The policy’s first action plan the following year had lofty goals: implement safety treatments along at least 13 miles of roadways on the high-injury network each year; assess which speed humps or signage slowed traffic and prevented accidents most effectively; and slow road speeds.
When Vision Zero was introduced in San Francisco, the city struggled with an average of about 20 pedestrian deaths and hundreds of critical injuries due to vehicle crashes each year.
“The result of this collaborative, citywide effort will be safer, more livable streets as we work to eliminate traffic fatalities by 2024,” the plan reads.
Despite high hopes, when the policy sunsetted in December, it came at the end of one of the deadliest years yet on San Francisco streets.
Vision Zero expires with little to celebrate
“The biggest tragedy is that 2024 was the worst year for traffic violence, and particularly for pedestrians, it was the worst year for traffic deaths for pedestrians since 2007,” said Jodie Medeiros, the executive director of pedestrian advocacy group Walk SF.
According to the nonprofit, 24 people were killed in crashes while walking last year, including a family of four who were waiting at a bus stop when they were hit by a vehicle that veered off the road in West Portal and onto the sidewalk.
Collectively, 42 people died in vehicle crashes while walking, biking and driving in 2024, and hundreds were injured.
Medeiros said that since 2014, the city has made progress redesigning streets and adding traffic-slowing measures, including speed cameras that began to go online last month. But one of the reasons she believes San Francisco is continuing to have a high number of injuries and deaths is because policy change has moved at a glacial pace, and agencies aren’t collaborating the way they should.
“It’s important to know that the city is not organized. The agencies haven’t been well coordinated,” Medeiros told KQED.
At a street safety hearing in the city’s Land Use and Transportation Committee this month, the Department of Public Health presented traffic death and injury data from 2023 — the most recent the agency had completed, representatives told supervisors. Its most recent high-injury network map is from 2021.
SFMTA also revealed that it is lagging on safety improvements that were supposed to be complete along those streets last December, Medeiros said.
The next 10 years of Vision Zero
On the morning of the hearing, Medeiros and other traffic safety advocates gathered on the steps of City Hall to place white sneakers, flats and boots in rows in a somber protest. The 10 pairs of “ghost shoes” represented 10 people who have already died in vehicle crashes in 2025, since Vision Zero expired.
The group held signs calling out the lapse in street safety policy and urging Lurie to take up the task of reviving it.
In a letter Walk SF sent to Lurie the same day, advocates demanded that he finalize a new policy by July 30, and have an interagency traffic safety plan codified by the end of September for the five agencies responsible for carrying it out: SFMTA, the departments of public health and public works, and the police and fire departments.
“We feel like this is a fair amount of time for him to be in office, to understand the agencies, to understand the challenges, what’s worked, what’s not worked, and to really create and have a robust, thoughtful new Vision Zero,” Medeiros said.
The letter also lays out what Walk SF and Bay Area Families for Safer Streets, another advocacy group made up of crash survivors, want to see prioritized in the new policy.
One of their main focuses is speeding.
“Dangerous speeding is a risk factor,” said advocate Jenny Yu, whose mother was in a severe crash in 2011.
“She was crossing the street on Park Presidio and Anza in Golden Gate Park, and a driver was turning left, speeding,” she recalled. “The SUV struck her body and swung her body across the street.”
City data shows that 1 in 5 crashes are related to excessive speed, and as speed increases, so does the risk of severe injury and death. If a car traveling 20 mph hits a pedestrian, the risk of a fatality is 10%. If that car is going 40 mph, the risk surges to 80%.
