A man was struck and killed by a truck in South of Market on Monday afternoon, adding another name to San Francisco's grim and growing ledger of pedestrian fatalities.

Details remain sparse — we know a truck hit a pedestrian in SoMa, and that the pedestrian did not survive. What we don't know yet is whether the driver remained on scene, whether speed or negligence played a role, or whether this happened at one of the intersections the city has already identified as high-risk.

What we do know is that none of this is new.

SoMa has been one of San Francisco's deadliest neighborhoods for pedestrians for years. The wide, fast-moving streets were designed decades ago to shuttle cars and trucks through the city as quickly as possible, and they do exactly that — sometimes with fatal consequences. The city's "Vision Zero" initiative, launched in 2014 with the ambitious goal of eliminating traffic deaths by 2024, has been a spectacular failure by its own metrics. That deadline came and went. People are still dying.

To be clear, this isn't just about throwing money at the problem — San Francisco has spent hundreds of millions on street redesigns, bike lanes, and traffic calming measures. The question is whether that money is being spent effectively or whether it's getting swallowed by the same bureaucratic bloat that plagues every city project. When a single crosswalk improvement can take years to move from proposal to paint, something is deeply broken in the process.

Every fatal collision should force a simple question: Was this preventable? If the answer is yes — if better infrastructure, faster project timelines, or more accountable city agencies could have made a difference — then the city doesn't just owe the public sympathy. It owes accountability.

One more death in SoMa. One more press release. One more round of promises. The pattern is the problem.