The Hidden Death Toll of San Francisco’s Traffic Policy

A Critical Audit of Vision Zero, Traffic Slowing, and Time-Destruction

Executive Summary

In 2014, San Francisco adopted Vision Zero, an initiative to eliminate all traffic deaths by 2024. Ten years later, not only has the city failed to achieve this goal — it has presided over a record-high number of fatalities, a 50% drop in vehicle speed, and an unquantified but massive human cost in the form of lost time.

This report presents a time-based mortality model that reframes how we assess public policy. Using conservative assumptions and real-world travel data, the results show that the city’s approach to traffic safety has not only failed to reduce deaths — it has led to the annual destruction of over 130 full human lifetimes in wasted time alone.

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1. Vision Zero: A Failure by Its Own Metric

In 2014, San Francisco launched Vision Zero, a traffic policy initiative aiming to eliminate pedestrian and traffic fatalities within 10 years.

But instead:

In 2024, San Francisco recorded 41 traffic-related deaths, including 24 pedestrian deaths, the highest total since 2007

https://www.sf.gov/data--traffic-fatalities

Since 2014, approximately 299 people have died on San Francisco’s streets

https://www.sf.gov/data--traffic-fatalities

This is not a success story — it’s the opposite of what Vision Zero promised.

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2. Streets Have Slowed — But Deaths Have Increased

Despite more than a decade of traffic-calming measures, including:

Lane reductions

Signal retiming

Speed limit decreases

“Slow Streets” initiatives

…there is no meaningful correlation between slower traffic and fewer deaths. In fact:

2024 saw more fatalities than 2014

Many of the deaths now involve emboldened pedestrians crossing unsafely in low-speed zones

Traffic has not been diverted safely. It has simply spilled into residential areas, creating new dangers

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3. The Speed Collapse: From 30 mph to 14 mph

San Francisco is now one of the slowest cities in the U.S. to drive in:

Average travel time to drive 6.2 miles (10 km):

25 minutes and 37 seconds — about 14 mph

https://www.tomtom.com/traffic-index/san-francisco-ca-traffic/

Historical average city speeds were closer to 30 mph, particularly on major arterials with timed lights

That represents a 50% reduction in operational traffic speed: a collapse in basic transportation efficiency.

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4. The Time-Death Model: Hidden Human Cost

Using basic assumptions:

2 million vehicle trips/day

Average trip length: 4 miles

Time per trip doubled (from 8 mins to 16 mins)

8 extra minutes lost per trip

We calculate:

➤ 16 million minutes lost per day

➤ 5.84 billion minutes lost per year

➤ Average human lifespan ≈ 42 million minutes

➤ Equivalent of 139 full human lives lost per year, in time alone

This is a conservative estimate. More aggressive assumptions (15 extra minutes per trip assuming a 6 mile trip) produce a death-equivalent of over 260 lives per year.

This means the city’s policy has a hidden death toll that exceeds the actual fatality count — by an order of magnitude — every single year.

Even if we assume a quarter the number of vehicle trips (which would mean rideshare is 20% of all trips, something any casual driver in SF can see is not true), we are still looking at 35-65 lifetimes worth of wasted time per year.

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5. The Ethical Inversion

If a policy directly caused 139–260 deaths per year, there would be outrage, investigations, lawsuits.

But when the damage is:

Spread across the city

Paid in minutes instead of blood

Framed as “progressive” or “green”

…it becomes invisible — but no less real.

Slower traffic does not save lives. It kills them indirectly by draining time — the one thing every human has in limited supply.

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6. Recommendations

A. Reassess Traffic-Calming Measures

Target actual risk zones rather than blanketing the city with slowdown infrastructure.

B. Conduct Full Time-Cost Impact Assessments

Include time-loss in environmental and transportation reviews.

C. Repeal Blanket Policies That Have No Clear Benefit

Policies like blanket speed reductions and corridor slowdowns should be tied to measurable safety outcomes — or rolled back.

D. Reintroduce Efficiency Metrics into Civic Planning

Efficiency is not anti-equity — it's pro-human. A city that runs slowly harms everyone, but especially working people and those who rely on services that now arrive late.

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Conclusion

San Francisco’s transportation policy has become a textbook case of well-intentioned governance gone catastrophically wrong. It has:

Failed to reduce fatalities

Slowed down the city’s economic engine

And wasted hundreds of millions of hours of residents’ lives

A policy built on the premise of saving lives has, in practice, become a machine for destroying them quietly.

This is not safety. It’s the bureaucratized erosion of livability, disguised as virtue.