Friday, August 24, 2007

How Safe are the Streets in San Francisco?

The Streets of San Francisco are making headlines again. This is not an invitation for you to sit down in front of your TV & be captivated by the 1970s detective series. Rather, it is to bring awareness to traffic safety concerns in San Francisco and the puzzling rise in the number of fatal traffic collisions in the city this year. Check out the August 23 front page article in the San Francisco Chronicle for a look at accident statistics involving pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorists, and what city officials plan to do to deal with this current surge in collisions.

Officials contend, however, that data for this year alone should not discredit the enforcement efforts of the past several years which have led to a significant reduction in injury collisions.

What can city officials do to ease the situation? They might consider consulting the Pedestrian and Bicyclist Safety Indices developed by researchers at FHWA’s Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center. The indices provide a set of models that allow practitioners to identify those intersections that present the most safety concerns to pedestrians and bicyclists.

Further collision trends and analyses can be found in the San Francisco Collision Report
while a report by UCSF’s San Francisco Injury Center and the Department of Public Health
provides overall injury statistics, with a chapter devoted to motor vehicle and traffic-related injuries.

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