On the morning of October 22nd, a 70-year-old man was struck and killed around 8:40 a.m. by a City trash vehicle trying to cross Stanyan Street and Parnassus Avenue.
San Francisco’s hostility towards cars is growing. Since 2016, the number of vehicles registered in San Francisco City and County has steadily declined; about 50,000 fewer cars are registered yearly.
Despite the city’s draining car population, San Francisco streets remain precarious places for pedestrians. The vast majority of the City’s designated bike lanes remain unprotected and many crosswalks are in need of either repair or safety updates.
The lack of City effort around shoring up our pedestrian safety passageways was again highlighted when a 70-year-old man was fatally hit this morning in the Cole Valley neighborhood — existing as an “extremely painful reminder” of the City’s aforementioned lethargy around pedestrian safety updates.
“While the City has made important progress in redesigning streets to improve safety, these tragedies are an extremely painful reminder of how far San Francisco still has to go,” said Jodie Medeiros, executive director of Walk San Francisco, in a press release regarding the death. “We are asking City leaders for an aggressive plan to accelerate Vision Zero progress, with the accountability and funding to get it done.”
Various news outlets reported on the fatal car collision; the involvement of a City-operated vehicle made for quick reporting and transparency around the incident.
According to ABC7, first responders arrived at the corner of Stanyan Street and Parnassus Avenue at 8:44 a.m. this morning after a dump truck attempted to make a right turn onto Parnassus Avenue struck a pedestrian attempting to cross the street; the driver allegedly did not see the pedestrian and remained on the scene and cooperated with police; no drugs or alcohol are believed to have factored into the crash.
As of publishing, San Francisco has now recorded 20 pedestrian deaths this year, already three more deaths than were recorded in 2023. Moreover, the death of the yet-named 70-year-old man highlights another worrying trend: San Francisco’s senior citizens are disproportionally more at risk of dying on city streets than individuals in any other age demographics.
Half of the pedestrian deaths already recorded for 2024 in San Francisco involved victims 60 years or older. At least one of these deaths involved an individual leaving a senior recreational area, while another two occurred around busy streets near Golden Gate Park.
San Francisco is now back to pre-pandemic levels of pedestrian deaths and injuries caused by vehicles, according to Walk SF. Without proper traffic mitigation and pedestrian safety practices, the nonprofit expects this figure to only balloon over time with the presence of “more heavy vehicles and large trucks, delivery vehicles, and ridehail cars than ever [in San Francisco].”
Anyone with information about the collision is asked to call the SFPD tip line at (415) 575-4444 or to send a tip by text message to TIP411 with SFPD at the start of the message.
