It's getting worse. And nobody seems to be doing anything about it.
San Franciscans are increasingly fed up with the aggressive road behavior of gig delivery drivers — particularly those on mopeds and e-bikes — who routinely ignore traffic signals, ride on sidewalks, and barrel through blind corners at speeds that could seriously injure a pedestrian. As one local put it: "They zoom down sidewalks at blind corners and are going to kill or seriously injure somebody soon."
The recklessness isn't confined to the streets, either. Restaurant workers and customers alike are dealing with drivers who physically shove their way to the counter to grab orders. One SF resident shared that a driver literally pushed her aside at a restaurant pickup counter. "I'm a skinny woman, but I am not taking that BS," she said. Another local noted, "I've had to make a mild scene twice now picking up takeout because of these guys trying to push ahead of me in line. I know they're just scraping by, but this is not the way — we live in a society."
Here's the uncomfortable truth: DoorDash, Uber Eats, and their competitors have built a business model that externalizes virtually all risk and cost onto drivers, restaurants, and the public. Drivers are incentivized to complete deliveries as fast as humanly possible because their per-order pay is razor thin. Run a red light, shave 90 seconds, maybe squeeze in one more delivery per hour. The economic logic is baked into the system.
But that doesn't make it acceptable. Traffic laws exist for a reason, and enforcement shouldn't evaporate just because the violator is wearing a DoorDash bag. San Francisco already struggles with pedestrian safety — we don't need an unregulated fleet of mopeds making it worse.
So where's the accountability? DoorDash rakes in billions while its contractors terrorize sidewalks and intersections, and the city apparently has zero enforcement strategy. SFMTA and SFPD need to step up: targeted enforcement in high-incident areas, real penalties for sidewalk riding, and pressure on the platforms themselves to take responsibility for the chaos their model creates.
Convenience is great. Getting flattened on the sidewalk by a guy watching TikTok at 25 mph is not.
