Pedestrian & Bicycle Crash Hotspots: San Francisco Bay Area

If you were hit while walking or riding a bike anywhere between San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, you were hurt in a region where pedestrians make up an unusually large share of the people who die in traffic. In San Francisco, 52.9% of traffic fatalities involve someone on foot, the highest share among cities tracked in NHTSA data.¹ All three cities run their own Vision Zero programs, and each has mapped the specific blocks where crashes cluster. The maps tell a similar story: a small slice of the street grid absorbs most of the harm.

12% of San Francisco's streets, 68% of the serious injuries

San Francisco's High Injury Network, the corridors the city has identified as producing the most severe and fatal crashes, covers just 12% of city street miles but accounts for 68% of severe and fatal traffic injuries. Pedestrians make up 70.5% of the deaths and severe injuries recorded on those streets.²

Citywide numbers improved in 2025: 25 traffic deaths, down 42% from 43 in 2024, with pedestrian deaths down a third.³ That didn't carry into 2026. Between early February and mid-March, five pedestrians died in five separate crashes: an elderly woman at Bayshore Boulevard and Silver Avenue on Feb. 3, a runner at Bayshore Boulevard and Arleta Avenue on Feb. 14, a 2-year-old in a stroller at Fourth and Channel streets on Feb. 27, a hit-and-run victim at Mission Street and Naglee Avenue on March 5, and a man struck on the sidewalk at Kearny Street and Broadway that same day. The Bayshore Boulevard and Silver Avenue corner alone had logged 12 collisions over the prior five years.¹

The city's worst crash in recent memory happened two years earlier. On March 16, 2024, a driver going roughly 70 mph left the roadway at Ulloa Street and Lenox Way in West Portal and struck a family of four waiting at a bus stop. Diego Cardoso de Oliveira, Matilde Ramos Pinto, and their two sons, ages 2 and 3 months, all died.⁴ SFMTA finished redesigning the intersection in September 2025, adding transit-only lanes on Ulloa and Taraval, painted pavement patterns, concrete bollards around the station entrance, and turn restrictions that cut illegal U-turns by 75%. In the surrounding half-square-mile, total collisions fell 60% and serious-injury crashes dropped from an average of 6.7 a year to 2.7.⁴

San Francisco has also turned to cameras instead of officers. Thirty-three speed safety cameras went live in March 2025, all sited on the High Injury Network near schools, parks, and senior centers, and speeding at monitored locations has dropped by as much as 90%.⁵

A corridor turnaround in Oakland, and who still bears the risk

Oakland's High Injury Network covers about 6% of city streets but produces more than 60% of severe and fatal crashes, based on 2017-2021 crash data.⁶ International Boulevard and San Pablo Avenue have topped that list for years, alongside Bancroft Avenue, Foothill Boulevard near 26th Avenue, and 18th Street in West Oakland.⁷

International Boulevard shows what happens when a corridor actually gets rebuilt. Ten people died on the street in 2023, seven of them pedestrians, before Oakland and AC Transit installed plastic bollards in summer 2024 to keep cars out of the dedicated bus lane. Illegal intrusions into that lane dropped 83%, pedestrian deaths in the bus lane fell to zero through most of 2025, and total fatalities on the corridor dropped to two.⁸

Citywide, deadly crashes fell to 23 in 2025 from a high of 36 in both 2020 and 2022.⁷ The risk hasn't been shared evenly. Between 2021 and 2025, Black residents made up 43% of people killed on Oakland's streets and Latine residents another 25%, and the High Injury Network sits disproportionately in the East and West Oakland neighborhoods where those communities live.⁷ Oakland completed 20 capital safety projects over $100,000 in 2025, 40% of them in East and West Oakland, and its speed camera program generated 82,000 citations in its first 40 days.⁷

San Jose is the deadliest big city in the Bay Area for people on foot

San Jose has had the roughest decade of the three. The city adopted Vision Zero in 2015, the same year it recorded 60 traffic deaths. Deaths climbed to a peak of 65 in 2022 before easing to 49 in 2023.⁹ In 2025, San Jose logged 40 traffic deaths, 20 of them pedestrians.¹⁰ Citywide, walking and biking made up only 11% of all crashes between 2019 and 2023, but 59% of traffic deaths. Pedestrians alone accounted for 47% of fatalities, many of them after dark.¹¹

The danger concentrates on the east side. Council District 7 recorded 16 fatalities in 2021, more than any other district, and more than 70% of the city's traffic deaths that year happened on the east side. Jackson Avenue, a 3.1-mile stretch between Berryessa Road and Story Road, has logged 28 fatal or severe-injury crashes and 43 pedestrians or cyclists struck over five years, ranking seventh citywide for deaths and serious injuries per mile. One house along the corridor has been hit by out-of-control vehicles 23 times.¹² King Road between Berryessa Road and Capitol Expressway, and the intersection of Senter Road and McLaughlin Avenue, round out the city's highest-risk locations.⁹

Senter Road shows what redesign can do. After the city painted intersections and added green bollards and plastic barriers in 2020, for under $1 million, deaths and serious injuries on the corridor dropped from 15 in 2020 to five in 2021.⁹ San Jose's 2025 Vision Zero Action Plan doubles the mileage of these Priority Safety Corridors and adds 19 miles of quick-build safety work, with a goal of cutting traffic deaths 30% by 2030 and reaching zero by 2040.¹¹

If you're hit walking or riding in the Bay Area

A police report alone rarely explains why a crash happened at one intersection rather than another a block away. When a location sits on a city's High Injury Network or Priority Safety Corridor list, that history can matter for an insurance claim or a lawsuit. It documents a pattern of road design and driver behavior at that specific spot, built up over years, rather than a single bad afternoon. If you or someone you love was hurt walking or biking anywhere in the region, an attorney who handles pedestrian and bicycle cases can help pull the crash report, medical records, and the relevant city corridor data together before deadlines pass. You can find one through the legal directory.

This article is for general information only and is not legal advice.

Sources

1. SF Standard, "SF has the highest share of pedestrian traffic deaths in the U.S."

2. San Francisco County Transportation Authority, "2022 Vision Zero Safe Streets Evaluation Findings and Updated High Injury Network"

3. SFMTA, "San Francisco Traffic Fatalities Drop by Nearly Half in 2025"

4. Mission Local, "After a family was killed at a West Portal bus stop, the street was redesigned. Did it work?"

5. SFMTA, "How New Speed Cameras Will Make Our Neighborhoods Safer"

6. City of Oakland, "2024 High Injury Network (HIN)"

7. The Oaklandside, "Oakland's roads are slowly getting safer"

8. The Oaklandside, "International Boulevard's makeover ended pedestrian deaths this year"

9. San José Spotlight, "San Jose preps plan to reach zero traffic pedestrian fatalities, deaths"

10. CBS News San Francisco, "San Jose fatal traffic collisions"

11. City of San José, "Vision Zero Action Plan 2025"

12. San José Spotlight, "East San Jose home hit by cars 23 times"