San Francisco acts to eliminate traffic deaths

SAN FRANCISCO – The city on February 10 launched a new large vehicle safety-training program designed for professional drivers to increase pedestrian safety on San Francisco streets.

Mayor Ed Lee, joined by the California Trucking Associations and the, also announced a two-year “Vision Zero” strategy to eliminate all traffic fatality by 2024.

The Strategy outlines the projects and policy changes the City will pursue in the next two years to increase traffic safety on San Francisco’s streets.

The new large vehicle safety training program is a video-based curriculum designed to increase professional driver awareness of the safety issues related to driving a large vehicle on urban streets with high numbers of people walking and biking.

“Large vehicle collisions with people who are walking and biking are low frequency, but high severity. In a five-year period, large vehicles represented only four percent of all collisions, but accounted for 17 percent of all bicycles and pedestrian deaths,” said SFMTA director of Transportation Ed Reiskin.

The unveiling of the new large vehicle safety training program comes on the heels of a campaign launched to change the tour bus policy after a 68-year-old Filipino-American city employee was struck and killed in front of City Hall on October 23, 2014.

The local chapter of the National Federation of Filipino American Associations waged a campaign to change tour bus policy of using the driver to also act as the tour guide.

“I support Norman Yee’s effort to make sure that the drivers don’t have any other distraction when they are driving tour busses in The City, We’ll get down to a conversation with the Board hopefully to pass something that tour bus drivers have to commit to,” said Lee.

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