner at Kaiser Permanente and an assistant professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, outlined the need in blunt terms.
“About every 15 hours, someone is taken to San Francisco General Hospital after being injured in a traffic crash, which results in more than 500 people a year being severely injured, making this a public health crisis, which was mentioned earlier. Though we might feel invincible, our bodies are incredibly fragile. Unfortunately, it’s just physics.”