13th Street Safety Project
13th Street is an east-west street that borders the South of Market neighborhood and Mission District, running underneath the elevated Central Freeway. On the ground level, 13th Street serves motor vehicle traffic traveling on and off the Central Freeway. Locally, this corridor connects travelers to and from the Mission District, Design District, Mission Bay, and South of Market neighborhoods. The 13th Street corridor is part of the Vision Zero High Injury Network, which are the 12 percent of streets that disproportionately account for 68 percent of severe and fatal traffic collisions.
The 13th Street Safety Project aims to:
- Improve traffic safety and comfort for all who travel on the 13th Street corridor between Folsom Street and Valencia Street
- Reduce the number of conflicts between those who walk, bike and drive along this corridor
- Increase the connectivity of San Francisco's bicycle network
Previous efforts on 13th Street and Division Street improved walking, biking, and driving between Townsend Street and Folsom Street. The 13th Street Safety Project will further expand the bike network by extending protected facilities on 13th Street west and connect to Valencia Street. The scope of the project will be informed by preliminary analysis from the SF Planning Department’s Market-Octavia Plan Amendment (the Hub) and the SF County Transportation Authority’s SoMa Freeway Ramps Intersection Safety Study.
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Existing conditions: people crossing 13th Street at Mission Street -
Existing conditions: a bicyclist rides in mixed traffic -
Existing conditions: 13th Street -
Existing conditions: 13th Street -
Existing conditions: Duboce Avenue
VISION ZERO
Every year, around 30 people are killed and hundreds are severely injured while traveling our on city streets. These deaths and injuries are unacceptable and preventable, and San Francisco is committed to eliminating them. The City and County of San Francisco adopted the Vision Zero policy in 2014 – a commitment to building better streets, educating the people on traffic safety, enforcing traffic laws and prioritizing resources to implement effective initiatives that save lives. The goal of Vision Zero is to eliminate all traffic deaths and reduce severe traffic-related injuries in San Francisco.
13th Street is part of the city's High-Injury Network, the 12 percent of streets that account for 68 percent of severe and fatal traffic collisions. Between 2018 and 2022, 100 collisions occurred in the project area and resulted in injury. Over one-third of reported collisions involved bicyclists or pedestrians, and the most common collision factors were red signal violations, high speeds, and unsafe left turns. This makes 13th Street one of the corridors with the highest numbers of injury collisions.
As the City continues to grow, the area surrounding the 13th Street corridor will become busier and even more heavily utilized as a key connection, leading to the potential for increased traffic conflicts. In order to address the traffic safety issues present along the corridor, the 13th Street Safety Project will implement improvements such as protected bike lanes, sidewalk extensions, and signal timing upgrades. These tools will help accommodate the growing numbers of traffic including bicyclists and pedestrians using the corridor, while also discouraging unsafe traffic behavior. These improvements will support San Francisco’s Vision Zero policy of reducing and eliminating severe and fatal traffic injuries on our city streets.
