Traffic Fatalities

Measure description

Vision Zero is the City’s road safety policy that aims to build safety and livability into San Francisco streets to achieve zero traffic fatalities per year. The count of Traffic Fatalities count is a Citywide outcome metric that reflects the City’s Vision Zero efforts. Vision Zero is a partnership between multiple City agencies, and is co-chaired by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency and the Department of Public Health.

Why the measure is important

Reporting on Traffic Fatalities for each calendar year provides the public, elected officials, and City staff with a current snapshot of the progress of San Francisco’s Vision Zero Initiative. The data that is collected and reported allows City departments to analyze trends and focus their efforts on the most impactful projects that will help reduce fatalities.

The interactive charts below present the City’s annual Traffic Fatality count.

Chart description

Y-axis: Number of traffic fatalities
X-axis: Calendar years
Dark blue bar: People killed while cycling
Orange bar: People killed while driving
Green bar: People killed while walking

Chart description

Y-axis: Traffic fatalities, cumulative, at each month of the year
X-axis: Calendar month, for a calendar years

Note about the Vision Zero Map

Please note that the Department of Public Health migrated the underlying data for the Vision Zero map from Transbase to DataSF in August 2023. We are working with the team to re-establish the data connection with the Vision Zero Map dashboard.

How performance is measured

Traffic fatalities are reported by mode (people walking, biking, driving, motorcycling, and riding in a vehicle) and are compared to the same month in the previous year to provide a concise snapshot of the mortality burden in San Francisco. These modes are summarized as vehicle or motorcycle (auto or motorcycle fatalities), walking (pedestrian fatalities), and biking (bicycle fatalities).

Fatalities included are:

Anyone killed in or outside of a vehicle (bus, truck, car, motorcycle, bike, moped, light rail vehicle (LRV), etc.) involved in a crash
Anyone killed within the public roadway due to impact with a vehicle or road structure
Anyone who dies within 30 days of the public roadway incident as a result of the injury sustained within the City or County of San Francisco

In the event where a case dies within 30 days of the collision/incident date, but their death date occurs in the following calendar month or year, the case will be classified based on the collision date. This is consistent with the definition used by the California Highway Patrol’s Statewide Integrated Traffic Records System (SWITRS), the primary data source utilized by the City for fatalities tracking prior 2013 – with the exception of the inclusion of LRV. LRV traffic deaths involving motor vehicles are included and captured in the SWITRS database. However, fatality cases involving pedestrian/cyclist versus LRV are not captured in SWITRS, but will be included in the appropriate category for traffic fatality counts and will be noted with an asterisk below the table. This reporting approach facilitates long-term trend analysis of comparable datasets with previous years of SWITRS data.

The number displayed on the scorecard page represents the calendar year annual total of the values in the line chart above.

*Note: Data do not reflect freeway deaths occurring on grade-separated freeways/roadways under Caltrans jurisdiction in the City and County of San Francisco, which are tracked and mapped separately.

Additional information

Visit the Vision Zero SF website, including the 2021 Vision Zero SF Action Strategy and monthly summary memos.
What is Vision Zero?
View results from the Controller's Office's benchmarking effort to see how San Francisco's Vision Zero progress compares with other cities. View the results here: Vision Zero Benchmarking: Fatalities
View SFMTA's progress on the Safe Streets improvements here: Vision Zero Safe Streets Progress | SFMTA
View Mayor Breed's press release marking 10 years of San Francisco's Vision Zero efforts and future direction here: March 28, 2024 press release.

Data

View Traffic Fatalities data in the Scorecards dataset on DataSF.

View all Traffic Crashes Resulting in Injury on DataSF.

Data lag: 1 month. Representatives from the San Francisco Department of Public Health (SFDPH), San Francisco Police Department (SFPD), and the San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency (SFMTA) meet monthly to reconcile the previous month’s traffic deaths using Office of the Medical Examiner’s and SFPD data. Due to this data quality step, Traffic Fatalities are reported with a one-month lag. For example, May’s data will be available at the end of June.