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 years acting as if street deaths are an unfortunate yet inevitable byproduct of urban life.

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Yet there are limits as to what Lurie can achieve unilaterally: An executive directive is not a bond measure that can fund infrastructure upgrades, and the mayor can’t rewrite state law. But he does control priorities, deadlines and the political will to withstand the inevitable pushback when safety requires reallocating street space.

To that point, Lurie’s directive established a street safety working group that includes the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency and the police, public health, fire, public works and other departments. Every agency involved in the design, operation, or regulation of our streets or the people using them will designate a senior leader to represent the department and to share data with other agencies. This contrasts with the piecemeal approach of Vision Zero, which was widely criticized for its lack of enforcement and poor data analysis, among other issues. San Francisco now has mayoral oversight of departments that might not have been as closely aligned on this issue. This will ideally facilitate a more collaborative forum for meeting the mayor’s directives. No other San Francisco mayor has done this, and it should really help agencies work better together rather than at cross purposes.

Supervisor Myrna Melgar, an urban planner by profession who sits on the working group, said she was excited by the prospect of what better department coordination can achieve.

“I am glad Mayor Lurie is recognizing that this is an urgent public safety issue all over our city — like the public safety issues in the Tenderloin, for example — but isn’t talked about with the same urgency. It’s an ever-present danger.”

While the working group’s effort ramps up, Lurie’s embrace of automated traffic enforcement has been successful. Since the program’s launch in 2025, speed cameras have resulted in a 78% reduction in speeding vehicles at 33 locations — about 40,000 fewer speeding vehicles per day.

Previously, 12 of those 15 locations had average speeds above the posted speed limit; today, the average speed is below the posted limit at all 15 locations. If those numbers hold up over time, that’s lives saved. Speed turns driving mistakes into fatalities. At 20 mph, a pedestrian has a 90% chance of survival if struck, but this drops to less than 20% at 30 mph.

But the city’s 33 speed cameras are still a pilot project. There should be many more of them, and the project should become permanent. 

There are also 13 red light cameras operating at city intersections; six more are scheduled for this summer. There is no limit on the number of cameras San Francisco can install; Lurie should expand the program. (New York City is installing cameras at 600 intersections this year.)

Meanwhile, California’s Assembly Bill 43 allows cities to reduce speed limits by 5 mph in all business activity districts (streets where at least half of the property uses are dining or retail). The law also allows them to lower speed limits by 5 mph on streets designated as “safety corridors,” providing additional flexibility to reduce speed limits on streets that have the highest number of severe injuries and fatalities. This is significant: 68% of severe and fatal collisions in San Francisco occurred on just 12% of city streets. 

Using and prioritizing high-injury network data should help the city determine where to implement speed reductions. 

Street design is another important component of the mayor’s directive, which identifies quick build projects where proven safety tools such as physical barriers, turn safety treatments like bollards and “No right on red” signs. But too often, said Jodie Medeiros, executive director of the pedestrian advocacy group WalkSF, “safety projects are watered down or delayed by years, even though the projects are proven to reduce dangerous speeding, close-calls, and crashes.”

In part, because doing so inconveniences drivers, often the city’s loudest constituents.

Prioritizing pedestrian safety requires tradeoffs that drivers don’t like — and agencies and elected officials get pushback. Even if safety upgrades don’t require community input, pressure on supervisors by their constituents has, in the past, resulted in watered-down safety interventions rather than what is needed.

“This crisis requires swift and proactive, systems-level thinking to implement citywide solutions,” said Luke Bornheimer, executive director of the new pedestrian safety organization Streets Forward. “Not reactionary, block-by-block band-aids that are overburdened by process.”

As we come up on the first 100 days of the mayor’s directive, a real and binding timeline is also needed for fixing the most dangerous corridors and intersections — the city can’t just “identify” projects, it has to deliver them, with dates.

Guest opinions in Open Forum and Insight are produced by writers with expertise, personal experience or original insights on a subject of interest to our readers. Their views do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Chronicle editorial board, which is committed to providing a diversity of ideas to our readership.

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Lurie’s directive is a credible start: It centralizes responsibility, elevates data and expands automated enforcement. But it still needs to be bolder.

Too many San Franciscans are still paying the highest toll for the city’s inability to keep our streets safe.

Allison Arieff is a columnist and editorial writer for the Opinion section.

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