Why fatalities matter
This dashboard explores the traffic fatalities over time. The number of traffic fatalities is a core measure of Vision Zero’s progress. We explore fatalities by mode of travel to better understand which transportation modes are being affected.
To learn more about traffic fatalities in San Francisco, explore the Vision Zero Maps and Data page and the Traffic Fatalities Map.
How to use this dashboard
Click on the different fatalities by mode of travel at the top to change categories. Click on the city names at the bottom or add or remove cities.
Fatalities by mode of travel include:
- Pedestrians, which are people walking
- Drivers, who are people driving a car or a motorcycle
- Passengers, who are people riding in a car or on a motorcycle
- Bicyclists, who are people riding a bicycle
- Person on Personal Conveyance, which includes people on scooters, mopeds, roller skates, and other non-pedal wheeled devices.
To allow for comparison, the dashboard shows the number of fatalities per 100,000 residents in that city during that year.
Key notes: City populations changed inconsistently following the COVID-19 pandemic. San Francisco's population declined the most. San Francisco's 2022 population was 93% of its 2020 population. New York City had the next largest decline, with its 2022 population being 95% of its 2020 population. The other cities had a 2022 population that was between 97-101% of their 2020 populations.
Traffic fatalities
Data notes and sources
Data notes and sources
The fatality data comes from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)'s Fatality Analysis Reporting System. All cities report their fatalities to the NHTSA on a yearly basis.
Cities can only influence conditions on the roads that they own or oversee. To focus on those areas, we removed freeways and highways from our analysis.
San Francisco's data in this dashboard may not align with other San Francisco fatality data because San Francisco Department of Public Health (DPH)’s methods differ slightly from the NHTSA’s methods. San Francisco includes types of fatalities that the NHTSA does not capture. San Francisco also reports at a more granular level. For example, San Francisco specifically breaks out Standup Power Device (such as motorized scooters) and Mopeds, where in the NHTSA data these are presented grouped together as “Person on Personal Conveyance”. To allow for consistent comparisons, we used the NHTSA data for all cities. San Francisco's methods are available here. Similarly, other peer cities may have their own methods for reporting fatalities that may differ slightly from the NHTSA data.
As noted above, to compare fatalities across cities, we divided by each year's population. Population data comes from the American Community Survey 1-year estimates for all years except 2020, where we used the Decennial Census Data.
A technical limitation of the dashboarding software (Microsoft PowerBI): When all cities are selected in the filter, not all city names may show in the dashboard. Use the legend to confirm the city by color, the tooltip (if available), or change the filters to view fewer cities at once.
To view the full dataset, visit the DataSF Open Data Portal.
Key takeaways
No peer cities have zero fatalities. Even though the majority of the peer cities have their own Vision Zero initiatives, no cities have been able to achieve the goal of zero fatalities.
San Francisco is returning to pre-COVID trends. In 2020, fatalities among drivers and people on personal conveyances increased. Research shows this may be due to changes in patterns due to the pandemic, such increases in speeding, not wearing seat belts, or impaired driving. Following the pandemic, San Francisco's fatalities in these same groups declined. Some other cities follow the same pattern. However, Boston, LA, and Miami’s driver fatalities increased over the past few years.
Bicyclist fatalities in San Francisco have declined since 2018. In 2018, San Francisco had 0.3 bicyclist fatalities per 100,000 residents. In 2019 and 2020, there were 0.1. This may be due in part to changes in infrastructure as well as changes in behavior following the pandemic.
San Francisco has fewer fatalities per 100,000 residents than nearly half of its peer cities. In almost every year, San Francisco has had fewer fatalities per 100,000 residents than Miami, Portland, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Long Beach. For example, in 2020, San Francisco had half as many fatalities per 100,000 residents as Los Angeles and 3 times fewer than Miami.
Explore other metrics
Visit the Vision Zero Benchmarking home page to learn more about the effort and explore other metrics.