In 2014, the San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Agency (SFMTA), which oversees the city’s Muni transit, streets, and parking, set a goal to eliminate traffic deaths in 10 years. It’s now 2024, and the agency has failed to do that. Traffic safety is now the most visible of several challenges providing a rough ride for the agency, coinciding with the stewardship of its current director of transportation, Jeffrey Tumlin.
The city was stunned on March 16 when a family of four was suddenly wiped out of existence in front of the West Portal library. A Mercedes SUV crashed into a Muni stop, killing Mission residents Diego Cardoso de Oliveira; Matilde Ramos Pinto; and their sons, 19-month-old Joaquim and 3-month-old Cauê. The family was taking a day trip to the zoo.
The four deaths brought the city’s total for traffic fatalities in 2024 to 11, and the first quarter isn’t even over yet. It’s a grim metric in what has become a Sisyphean struggle for the agency.
The tragedy follows increased restiveness over progress on traffic safety initiatives, marked by the failure to reach the 10-year goal and by emotional testimony given at a March 19 SFMTA Board of Directors meeting from Richard Zieman, whose son, teacher Andrew Zieman, was killed by a reckless driver on Franklin Street in 2021. Zieman testified in favor of a board item implementing a newly authorized speed camera program but also noted protests over delayed safety improvements on Franklin. Part of the original plan to slow traffic on the street had been pulled in 2022.
In 2014, San Francisco embraced Vision Zero, a traffic safety policy initiative started in Sweden, along with the 10-year goal. Meanwhile, pedestrian fatalities reached new highs across the country. Locally, deaths declined from 31 in 2014 to 20 in 2017 and then climbed to 39 in 2022. In 2023, the number dipped again to 22.
Vision Zero was inherited by Tumlin when he became director in 2019. He was an outsider from the consultancy world, intending to bring more new ideas to the agency. His predecessor, Ed Reiskin, was asked to resign by Mayor London Breed after a year where everything seemed to go wrong for the monolithic agency, including a horrifying accident involving one of Muni’s new subway cars dragging a woman under a station platform caught on video.
To that end, traffic management and street design priorities shifted away from speed and convenience for cars and more toward protecting pedestrians and cyclists, backed up by peer-reviewed research. SFMTA has been using new tools like protected bike lanes, speed cameras, stricter speed limits, and increased “daylighting,” which keeps parking spaces farther away from intersections, to improve street safety.
Getting those tools has sometimes required legislative action in Sacramento, extensive outreach to stakeholders, or reform of complex regulations. This “tactical urbanist” approach to street safety also contrasts with relying on police enforcement of traffic laws, which has declined precipitously since 2014. The controversy over “pretext stops” recently restricted by the Police Commission also complicates police traffic enforcement.
The projects routinely attract pushback from neighborhood stakeholders and other city agencies. Community stakeholders, such as small businesses and neighborhood groups, voice concerns over reduced parking and what they see as unintended consequences, such as increasing congestion and other burdens on side streets.
“SFMTA talking to the neighbors is just checking a box. They’re trying to fix one problem while they create another and sometimes the other problem is much worse than the problems they’re trying to fix,” George Wooding, a longtime neighborhood activist and former leader of the Coalition on San Francisco Neighborhoods, told the Voice in an interview. “People are going 10 miles an hour slower, children and pedestrians are safer and they’re all right, but they never considered what they did to the streets surrounding the street.”
Moe Jamil, a deputy city attorney and Russian Hill Neighbors board member running for District 3 Supervisor says the agency is run by “ivory tower bureaucrats” and needs “wholesale change.” As it turns out, one of Jamil’s opponents in the District 3 race is Sharon Lai, who served on the SFMTA Board of Directors from 2020 until 2022. Incumbent supervisor Aaron Peskin endorses both candidates.
“Special care needs to be given to communities largely shut out of recent planning efforts, especially families with children, service and trade workers who commute around and into the city, and the elderly and disabled populations that frequently need to drive,” Jamil added.
In February, City College of San Francisco trustees voted to oppose a safety improvement project on Frida Kahlo Way, including a two-way protected bikeway, citing several issues, including the elimination of some parking, always a concern for a commuter campus.
In an interview Tuesday, Tumlin told The Voice that SFMTA has been working with City College to address the concerns. “There was a long list [and] I think we’ve addressed all of them. The last remaining concern that we could not fully address was around parking; we were able to restore about 25 percent of the parking spaces.”
“We recognize that City College is an essential and very complex institution that students come to from all over the region. They’ve got complex lives, and parking will always be a key part. But we also want to acknowledge that many students don’t have cars, and right now, there’s no good way to bike there,” he added. “By unlocking the ability for students who don’t own a car to get safely to City College for the first time, we think that we can help City College with its mission of ensuring that mobility isn’t an obstacle to getting an education.”
The project is part of SFMTA’s “Quick-Build” strategy, which has been implemented in other cities and endorsed by traffic safety groups. Its reliance on measures like changing signage and paint striping on the street, which the agency describes as “reversible and adjustable,” is supposed to enable quick implementation. However, some advocates note that even Quick-Build projects, like one for Bayshore Boulevard, which took years to approve, get mired in San Francisco’s cumbersome oversight systems.
“This is what SFMTA deals with all the time,” Robin Pam, a parent organizer with advocacy group Kid Safe SF, told The Voice in an interview Monday. “City College has held up [the Frida Kahlo Way] project for at least six months. You saw the same thing happen with the Flower Market and the 17th Street project. All of that delay in project time adds costs to the project.”
Others have questioned whether the seemingly light measures taken in Quick-Build projects are enough to change problem drivers’ behavior.
“Quick-Build is absolutely not enough,” admits Tumlin, adding, “It’s also all we can afford.”
He cited the 2022 loss of Proposition A, a $400 million bond measure to fund street improvements, as a significant factor. “We’ve been left with plastic straws and paint, which have still been far more successful than we had thought,” he adds. “They also attract state and federal funds to build them out in concrete later. I would love to be able to pour concrete and plant trees. But those resources have been stripped away.”
The lost opportunity of Proposition A compounds SFMTA’s fiscal worries, which are complicated by the Covid pandemic and a post-Covid world in which new modalities like rideshares and robotaxis have already cut into parking revenues for both SFMTA and other agencies.
Once Covid aid runs out, the rug gets pulled out from under the agency, and Muni, its most visible service, will suffer tremendously.
“Our federal funding has been exhausted, and we’re subsisting on state and regional funding, which will cover us for the next two years. But in 2026, we’re facing a $240 million annual structural deficit,” Tumlin explains. He’s banking on a 2026 regional funding measure that will help bail out both SFMTA and BART, which has its own more severe money troubles.
Tumlin does say that much of the “death spiral” predicted last year for the agency without the measure can be mitigated by eliminating some Muni lines instead of cutting service across all of them. “That is not a fate that any of us want to suffer, but it would allow us to survive financially. It would just destroy mobility for hundreds of thousands of San Franciscans.”
Meanwhile, the convergence of all these issues has made Tumlin’s tenure at SFMTA a political hobby horse, with an increasingly contentious race for mayor coming in November. Two candidates, Supervisor Ahsha Safai and former interim mayor Mark Farrell, have said they will fire Tumlin if elected. They probably won’t get to do that, as his term as director is up for renewal by the SFMTA board in December.
When asked if he would seek another term, Tumlin said, “That all depends on the outcome of the November election. I think we’ll just leave it at that.”