SAN FRANCISCO – San Francisco leaders and community members came together Sunday to continue the fight for safer streets on World Day of Remembrance for Traffic Victims.
Walk SF held a vigil at City Hall for the 317 victims who have died over the past decade, not to mention the countless more seriously injured people in traffic accidents.
Jenny Yu’s mother is one of those victims.
She was walking across the street in the Richmond District when a speeding driver in an SUV made a left turn and struck her.
“She’s not nearly who she used to be,” Yu said. “She survived physically, but mentally she is not the same person anymore. Her body was thrown across the road. Two separate traumatic brain surgeries, now she has severe traumatic brain injury, PTSD, she is suicidal and severely depressed.”
According to Walk San Francisco, approximately 500 people are seriously injured in these types of accidents every year.
Now Yu says her mother needs 24-hour care. The accident happened in 2011 and the shoes on the stairs represent the deaths since 2014, all after Yu’s mother’s accident and the beginning of her fight for change.
“Every year it’s hard for me to see, not only the lives that have been taken, but also the family members and the pain they go through,” Yu said.
“We started counting when the city passed vision zero in 2014,” said Walk SF Executive Director Jodie Medeiros.
Medeiros says they call the shoes “ghost shoes.” The shoes are painted white and represent every person killed in traffic accidents since city leaders committed to Vision Zero, a preventive approach to ending serious and fatal crashes.
The legislation calls for slower streets, safer street design and education to educate people about street safety, but she says as the world changes, it needs to be updated.
“A lot has been learned in the last ten years, so how do we come up with a new policy that reflects that learning and that is very aggressive and ambitious, because zero is the right number,” Medeiros said.
Yu adds that while legislation helps, it is important that individual drivers take responsibility and realize they are sharing the street with others.
“It’s for pedestrians, motorists and cyclists, but we also have a lot of cases where speeding is fatal,” Yu said. “They need to understand, regardless of why they are speeding, that they should not speed.”
Walk SF says pedestrian deaths nationally have reached the highest number since 1981, and these types of reminders are needed now more than ever.
