How San Francisco Got More Drivers to Yield to Pedestrians

Along with an increasing number of cities around the country, San Francisco has a “Vision Zero” plan to make its streets safer for pedestrians. The initiative’s near-term goal is to reduce deaths and serious injuries by 50 percent by 2021, and in this tech-dominated town, a big part of the strategy for doing that involves data—improving the quality of information on pedestrian injuries and fatalities, analyzing those numbers, and “using data to inform better public policy.”

A new study out this month from the city’s Department of Public Health and Municipal Transportation Agency gives you some idea of how data-driven policy analysis and implementation might work in practice. Officials looked at whether or not various interventions succeeded in getting drivers to yield to pedestrians at intersections. That’s important for safety, as the report notes, since “64 percent of all collisions between people walking and driving are ‘driver at fault.’ ”