San Francisco has now seen more traffic deaths in 2024 than any year in the last decade.
A woman died Friday morning after being hit by a car while walking across the Great Highway near Ulloa Street, marking San Francisco’s 40th traffic fatality and 24th pedestrian death of the year.
A spokesperson for the San Francisco Police Department said the woman was still alive when EMTs arrived, but died shortly after.
“Despite the lifesaving efforts of emergency responders and medical staff, the pedestrian succumbed to her injuries and was declared deceased at the hospital,” the spokesperson said via email, adding that the driver stayed on scene and cooperated with police.
Stephen Martin-Pinto, an emergency responder who was on scene, posted a thread on X about the incident. He wrote that the victim was elderly and had been reported missing by her family. The police did not immediately confirm these details.
The death makes 2024 the deadliest year for traffic deaths broadly — and pedestrian deaths specifically — since the city took its Vision Zero pledge in 2014.
Needless to say, the city failed to fulfill its promise to end traffic deaths by now.
The intersection where the woman was killed is on the stretch of the Great Highway that will soon be closed to vehicles.
Voters passed Proposition K to permanently ban cars from the Great Highway in November, and a state board approved a permit for the city to transform the roadway Dec. 12. The road is set to actually close to cars sometime in the spring. After that, landscaping will begin to turn the Great Highway into Ocean Beach Park.
“We are saddened that one of our neighbors lost their life on the Great Highway this morning,” Lucas Lux, president of the nonprofit Friends of Ocean Beach Park, said in a Walk San Francisco press release. “Getting to the beach should not be a life or death matter. With the upcoming transformation into a permanent park early next year, we hope this is the last traffic fatality in this space.”
Despite approval from SF voters and a state commission, the closure of the Great Highway to cars remains a contentious issue, especially on the city’s west side.
Equally contentious is the broader conversation about redesigning streets to serve pedestrians and cyclists and force cars to drive slower.
While data show that drivers are usually at fault in fatal collisions with pedestrians and other cities have achieved Vision Zero, some San Franciscans believe eliminating traffic deaths is impossible and the city’s interventions in the streetscape do more to inconvenience drivers than to protect those outside of cars.