Just 10 SF streets account for a third of car-pedestrian injury crashes
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Ten streets are responsible for about a third of all vehicle-pedestrian injury crashes in San Francisco — a dynamic that hasn't budged since before the pandemic, an Axios SF analysis of city data shows.
Why it matters: Despite Vision Zero efforts, street redesigns and pandemic-era traffic shifts, pedestrian safety remains a major concern in a city with heavy foot traffic, especially amid a recent string of high-profile pedestrian deaths.
State of play: While traffic fatalities dropped from 43 in 2024 to 25 in 2025, vehicle-pedestrian injury crashes have remained steady over the past five years, about 400–500 annually, with 448 last year.
- These incidents most often involved drivers failing to yield right-of-way at crosswalks.
- Axios SF analyzed city data to identify the top 10 corridors, measured by the number of times a street appears in incident reports for pedestrian-involved traffic collisions that result in any injury, minor or severe.
While the specific streets in that top 10 have changed over time, 10 corridors have consistently accounted for about 33-39% of incidents each year from 2019 to 2025.
- Along many of these thoroughfares — such as Sixth and Howard or Sixth and Mission streets, both of which have four vehicle travel lanes — drivers often feel comfortable speeding or running red lights even as pedestrians need more time to cross, according to street safety advocacy group Walk San Francisco.
- Meanwhile, five neighborhoods grouped in the city data — SoMa, Tenderloin, Mission, Bayview Hunters Point and the Financial District/South Beach — account for roughly 40% of all injury crashes in the city, another statistic that's remained unchanged since 2019.
Zoom in: Pedestrian injuries have declined along stretches of Market Street, Geary Boulevard and Third Street, where the city has spearheaded safety improvements it credits with lowering risk.
- Market Street's decline comes after the city made it car-free in 2020, though it opened to robotaxis and ride app vehicles last August.
- Meanwhile, both Geary and Third have undergone traffic safety improvement upgrades, such as new protected bike lanes and curb extensions that widen the sidewalk into the parking lane.
Yes, but: More pedestrian-involved traffic crashes are occurring on narrower streets with lots of car traffic and pedestrians — such as segments of Eddy and Post that run through the Tenderloin. Eddy and Post have both moved into the top 10 since 2019.
- These streets sit within dense grids, have shorter blocks and often see heavy curbside activity, including loading and double parking outside of dedicated zones.
- The Tenderloin is already a place cars "tend to drive quickly through," said Harrison Anderson, who lived in the neighborhood when he first moved to San Francisco 10 years ago.
- Anderson, who recently walked 50 miles in one day to raise awareness of traffic fatalities, told Axios he often sees drivers in these types of high-traffic areas fail to stop before the crosswalk when making a turn. "They pull to the road without being able to see if pedestrians are coming," Anderson noted.
Between the lines: Street safety involves a confluence of factors, so it's difficult to point to one specific thing as the cause for increases in collisions, said Kate Blumberg, a member of the Livable Streets Committee who led a 2025 civil grand jury report on San Francisco's traffic enforcement failures.
- "It's really hard to tease out what's actually going on," she told Axios.
- Blumberg did emphasize, however, that the city needs to think strategically about how to enforce actual consequences for reckless drivers in combination with infrastructure changes.
The big picture: The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority (SFMTA) told Axios that the city has implemented neighborhood-wide no-turn-on-red restrictions in the Tenderloin, one of San Francisco's densest neighborhoods.
- The city has also lowered the speed limit from 25 mph to 20 mph on all Tenderloin streets and plans to install more protected bike lanes and curb ramp upgrades and improve pedestrian signals (like countdown timers).
- Eddy, which runs through the Tenderloin into the Western Addition and where speeding has long been a concern, is a key focus for street design improvements — car crashes have increased there compared to pre-pandemic levels, per SFMTA spokesperson Parisa Safarzadeh.
What we're watching: Dangerous driving isn't just a big-street problem anymore — it's also showing up on smaller corridors, with drivers speeding and running red lights even near schools, Walk San Francisco communications director Marta Lindsay told Axios.
- These kinds of behaviors are increasingly occurring in residential areas, such as along Ashbury Street in the Upper Haight near the Lycee Francais, she noted.
More drivers, including ride app drivers, are also using smaller side streets as shortcuts to bypass congestion to save "literal seconds," Luke Bornheimer, executive director of street safety advocacy group Streets Forward, told Axios.
- "If it's starting to spread through all of our streets, it's a harder challenge," said Lindsay, who added that more traffic calming measures like speed bumps are needed.
What's next: Advocates are also calling on the city to install more automated speed cameras and finish painting daylighting curbs.