San Francisco launches dashboard to benchmark Vision Zero progress

San Francisco has launched a new dashboard to benchmark its progress on Vision Zero traffic fatalities compared to 12 peer cities.

The City and County of San Francisco adopted Vision Zero as a policy in 2014, declaring that no one should die while travelling on city streets.

“Our goal with producing these dashboards is to understand how San Francisco and peer cities across America are doing across a range of metrics that measure traffic safety,” a spokesperson from the San Francisco Controller’s Office told Cities Today. “We’ve received some positive responses from sharing our data dashboards, and hope the data can be a useful resource for other cities with their own Vision Zero efforts – especially as behaviours and trends evolve in cities recovering from the pandemic.”

For Vision Zero benchmarking, the site presents San Francisco in context to Boston, Chicago, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, Oakland, Portland, San José, Seattle, and Washington DC.

San Francisco selected cities based on similarity in population size and density, prioritising those in California and major cities in other geographic regions across the US. Not every city had available data for every measure.

“With so many different factors that impact traffic safety, unpacking the efforts of Vision Zero to reduce fatalities and injuries can be complicated,” the spokesperson added. “We hope that members of the public who click through the dashboards can better understand San Francisco’s focus areas and performance. Presenting the data this way helps illustrate the progress that’s been made and highlights the importance of continued Vision Zero efforts.”

The benchmarking effort considered seven metrics demonstrating progress on key Vision Zero indicators or efforts, which include:

• annual public transit trips
• commute methods
• fatalities
• injuries
• separated bike lanes
• street network speeds
• traffic citations.

Each metric includes a dashboard or visual and text explaining the key takeaways. The text for each dashboard also discusses the data sources and any limitations.

Image: Adrian825 | Dreamstime.com