A vehicle waits to make a right turn on March 5 from Fourth Street onto Channel Street, a San Francisco intersection where a 2-year-old was fatally struck by a vehicle on Feb. 27.

Pedestrians look at a memorial on March 5 at the corner of Fourth and Channel Street, where a 2-year-old was fatally struck by a vehicle on Feb. 27.

It’s not even three months into 2026, and five pedestrians have been killed in San Francisco so far.

The first was a 76-year-old woman on Feb. 3 at Bayshore Boulevard and Silver Avenue. The second, on Feb. 14, was a 47-year-old woman who was hit and killed just blocks away at Bayshore and Arleta Avenue. A 2-year-old child was hit and killed by a driver on Feb. 27 at the intersection of Fourth and Channel streets. On March 7, a pedestrian was killed and another person was injured on a sidewalk when a car going in reverse, having driven the wrong way up a one-way street, backed over him on Kearny Street in North Beach.

These fatalities all occurred on high-injury networks, areas known to the city officials where crashes and fatalities occur with regularity.

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So, if San Francisco is aware of how dangerous these corridors are, why hasn’t it fixed them?  

For years, that task fell under the city’s Vision Zero framework, which expired in 2024. Mayor Daniel Lurie replaced it with an executive directive on street safety, announced in December of last year.

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We’re fast approaching the end of the first 100 days of the directive, and it’s worth examining what the mayor is doing differently and why there are still so many pedestrian fatalities.

I’ll start by noting it’s highly significant that Lurie chose to address this issue in his first year of office. When the mayor said “street safety is public safety,” that mattered because the city has spent........

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