After San Francisco’s policy on traffic safety expired at the end of 2024, city supervisors on Tuesday adopted a new plan to curb traffic fatalities and injuries on city streets.
The Board of Supervisors passed the Street Safety Act, sponsored by District 7 Supervisor Myrna Melgar, that includes actions with deadlines for seven city departments, including the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD), and the Department of Public Health.
Last week, Melgar joined advocates for traffic safety at the steps of City Hall in support of her resolution ahead of a committee hearing.
“We have had enough of dangerous streets, enough preventable tragedies, enough of excuses,” Melgar said at the rally. “We cannot rely on old tools and old ways of doing things to fix today’s problems.”
Marta Lindsey, the communications director for Walk San Francisco, told The Voice that the Vision Zero policy was not the issue, but the way the city executed the policy.
Advocates have pressed city leaders to adopt a new policy since the old policy expired, and after failing to meet the Vision Zero policy of zero traffic fatalities by 2024.
Marta Lindsey, the communications director for Walk San Francisco, told The Voice that the Vision Zero policy was not the issue, but the way the city executed the policy.
“You have to have enough solutions at enough places for it to work,” Lindsey said.
Lindsey also said that the original policy did not have “specifics” for city departments compared to the Street Safety Act. Those specifics include having the SFMTA release a plan by December 2026 on the agency’s plans to bring its popular Residential Street Calming program and to release a public dashboard with traffic crash data.
For the Police Department, which was criticized this year in a Civil Grand Jury report for its lack of issuing tickets to drivers for violating traffic laws, some of the actions set out in the resolution include conducting “high visibility enforcement” focused on speeding vehicles and developing a plan to increase traffic enforcement efforts by December 2026.
Other city agencies in the resolution include the Recreation and Park Department, the school district, and the San Francisco Fire Department. The Fire Department has been tasked with working with the SFMTA to release guidelines on acceptable traffic calming tools for city streets by the end of December of this year.
Last year, the city tallied 42 traffic-related fatalities, with 24 of those being pedestrians.