I hold a medical degree, and I work in tech, but my most important identity is mother to a 19-month-old. Right now, the greatest threat to my child\u2019s life is the intersection of 4th and Channel streets, right outside our living room.<\/p>\n
Earlier this month at that intersection, a 2-year-old girl was struck and killed<\/a> by a car while crossing the street alongside her mother, who was also hospitalized. Two years prior, a 4-year-old girl was killed <\/a>under nearly identical circumstances just blocks away at 4th and King.<\/p>\n When you analyze health data for a living, you learn to spot systemic failures. San Francisco\u2019s approach to traffic safety is exactly that: a catastrophic failure.\u00a0<\/p>\n The city treats the deaths of pedestrians \u2014 five have been killed in 2026 already (opens in new tab)<\/a> \u2014 as random, unavoidable tragedies: wrong place, wrong time, tough luck. But these fatalities are not determined by luck. They are the predictable outcome of outdated street designs that prioritize traffic over human life.<\/p>\n This is especially true in Mission Bay, one of San Francisco\u2019s fastest-growing neighborhoods<\/a>, with streets designed in the 1990s for a different era, when the area was still a low-population hinterland of warehouses and vacant lots. They were never intended to meet modern safety standards for a walkable neighborhood full of children. Channel Street alone features two traffic lanes in each direction, with parking on both sides. It is far too wide for local traffic, essentially functioning as a residential speedway.<\/p>\n Over the last five years, there have been seven crashes on Channel Street, five of them involving pedestrians or cyclists. Furthermore, 4th Street sits directly on the city\u2019s High-Injury Network (opens in new tab)<\/a>, the streets where the large majority of crashes occur. The city has identified the danger, yet our streets remain lethal.<\/p>\n What makes this design flaw so deadly is who now lives here. Mission Bay is a booming residential community. More than 450 young children reside in the 94158 ZIP Code alone. We have surrounded these intersections with early childhood centers and schools, including the Mission Bay School (scheduled to open in August), UCSF Child Development Center, Mission Bay Kids, and the Dahlia School. The latter, a Montessori school for kids aged 18 months to 9 years, is located in my own building, directly across the street from the site of the deadly crash.<\/p>\n Yet the city\u2019s transportation plan aggressively protects the blocks immediately adjacent to the Chase Center and Oracle Park, forcing residential arteries like Channel Street to absorb displaced event traffic. During every game or concert, our neighborhood becomes a high-stress cut-through for frustrated drivers trying to reach the 280 freeway. They run red lights, block crosswalks, and force caregivers to push strollers into active traffic.\u00a0<\/p>\n And because there is little to no enforcement by the San Francisco Police Department on the internal arteries of Mission Bay south of King Street, and no red-light (opens in new tab)<\/a> or speed-safety cameras (opens in new tab)<\/a> in the area, the city is signaling that the rapid exit of event attendees is worth more than the lives of our children.<\/p>\n Traffic violence is a crisis with a known cure. Hoboken, New Jersey \u2014 a city twice as dense as San Francisco \u2014 has achieved nine consecutive years with zero traffic fatalities by engineering its streets to prioritize pedestrians over vehicular speed. San Francisco\u2019s refusal to replicate these effective safety measures is a conscious policy choice.<\/p>\n Officials at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency have a Mission Bay school access study (opens in new tab)<\/a>and a proposed traffic-calming project sitting on their desks. These reports show that street widths and \u201chighway-like\u201d features on the Mission Bay Boulevard corridor encourage speeds that are incompatible with a school zone, and that the lack of protected crossings creates \u201chigh-stress\u201d gaps for pedestrians. We need city leaders to stop studying our intersections and start fixing them.<\/p>\n Mayor Daniel Lurie, Supervisor Matt Dorsey, and the SFMTA must implement immediate, evidence-backed interventions to improve safety at the chaotic 4th and Channel intersection, and across Mission Bay.<\/p>\n California Assembly Bill 413 requires intersection daylighting statewide. We need the immediate removal of street parking spaces adjacent to our crosswalks in order to eliminate fatal blind spots. These daylight zones need to be hardened with bike racks, planters, or soft-hit posts that prevent people from idling in red-curb zones, as they often do now.\u00a0<\/p>\n Additionally, the city should add infrastructure to this intersection to slow drivers and reduce crossing distances for pedestrians. Options could include turn-calming features, the black-and-yellow plastic bumps that physically force drivers to make slow, wide turns; safety zones that shorten crossing distances and give pedestrians more space to safely wait to cross; and a ban on right turns on red, announced with highly visible signage.<\/p>\n Finally, the SFMTA should station parking control officers at Channel Street during all stadium events, and this corridor should be evaluated for both red-light cameras and speed safety cameras, which have been shown to drastically lower driver speeds everywhere they\u2019ve been installed.<\/p>\n I should not have to look out my living room window every day, holding my toddler, bracing for the sound of the next impact. The solutions to save our children are cheap, proven, and waiting to be built. I write this as a clinician trained to follow data wherever it leads. But above all, I write this as a mother, echoing the desperate pleas of hundreds of parents in Mission Bay.\u00a0<\/p>\n The numbers are unambiguous. Our streets are killing our children, and we know how to stop it.<\/p>\n Tanvi Jayaraman is a Stanford MD and leader in clinical AI. A Mission Bay resident and mother of a 19-month-old, she is an advocate for organizations like Walk San Francisco (opens in new tab)<\/a>and KidSafe SF (opens in new tab)<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I hold a medical degree, and I work in tech, but my most important identity is mother to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":219713,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[8256,1103,143,145,144,5449,3394],"class_list":["post-219712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-chase-center","tag-mission-bay","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-sfmta","tag-traffic-deaths"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219712\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/219713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}