Lydia Tonozzi was on her way back to work from her lunch break. She remembers waiting to cross Van Ness Avenue. After that, the recollections come in bits and pieces. 

She’s on the ground, and someone’s asking her name. A paramedic says he’s going to move her leg. Then pain — excruciating pain.

“I remember getting into the ambulance and thinking, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to make it through this,’” Tonozzi said.

The one step she took into a San Francisco crosswalk on April 24 was the beginning of a long, agonizing journey that has included three surgeries, five days in intensive care, and months in a nursing facility. All to cope with numerous broken bones and a concussion, she said.

“I couldn’t walk or stand up,” the 35-year-old said. “It’s wild at my age to have people having to give you a sponge bath.”

The driver who smashed into her was a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency parking control officer who was illegally driving in a bus lane, according to a lawsuit Tonozzi filed. The SFMTA declined to comment, but the San Francisco Police Department did confirm that a vehicular collision involving a pedestrian took place at that location.

The collision made Tonozzi a member of a grim and growing club of people who have landed in the hospital — or worse — after being struck by a San Francisco city worker on the job.

San Francisco is in the midst of its decadelong Vision Zero project to eliminate traffic deaths. But despite the city spending hundreds of millions of dollars and transforming miles of streetscape, 2024 is set to be one of the deadliest traffic years in recent memory. While residents are united in a desire for the deaths to stop, the matter of whom is to blame for Vision Zero’s deficiencies is divisive. Bureaucratic delays on safety projects, lackluster police traffic enforcement, and even pedestrians themselves have taken turns as the situation’s bogeyman. 

For the most part, however, the driving habits of city workers have escaped scrutiny.

From January 2019 through July 2024, 151 people filed claims that they were struck by a municipal vehicle while walking or biking, according to data obtained by The Standard. Those claims have cost the city nearly $40 million in settlements, and more than a dozen remain unresolved.

The figures indicate a tough reality for San Francisco transportation officials: Their own workers have been among the drivers impeding the city’s progress toward eliminating traffic deaths and severe injuries.

On Saturday, an SFPD officer struck and killed a pedestrian in the Bayview.

“Apparently we can’t get to that Vision Zero without also addressing the contributions to those numbers by city employees, not just the contribution to those numbers by private citizens,” Tonozzi said. 

Crash claims reviewed by The Standard contain numerous allegations of dangerous driving by municipal workers, including striking pedestrians as they walked in marked crosswalks.

Michael Christopher Daniel alleges that a San Francisco Public Utilities Commission engineer was driving a Toyota Prius carelessly when it struck him as he crossed a Hayward street in 2022, causing a permanent disability. 

Andrew Rene Kendrick claims he was struck by a firefighter driving an ambulance, with no sirens on, at Van Ness Avenue; it knocked him out of his wheelchair and sent him sprawling to the ground, unconscious.

Sabrina Habel contends that a city bus was making an unsafe turn when it struck her in a Presidio Heights crosswalk in February.

Carlos Perez was walking in the crosswalk on an Excelsior street when he was struck by a Public Utilities Commission sewer service worker who allegedly sped down the road in his city-owned Ford F550. The collision killed Perez, according to a lawsuit filed by his children.

Bike lanes are not always sufficient protection for cyclists, according to the claims.

Michelle Spicher was cycling in the 16th Street lane near the Chase Center one morning in March 2022 when an SFMTA painter, whom she claims was driving  carelessly, allegedly struck her with a truck and smashed her ankle. 

About one year later, Bryn Miller was biking on 20th Street in the Mission when an SFPD officer allegedly turned his vehicle and struck her, sending her flying over the handlebars with injuries that required a trip to the emergency room.

Every department involved in the incidents detailed in this report declined to comment on specifics, citing ongoing litigation. A spokesperson for the city attorney’s office said that just because an injured pedestrian or cyclist sues the city does not mean the driver was at fault.

“San Francisco works diligently to keep our streets safe and improve pedestrian safety,” Jen Kwart, the spokesperson, said. “We investigate all claims thoroughly on an individual basis, and we always strive for a fair resolution that protects public resources.”

The fire department, Public Utilities Commission, and SFMTA all emphasized the strength of their employee driving training programs, which specifically teach how to navigate areas with cyclists and pedestrians. Public Utilities in June added to its defensive driving training a technique to avoid “dooring” cyclists, the same month Steven Bassett was killed when his bike collided with a PUC truck’s door.

Whether the training is translating into safe driving is difficult to measure, largely due to the fact that no single agency has taken on the mantle of driver safety across San Francisco’s workforce.

Some officials say the Fleet Management division of the city administrator’s office oversees vehicular safety, but that division is quick to point out that it doesn’t have oversight of other departments’ employees. Fleet Management identifies itself primarily as a mechanics shop that collects data about the physical well-being of vehicles. And despite city regulations requiring each department to submit reports on employee collisions to Fleet Management, many don’t. 

