Vision Zero and reality 2

Last Sunday Hoodline posted a story on Vision Zero informing readers that so far Vision Zero has had zero effect on traffic fatalities in San Francisco (‘Vision Zero’ Has Yet To Reduce San Francisco Traffic Fatalities). This is not news, since Brian Goebel broke the story on KQED back on January 1, and I blogged about his story later that month.

That Hoodline story got 210 comments, showing that people in SF are very much concerned---and often skeptical---about what City Hall is up to (See also the comments to yesterday's Examiner story on night parking meters).

In one of my comments, I linked a 2010 MTA document (New York City’s Pedestrian Safety Study and San Francisco Data) that puts city traffic fatalities in historical perspective.

Look in particular at pages 4-7 where there are numbers for traffic fatalities in SF from 1915 through 2008. During that time there's been a dramatic drop in traffic fatalities here, since it wasn't uncommon for there to be more than 100 deaths a year on city streets through the 1960s.

The main reason pedestrian fatalities in SF remain relatively high: people walk a lot more in San Francisco than they do in other cities (see pages 10-12).

See this Vision Zero document, page 2.