Why injuries matter
This dashboard explores all traffic injuries over time for San Francisco and 8 other cities in California. The number of traffic injuries is another important measure of Vision Zero's progress. Vision Zero seeks to reduce crashes and the likelihood that those crashes result in death or permanent injury.
San Francisco also tracks both severe injuries and critical injuries. Learn more about that effort and explore the San Francisco-specific data reporting.
We explore injuries by type to better understand which transportation modes are being affected.
How to use this dashboard
Use this dashboard to see the number of people injured in crashes per 100,000 residents in each city. Click on the different types of injuries at the top to change categories. Click on the city names at the bottom or add or remove cities.
We explore injuries by transportation type, which include:
- Pedestrians, who are people walking
- Drivers, who are people driving a car or motorcycle
- Passengers, who are people riding in a car or on motorcycle
- Bicyclists, who are people riding a bicycle
Key notes about this dataset: Injury data is highly dependent upon local reporting. While this dashboard uses a consistent dataset that pulls from city and California Highway Patrol data, there is a possibility that there may be reporting differences between cities. This is an area for future exploration.
The total injuries category includes the four transportation types above and additional injuries from methods like scooters, other personal conveyances, and unusual transportation types, such as tractors. The personal conveyance category is newer, so reporting is not consistent across cities. Future benchmarking projects may be able to include this category in dashboarding efforts.
For this dashboard, we considered additional cities from California, including Bakersfield, Fresno, Sacramento, and San Diego. We did not include data from cities from other states because of data limitations. The way that traffic injuries are reported can vary from state-to-state due to state traffic law. We focused on California cities so we could use a consistent data source and ensure apples-to-apples comparisons. The additional California cities are somewhat similar to San Francisco, but may have more differences than our original peer cities.
The dataset only includes injuries, but not fatalities. Injuries on freeways or highways are excluded. All injuries types, from severe to suspected minor injuries or complaints of pain, are included.
Los Angeles changed its reporting method in 2019. Therefore, LA data and the calculated peer average runs through 2019 only.
Traffic injuries
Data notes and sources
Data notes and sources
Transportation Injury Mapping System (TIMS), Safe Transportation Research and Education Center, University of California, Berkeley. 2024
Traffic injury data comes from the Statewide Integrated Traffic Records System (SWITRS) via the Transportation Injury Mapping System (TIMS). SWITRS contains all the crashes reported to the California Highway Patrol (CHP) by local and government agencies. TIMS is used to access this California crash data in SWITRS. Traffic injuries are classified by the CHP as 'Possible Injury', 'Suspected Minor Injury', or 'Suspected Serious Injury' based on a standardized method for reporting traffic crashes and the vehicles, persons, and environment involved. Learn more about this method here.
As noted above, Los Angeles changed its reporting method in 2019. Therefore, LA data and the calculated peer average runs through 2019 only.
As noted above, to compare injuries 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
San Francisco has fewer injuries per 100,000 residents than nearly half of the selected California cities. San Francisco has had fewer injuries per 100,000 residents than Oakland, Long Beach, and Sacramento. For example, in 2020, San Francisco had half as many injuries per 100,000 residents than Sacramento.
Apart from a slight uptick in 2021, bicyclist injuries per 100,000 residents in San Francisco have declined since 2014. In 2014, 75 San Franciscan bicyclists per 100,000 residents were injured compared to 45 in 2022. This may be due in part to changes in infrastructure as well as changes in behavior following the pandemic.
San Francisco is returning to pre-COVID traffic injury trends. In San Francisco just over 300 people were injured per 100,000 residents in 2020. This increased to around 415 in 2021 and 2022. Some other cities have also experienced a similar increase in injuries, including San José, San Diego, Long Beach, and Fresno.
Lower injury rates do not always indicate safer conditions. San Francisco has more pedestrian and bicyclist injuries per capita than many of the selected California cities. However, it also has a greater proportion of the population walking and using bicycles each day. The incidence per user of the transportation method is challenging to calculate but may show a different result.
Further, a city can both have low injury rates and high fatality rates. Bakersfield, for example, has a lower pedestrian injury rate than San Francisco. However, it had 6.8 pedestrian fatalities per 100,000 residents in 2022 compared to San Francisco's 2.4. Some cities may have lower rates of overall crashes involving people walking, but when those crashes do occur they may be more likely to result in a fatality.
Explore other metrics
Visit the Vision Zero Benchmarking home page to learn more about the effort and explore other metrics.