Money Spent On Pedestrian Safety Without Results. Here’s Why?
On July 27, 2008 Examiner Staff Writer Will Reisman reported: “Despite money being thrown toward safety upgrades and few cars driving on streets because of the economy, (San Francisco) pedestrian deaths have remained fairly steady through the past five years.” Why?
One reason taxpayer dollars are being spent without any improvement in public safety is that the City and County of San Francisco’s Traffic Engineers do not have the necessary data to spot the locations or “hot spots” where the streets and intersections are most dangerous to pedestrians. Why? The reason is that the City is failing to investigate over 531 pedestrian injury traffic collision per year or annually. How could this be?
By written policy, S.F.P.D. General Order 9.02, S.F.P.D. purposely does not respond to 911 calls of accidents on City streets unless it is clear that there is an “injury”. In short, the “call is disposed of.” As a result of San Francisco’s policy, the City’s traffic engineers are aware that about 5000 collisions occurring within the City and County of San Francisco “give or take a thousand” go unreported every year to the State Wide Integrated Traffic Reporting System (S.W.I.T.R.S). This fact is acknowledged by the Traffic Engineering Department (Ricardo Olea) and by City employee Michael Radetsky, Senior Health Educator.
The City’s Traffic Engineering Department is aware of this under-reported data. The City’s policy not to respond to citizen calls of traffic collisions has been documented by The San Francisco Department of Public Health. In 2005 they released a study: “San Francisco Pedestrian Injury Surveillance: Mapping, Under-Reporting, and Injury Severity in Police and Hospital Records”. The study discovered that 21% of all pedestrian injury accidents that arrived at emergency rooms in San Francisco remain unreported by S.F.P.D. to S.W.I.T.R.S. In one year alone this deficiency amounted to 531 pedestrian injury traffic collisions that were not investigated by S.F.P.D.
Examiner Staff Writer Will Reisman reports that the Municipal Transportation Agency has set aside $17.4 million for pedestrian improvement project for the upcoming fiscal year. The first step in improving pedestrian safety is not throwing more tax payer money at an undefined issue; the first step is to collect the data so Traffic Engineers can do their job. The first step in that process is to revoke General Order 9.02 and start to collect all the information about the location of pedestrian and car accidents in San Francisco, whether or not injury is present.