A full-court press is on to spur City government to spread awareness of the number of traffic crashes involving bicyclists and pedestrians, calling on Mayor Todd Gloria and City Council to dedicate more funding toward Vision Zero.

Adopted by the City Council in 2015, the goal of Vision Zero is to eliminate all traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2025. Since then, the City has invested more than $140 million into projects – improved intersections, sidewalks, bikeways, roundabouts, and streets – to protect and save lives.

But bicycling and safety enthusiasts claim Vision Zero hasn’t gone far enough to protect cyclists and pedestrians on the City’s streets. On March 18, San Diego County Bicycle Coalition, a nonprofit advocating for bicyclists’ rights, and Families For Safe Streets San Diego, families who’ve lost loved ones to traffic violence, teamed to hang posters at the sites of every crash that killed a bicyclist or pedestrian since 2021. The posters read, “Our Neighbor was Killed Here,” and direct viewers to a web page encouraging them to email Gloria and their council member to request more funding for traffic safety.

“Despite the City’s pledge to eliminate traffic fatalities by 2025, more people are dying on San Diego’s streets than ever before,” said Will Rhatigan, advocacy director for the SDCBC. “We hope that this campaign will serve as a visual reminder to all San Diegans that when we fail to build safe sidewalks, bike lanes, and intersections, our neighbors are killed. We know that safe streets save lives, and we are calling on Mayor Todd Gloria and the San Diego City Council to invest in the proven road safety measures that will prevent any other families from losing their loved ones to crashes.”

“The City is currently developing a Mobility Master Plan, which is a comprehensive transportation planning effort to create a balanced, equitable, and sustainable transportation system for the City,” said Nicole Darling, director of the City’s Communications Department. “In addition to focusing on safety and Vision Zero, the plan also includes an approach to achieve sustainability and equity goals. It will combine community, mode, and objective-specific planning into one comprehensive document to identify and prioritize mobility projects, programs, and policies that will have the largest benefit in our communities and on the environment.”

“The Mobility Master Plan will ensure that citywide mobility initiatives support investments in communities of concern, promote Vision Zero, and advance the goals of the Climate Action Plan,” continued Darling. “The Mobility Master Plan will focus on strategies, policies, programs, and projects that make walking, rolling, bicycling, and using transit more attractive, easier, efficient, and affordable.”

The beaches have joined the community outreach traffic-safety campaign. “BeautifulPB is joining in a recent citywide campaign launched by San Diego County Bicycle Coalition and Families for Safe Streets San Diego, which hung posters at the sites of all fatal bicycle and pedestrian crashes since 2014, including seven in Pacific and Mission beaches,” said Katie Matchett, president of the grassroots nonprofit working to create a more sustainable, equitable, and beautiful community. “The idea is to both raise awareness of this issue and to encourage elected officials to take action to fund safety improvements in the next fiscal year.”

Bicycling and safety advocates point out that, while this crisis of fatal crashes has impacted everyone, it has hurt cyclists, pedestrians, and wheelchair users the most. Between 2012 and 2021, the number of pedestrians killed in San Diego County nearly doubled, from 58 to 101. In the same year, the number of cyclists killed in San Diego County reached 17, setting the highest bicycle fatality rate of any large California county.

While the causes of increasing traffic fatalities are complex, including heavier vehicles and distracted driving, the solutions are obvious, claim safety advocates. They cite that replacing a stoplight with a roundabout can reduce fatal or serious injury-causing crashes by 80%. They also add that, while the risk of death for a pedestrian or cyclist is only 10% when hit by a car traveling 23mph, that risk increases to 50% when a car is traveling 42 mph. Thus, safety advocates conclude lowering speeds in places people bike and walk undeniably saves lives.

To begin saving bicyclist and pedestrian lives in San Diego from serious and fatal traffic crashes, Families for Safe Streets San Diego and the San Diego County Bicycle Coalition are calling on the mayor and City Council to commit to three actions:

– Double the funding for San Diego’s quick-build bikeways program in the fiscal year 2024, to enable it to build 18 miles of connected, protected bikeways each year. Separated bikeways are proven to reduce serious crashes by over 80% and should be installed on every urban road with speed limits of 30 mph or above.

– Upgrade 15 of San Diego’s most deadly intersections with lead pedestrian intervals, high-visibility crosswalks, and other lifesaving safety measures in FY 2024. Though Vision Zero’s first strategy is to make traffic signal and crosswalk improvements to San Diego’s most dangerous intersections, over 100 identified dangerous intersections have still not received safer crosswalks and traffic signals. Mayor Gloria’s administration needs to speed up the pace of installing these lifesaving safety measures.

– By the end of 2023, approve an updated Bicycle Master Plan that follows NACTO’s guidelines for building bike facilities for people of all ages and abilities. The master plan has not been updated since 2013 and needs to include protected bikeways on all of San Diego’s high-speed or high-volume roads, and it needs to come with strict deadlines that will hold the City accountable for actually building bikeways it plans.