In 2023, Fleet Management logged 136 collision reports documenting crashes that occurred while San Francisco workers were driving. But the transportation, public health, police, and fire departments were notably missing from that total, leaving out about a third of the city’s 6,280-vehicle fleet, not including Muni buses.

The 136 collisions that were logged citywide represented about 3.2 crashes for every 100 fleet vehicles. The city administrator’s office does not set a per-vehicle crash goal in its annual report on employee safety. The department, which does not distinguish in its data whether the employee was at fault, did not respond to questions about a citywide target.

Instead, several departments independently track their own fleet safety.

During the 2024 fiscal year, SFPD logged 57 collisions in which the officer was at fault, according to performance metrics. The previous year, the total was 49, still well above the target of zero.

That same year, Public Works logged nearly eight “preventable motor vehicle accidents” per 100 vehicles in its fleet, well above its target of five. The department cited “the quantity and skill level of new hires going through the new driver program” as a possible reason why it missed its mark.

There is no universal standard metric for an acceptable number of crashes, according to Michael Brennan, the former fleet manager for Manatee County, Florida.

“Your goal is zero,” said Brennan, who is now a consultant on how to improve fleet safety.

Pairing consistent training with telematics — GPS systems that track vehicle speed, harsh braking, hard acceleration, seat belt violations, and more — is the best way to reduce dangerous driving among employees, according to Brennan.

“When you start seeing hard stops or erratic behavior, then you bring that particular operator in and say he’s going to need some training,” Brennan said. “And you get him the training he needs to correct whatever behavior you’re seeing.”

But establishing a telematics program that officials regularly use to reduce dangerous driving has proved difficult in San Francisco.

In 2016, city leaders launched a telematics program in reaction to a string of deadly crashes involving public employees and contractors. At first, the effort made promising strides. Fleet management began sharing speeding reports with department heads, leading to a 60% reduction from 2017 to 2020 in incidents of employees driving at speeds over 80 mph.

But progress flagged as the pandemic took hold. 

In August 2020, the budget and legislative analyst’s office released a report excoriating the telematics program. Fleet Management had a backlog of 1,000 vehicles that needed trackers installed and was using only a small portion of the system’s capabilities, the report concluded. Making matters worse, no central authority had stepped up to hold accountable the employees who were identified by the telematics as driving recklessly.

More than four years later, the core issues identified in that report remain unchanged.

The telematics installations that were supposed to be complete in 2020 are not scheduled to be finished until summer 2025. 

Meanwhile, managers monitoring the telematics system have expressed skepticism in its accuracy. They say GPS can mistake highways for surface streets, causing false positives on speeding reports. 

The speeding data, which Fleet Management has said is an accurate indicator of overall trends, still indicates widespread problems among city workers. 

The trackers installed in nonemergency city vehicles logged workers traveling at rates over 80 mph an average of 745 times each month in 2023, according to a report. That was down significantly from the 1,753 average monthly incidents in 2022. But data of April 2024 speeding figures, obtained by The Standard, showed 1,512 incidents, indicating that speeding may have ticked back up this year.

“This emphasizes the importance of city agencies holding city employees accountable for dangerous driving behavior and, especially, speeding,” Walk San Francisco Executive Director Jodie Medeiros said in response to these findings. “They have the data; they need to be using it to change how employees are driving to prevent crashes.”

If San Francisco’s approach to adopting telematics has been sluggish and skeptical, New York City has taken the opposite tack. 

Fifteen years ago, New York had a similar model to San Francisco’s: Each department managed its own fleet. Now, the city has a central program, and Chief Fleet Officer Keith Kerman is convinced that’s the best practice. 

In 2017, Kerman’s team unfurled a fleet safety initiative as a central pillar of New York’s Vision Zero push to eliminate traffic deaths. Crucially, they opened an office of real-time fleet tracking, where workers watch telematics data live to flag any driver exceeding the city’s 25 mph limit.

“And then we call the agency and say, ‘Hey, you have an employee right now who is going 55 [mph] on 5th Avenue. Deal with it,’” Kerman told The Standard.

Kerman credits that persistent monitoring with a 75% reduction in speeding incidents among city workers in New York. In total, the live monitoring, paired with other fleet safety technology improvements, has cut back preventable collisions by about 25%, Kerman said.

There’s no signal that San Francisco will see a similar consolidation of fleet – and risk – management into a centralized entity. But incoming Mayor Daniel Lurie has already shown an appetite for shaking up City Hall’s structure to encourage cross-departmental collaboration.

Regardless of the method, Tonozzi, who is still recovering after being struck by the parking control officer, wants the city to make sure its workers who are on the road drive cautiously.

“I think that [the city] is not ensuring that it is safe for pedestrians,” she said. “I had never thought something like this would happen to me. It’s freaking horrific; it stops your life for months. It’s not something that anyone should ever have to go through.”