A gruesome crash in San Francisco on Friday afternoon left a cyclist hospitalized with life-threatening injuries after a dump truck hit her and dragged her for about 20 feet, according to accounts from residents and businesses near the crash.
The woman survived but is still in recovery, according to the San Francisco Police Department. Bystanders described a horrific injury in which the cyclist’s leg was maimed.
Neighbors also described the Seventh Avenue and Irving Street intersection, where the crash occurred, as “crazy” and “hectic,” and said they witness “close calls” there on a daily basis.
“I live right here and I feel like I’m risking my life crossing that intersection daily,” said Michele Carlson, bartender at the Fireside Bar.
Seventh Avenue is a thoroughfare with heavy car traffic that connects the Inner Sunset to the south and east of the city. On Irving Street, there are train tracks, N-Judah trains and double-parked loading trucks or cars picking up food from nearby restaurants.
There are no designated bike lanes on either street, and cyclists share the road with motor vehicle traffic.
“We just hear people honking all the time. It’s a busy area. You got the trains. People riding their bikes. There’s a hill right here. So people come fast down it,” said Stefan Miller, a tattooist at One Shot Tattoo on Seventh and Irving.
Carlson, the bartender, agreed. “People don’t notice because it’s such a thoroughfare,” she said. Drivers coming from busy Laguna Honda Boulevard, she said, “don’t realize that you need to slow the fuck down.”
Most people Mission Local talked to recalled seeing the brutal aftermath of the crash, but details on how it happened were unclear. The details, as described below, are disturbing.
The cyclist, who had a helmet on, was caught between a huge U.S. Foods truck parked in the right lane while unloading, and a dump truck trying to go around it on the left. The dump truck hit the cyclist. It was unclear which direction the cyclist was heading.
The truck was about one-third full with “dirt, concrete and stones,” said Brian Braden, a barber at Surreal You Hair Design on Irving Street.
After hitting the cyclist, the dump truck driver apparently did not know she was on the ground, said Mercy, a barista at the Beanery Cafe near the intersection. Mercy heard people yelling at the truck driver to stop.
The cyclist “was screaming. Her whole leg was scraped off down to the bones. All along for about 20 feet,” said Braden. “All pieces of her leg. The fat. The muscle. The blood. The bone.” Her bike seemed intact, he said. After she was sent to the hospital, one of her shoes was left on the ground, covered in blood.
Bystanders rushed to help, gathering towels from the nearby tattoo shop and nail salon to stop the bleeding. An EMT who happened to be nearby put a tourniquet on her leg, before the paramedics arrived on scene.
The driver, who remained on scene, was “sitting on the curb, crying,” Braden said.
“It was a rough twist of fate,” said Miller, the tattooist. “It was the wrong place, wrong time for everybody.”
Irving Street in the Inner Sunset is usually busy with N-Judah trains, trucks unloading, and double-parked cars. Photo by Junyao Yang on March 9, 2026.
7th and Irving is ‘like a freeway’
It was a day that Mercy had long feared would come.
“We were expecting this, terrified an incident will happen one day,” the barista said. “The way they drive, the way they turn, everything is like a freeway.”
Over the past 10 years working at the Beanery Cafe, Mercy has seen so many pedestrians yelling at drivers at the intersection in fear of being hit, she said. After Friday’s crash, she planned to go to the city on her day off to urge it to do something.
Many of the regulars at the cafe are seniors, people with walkers or in wheelchairs, she said. “It’s very scary to see them crossing. They may be hit one day,” she said.
San Francisco, which in 2014 adopted a “Vision Zero” plan to reduce traffic deaths to zero in 10 years, has failed in its goal. Last year, there were 25 deaths, slightly lower than the rolling average of 33 deaths a year since 2005.
At least five pedestrians have been killed by cars in San Francisco so far this year, according to Walk SF, a pedestrian safety nonprofit.
Residents agree that the city needs to address pedestrian and bike safety at Seventh and Irving.
When Carlson lived on Seventh Avenue between Lawton and Kirkham some 15 years ago, “it used to be such a freeway. The cars would just be flying,” she recalled. Cyclists rode on the sidewalk, and she worried about her toddler being hit by bikes.
Then the city added two new bike lanes — it slowed down the traffic in her stretch of Seventh Avenue and cyclists stopped riding on sidewalks. That worked, and it could be a first step at this intersection. Another solution could be having no turn on red during rush hours, Carlson said.
Braden, the barber, said that the city should install speed cameras of the sort that have been set up throughout the city at Seventh Avenue and Irving Street. “We need them here,” he said, “because drivers really come speeding down the hill.”
The solution just has to be more than a speed limit sign, Braden continued. “It says 25 miles per hour. And I laugh,” he said. “Maybe the bicycles and scooters, but the cars ain’t doing no 25. They don’t care.”