John Roach, Esq. | August 30, 2026 | Car Accidents
San Francisco’s Most Dangerous Intersections: What the City’s Own Data Shows
San Francisco’s Most Dangerous Intersections: What the City’s Own Data Shows
Citywide traffic deaths just hit a decade low. But San Francisco has the highest share of pedestrian deaths of any major U.S. city — and the same handful of intersections keep producing injury crashes year after year.
The Good News First
In 2025, San Francisco recorded 25 traffic deaths — down 42% from 43 the year before, and the lowest total since 2018. Pedestrian fatalities fell 33% over the same period. It was the second-lowest year for injury-causing crashes since the city adopted Vision Zero in 2014, behind only the pandemic-shortened year of 2020.
The Number That Didn’t Improve
Progress on the raw death count hides a harder trend underneath it: San Francisco pedestrians are dying at a higher rate, relative to the city’s total traffic deaths, than in any other large American city the federal government tracks — and that share has climbed every year since 2020.
Between January and mid-March 2026, five of San Francisco’s six traffic deaths were pedestrians. Every one of the five died at a location already on the city’s own Vision Zero High Injury Network — streets the city had identified, in advance, as among its most dangerous — and each location had a documented crash history there within the prior five years:
- Bayshore Boulevard & Silver Avenue — Feb. 3, 2026
- Fourth Street & Channel Street — Feb. 27, 2026
- Mission Street & Naglee Avenue — Mar. 5, 2026
- Kearny Street & Broadway — Mar. 5, 2026
The Repeat Offenders
The city’s own most recent official collision report — covering the full five years from 2020 through 2024 — ranks these as San Francisco’s highest injury-crash intersections:
| Rank | Intersection | Injury Crashes, 2020–2024 |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Gough Street & Market Street | 40 |
| 2 | Market Street & Octavia Street | 38 |
| 3 | Fell St / Oak St / JFK Dr / Stanyan St (the Panhandle convergence) | 30 |
| 4 | Market Street & Van Ness Avenue | 27 |
Worst specifically for pedestrians: Eddy Street & Larkin Street (13 crashes). Worst specifically for cyclists: Market & Octavia (15) and 7th Street & Market Street (13).
Lists like this don’t always agree with each other — a lot depends on which dataset and time window is used. A widely-cited 2024 analysis of SFPD data covering January 2022 through September 2023 produced a different top ten entirely, one still led by Market & Octavia but otherwise built around intersections — Geneva & Mission, Divisadero & Geary — that don’t appear in the city’s own five-year collision report at all. The numbers above come from the city’s own official Vision Zero dataset, the most complete record available, rather than a shorter police-data snapshot.
A Rare Bright Spot
Not every hotspot is static. At Market & Octavia — for years described as the single most dangerous intersection in San Francisco — bicycle injury crashes fell from 29 in the five years before its redesign (2010–2014) to 15 in the five years after (2020–2024), following protected bike lanes and other infrastructure changes. These locations aren’t dangerous by nature; how dangerous they stay is a function of what, if anything, gets rebuilt.
Why a location’s history matters legally. Under California Government Code §835, a public entity can be held responsible for a dangerous condition on its own property if it created that condition, or knew about it and failed to fix it. A documented history of prior crashes at the same intersection is frequently part of the evidence in exactly that kind of claim.
The Law Office of John J. Roach represents pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers injured at locations like these throughout San Francisco, including claims against public entities — which carry a six-month filing deadline, far shorter than the standard two-year window for most injury claims.
Sources & Methodology
- SFMTA / Vision Zero SF, San Francisco Traffic Crashes Report, 2023–2024 (Ricardo Olea, published Aug. 20, 2025) — the source for all 2020–2024 intersection-level injury crash counts. Full report (PDF)
- SFMTA, press release, “San Francisco Traffic Fatalities Drop by Nearly Half in 2025,” published Jan. 8, 2026. sfmta.com
- The San Francisco Standard, “SF has the highest share of pedestrian traffic deaths in the U.S.,” published Mar. 17, 2026 — source for the NHTSA pedestrian-share comparison and the four 2026 fatality locations. sfstandard.com
- Axios San Francisco, “The most dangerous intersections in San Francisco, per police,” published Apr. 29, 2024 — cited for the comparison dataset (SFPD data, Jan. 2022–Sep. 2023). axios.com