We’ve Gone Platinum!

On April 16, Walk Friendly Communities, a national program recognizing and celebrating cities that prioritize walking and pedestrian safety, designated San Francisco as a Platinum-level Walk Friendly Community. Recognized as a Gold-level community since 2011, San Francisco has implemented bold and innovative programs to achieve the new Platinum designation. The categories measured by the Walk Friendly Communities are planning and policy, engineering and design, behavioral programs, and evaluation.

San Francisco is only the third city in the country, after Seattle and New York, to receive the Platinum label, the highest designation given by the program. This honor recognizes that staff, advocates and elected leadership in San Francisco work every day to improve safety and create environments that support walking.

San Francisco is distinguished by our leadership in Vision Zero. We are taking aggressive steps to eliminate deaths and serious injuries resulting from collisions. The SFMTA, along with our partners across the city, have made significant investments in the city’s most dangerous corridors. We have completed projects on 9.8 miles of the High Injury Network, have more than 22.7 miles under construction and are in active planning and design for a further 33.7 miles of projects. We are systematically evaluating the safety impacts of our investments and using both crash and injury data to inform our decision-making.

Walk Friendly Communities launched in 2010. Since then, the program has recognized 74 cities and towns across the country. The Walk Friendly Communities program is sponsored by FedEx and was launched with support from the Federal Highway Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is managed by the University of North Carolina’s Highway Safety Research Center.