Oakland recorded 23 traffic fatalities in 2025, the lowest total in at least five years, according to new data from the city's Safe Oakland Streets initiative — but the number obscures a stubborn racial equity gap that the program was explicitly designed to close.

Four years into Oakland's most ambitious road-safety effort, the city is outpacing state and national averages in cutting traffic deaths. But its own data shows that Black and Latine residents accounted for 68 percent of everyone killed on Oakland's streets between 2021 and 2025 — and the capital projects meant to fix the deadliest corridors are still being spread too thin across the city.

Oakland recorded 23 traffic fatalities in 2025 — down from highs of 36 in both 2020 and 2022, and the lowest total in at least five years — according to data presented to the city's Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Commission last week.

The figures come from the Safe Oakland Streets (SOS) initiative, an interdepartmental partnership launched in 2022 involving the Oakland transportation department, the city administrator's office, the race and equity department, and the Oakland Police Department. The program's stated goal is to end all road deaths in Oakland by 2042.

Jasmine Pomar, the transportation department's chief of staff, told commissioners that Oakland's decline in traffic fatalities has exceeded both state and national averages over the same period. "There is no acceptable level of people dying on our roadways," she said.

The numbers that complicate the good news

Behind the overall decline sits a more troubling picture. Between 2021 and 2025, Black residents made up 43 percent of people killed on Oakland's roads, and Latine residents accounted for another 25 percent — a combined 68 percent of all fatalities, according to the SOS data. Oakland's "High Injury Network" of streets, which includes corridors like International Boulevard and Bancroft Avenue, runs almost entirely through East and West Oakland neighborhoods where those communities are concentrated.

Oakland's transportation department completed 20 capital improvement projects — each costing over $100,000 — in 2025. An equity analysis found that only 40 percent were built in the "high and highest priority" neighborhoods that the SOS program identifies as most in need of intervention.

Most of the capital projects completed outside those priority neighborhoods were paving projects. Most of those inside them were bikeway projects.

Street safety advocates have long argued that smaller interventions — paint, bollards, minor markings — fall short in corridors that need physical changes like road diets and concrete bulbouts to actually slow cars. The city's own Rapid Response program, which dispatches OakDOT crews after serious crashes to make quick safety improvements, completed 31 investigations in 2025. Eighteen led to a treatment, which often means added paint and a recommendation for a larger capital need — a recommendation that may or may not be funded.

Speed cameras, enforcement, and what's driving the drop

Oakland's speed camera program, which The Dissent reported issued more than 82,000 fines in its first 40 days of enforcement earlier this year, has also contributed to the shift. Pomar told commissioners the department considered the cameras beneficial and expected to have more complete data by year's end.

On the enforcement side, OPD data from 2025 showed that roughly 30 percent of targeted traffic stops were for drivers failing to yield — the single leading cause — with another 30 percent tied to unsafe turning at corners. Academic research has found that dangerous turns are among the most deadly maneuvers for pedestrians.

What Oakland still has to do

The SOS initiative has four goals embedded in its founding mandate: prevent fatal and serious-injury crashes; eliminate the inequitable distribution of those crashes; develop safety strategies; and achieve zero deaths by 2042. The first goal is showing progress. The second isn't.

Oakland is a city whose transportation department is operating under persistent budget pressure and a police force that, for years, had too few officers to sustain comprehensive traffic enforcement. The road safety gains are real. Whether the city can build on them — and whether East and West Oakland residents will see those gains at the same rate as the rest of the city — is an open question the SOS data has so far left unanswered.

Reporting based on data presented to Oakland's Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Commission, as reported by The Oaklandside.