Another Tragic SF Pedestrian Death Raises the Question: Is Vision Zero a Failure?

Fairuz Qari still feels the shock of what she heard on Tuesday morning.

“Screaming people,” said Qari, the owner of Tabroun, a Palestinian restaurant on the picturesque corner where San Francisco’s Cole Valley meets Parnassus Heights.

Qari followed the sounds outside to a gruesome scene. Across the street, a dump truck making a right turn from Stanyan Street had struck a 70-year-old man crossing Parnassus Avenue. First responders pronounced the man dead and covered his body with a tarp.

“I wish I could unsee this,” she told KQED the day after the collision. “Because until now, my body is very sad.”

The crash marks the city’s 20th pedestrian fatality this year and third this month, arriving at the end of a decade-long initiative to eliminate traffic deaths by 2024. It’s a grim reminder that San Francisco is about as far as it’s ever been from its Vision Zero goal.

“Twenty is too many,” said Jodie Medeiros, executive director of advocacy group Walk SF. “We always say that we can’t imagine what San Francisco would be like if we didn’t adopt Vision Zero. But things just haven’t gone far enough.”

Pedestrians now make up 70% of the city’s traffic fatalities this year — up 5 percentage points from the average. According to city data, 2024 is on track to be the deadliest year for pedestrians since 2014. And since the pandemic, small streets — like the intersection of Stanyan and Parnassus — are becoming more dangerous.

“We have seen such a shift in where crashes are happening,” said Marta Lindsay, a spokesperson for Walk SF. “And to me, it’s really scary because now every street is becoming high risk. It’s because of this deadly combination of aggressive driving, speeding, larger, heavier vehicles and more traffic. It’s turned little streets into ones where someone could die tomorrow.”

Those problems are especially concerning in the area of this week’s deadly crash, where neighbors said large trucks often drive through the hilly, residential streets on their way to and from a construction site at UC San Francisco.

A construction worker who asked not to be named confirmed that the dump truck involved in the crash was contracted to remove dirt from the ongoing hospital project site at Parnassus and Hill Point Avenue. The truck was identified by KTVU footage as operated by Lally Trucking Inc., which is based in Modesto. While the phone line at Lally appeared to be disconnected, safety reports published on the company’s website show zero involvement in past reportable crashes.

The truck’s driver remained on the scene and did not appear to be under the influence, police said in a statement. The medical examiner’s office identified the victim as Jose Chow, 70, of San Francisco.

On Wednesday morning, Lydia Byers and her husband, Neil, paused at a memorial on the street corner where Chow was killed. Walk SF and community members held a vigil the night of the crash and left yellow paper hearts, marigolds and a handwritten sign that read: “A driver killed our neighbor here, Oct. 22, 2024.”

Across the street, at Sunny Country market, bright sunflower bouquets bloomed out of barrels, with more flowers displayed in rows in front of the store’s tall windows. Bunches of woven baskets hung for sale under the market’s burgundy awning. As trucks and other large construction vehicles rumbled by, the couple looked both ways at the crosswalk and tried to understand how the crash could have happened.

“This is our neighborhood,” said Byers, who said she has lived in the area much of her life. “This is my intersection that I frequent. It’s really scary that your life could be gone in a flash due to someone making a turn and not paying attention.”

“Just cut out right turns,” her husband added. “What’s a couple of seconds?”

Erica Kato, a spokesperson for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, said in an email that the intersection has “painted daylighting” in the direction the truck was driving. Daylighting uses markers or red paint to prevent cars from parking near crosswalks to make sure drivers’ views of pedestrians are not obstructed.

However, on Wednesday, a red SUV was parked at the top of the steep hill approaching Parnassus, next to the red curb.

Although the intersection has not had a pedestrian collision in the last 10 years, Medeiros said neighbors described plenty of close calls, as well as a lack of pedestrian signals at the crosswalk. Both the driver and the victim had a green light.

“We need something,” Qari said. “In the morning, this is a very busy area. We have two schools [nearby — Haight Ashbury Cooperative and Grattan Elementary —] and a lot of kids. Traffic drives very fast, and you see a lot of trucks at the corner. We have to do something and put an extra light up to slow down the traffic.”

Kato said the MTA is conducting a “rapid response review” of the deadly crash to evaluate the existing site and make recommendations for improvements. The location is on a list for future pedestrian signal upgrades.

Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, who represents Cole Valley, visited the vigil and promised improvements to the city’s roads.

“My office has been in touch with SFPD, the MTA, UCSF and concerned neighbors since yesterday morning,” Mandelman posted Wednesday on social media platform X, “and we will continue working with stakeholders both to understand what could have been done to avoid this particular tragedy and to prevent future crashes and deaths at this intersection and elsewhere.”

Still, improvements at the intersection would add it to a long list of streets where it took a tragedy to spur change. Transportation advocates have long argued for a more proactive approach to making streets safer for all.

Since San Francisco committed to Vision Zero in 2014, advocates say the city has made considerable improvements to public safety, especially in the city’s “high-injury network,” or the 12% of streets where more than two-thirds of its traffic collisions occur.

But in that time, 326 people have been killed by traffic violence on San Francisco streets, according to the Department of Public Health. That equates to a traffic-related fatality, which includes cyclists and motorcyclists, every 12.11 days.

In San Francisco, where speeding drivers are one of the leading causes of pedestrian deaths, city officials are working to install speed cameras in areas with the highest crash rates as part of a statewide pilot program funded by Assembly Bill 645. Starting next year, drivers will be ticketed for going 11 mph or more over the speed limit in 25 mph zones, according to the MTA.

Proponents have said cities like New York have already embraced speed safety cameras with dramatic success. They say detection systems shift behavior and can reduce the number of severe and fatal crashes by as much as 58%.

However, advocates say it will take more funding and urgency from city officials to truly end traffic fatalities.

“We’re in an election year right now,” Medeiros said. “Our decision-makers need to talk about it as the crisis it is.”

KQED’s Gilare Zada contributed to this report.