SAN FRANCISCO — First a preschooler walking with her mother was killed by a red-light runner. Then a college student fell fatal victim to a late-night hit-and-run driver. Finally, a renowned kick-boxing champion was murdered earlier this month in a confrontation that followed another hit-and-run mishap.
This historically genteel walker's paradise of scenic boulevards and hilly back streets -- where one-third of the residents don't even own a car -- is assuming a more menacing edge as fatal encounters between motorists and pedestrians are rising at a rate that alarms officials.
Victims have been struck in crosswalks, at bus stops and while dashing into traffic. And even while walking on the sidewalk.
After hitting a high of 32 in 2000, the rate of pedestrians killed on the streets of San Francisco declined to 19 the following year and to 18 in 2002. A dozen people have been killed in the first six months of 2003, possibly signaling another ominous trend in the pedestrian death total.
San Francisco's pedestrian fatality rate ranked third in the state, according to California Highway Patrol statistics for 2000, the last year for which such numbers are available. That year, Los Angeles had 99 pedestrian traffic deaths and San Diego had 34. But officials say San Francisco's pedestrian population and compact size -- seven miles by seven miles -- create a crowded petri dish of traffic mishaps.
In the city's financial district and along crowded Market Street, each day brings a dangerous dance among harried motorists, self-righteous pedestrians and militant bicyclists.
Now officials are erecting a roadblock to the behavior.
Several blocks from the spot where 22-year-old San Francisco State University student Srijaya Dalton was killed by a hit-and-run driver, Mayor Willie Brown announced a campaign urging drivers and walkers to be less aggressive and more civil to one another.
Called "Slow down, look around," the program includes increased enforcement of laws against speeders and jaywalkers and will be plugged in television ads and bus and subway posters by former San Francisco 49ers running back Roger Craig.
"People drive too fast; they don't drive defensively," Brown said. "The theory we're trying to convey is that motorists should assume that pedestrians are careless. If people drove full time that way, there wouldn't be as many accidents."
