This isn't about jaywalking. Everyone jaywalks. This is about something far more dangerous and far more common than city officials want to acknowledge.

Drivers across the Bay Area are reporting increasingly harrowing encounters with pedestrians stepping into highways and busy streets with zero awareness of their surroundings. As one local put it bluntly: "Drugs and mental health issues... only going to get worse in the next 3 years." It's hard to argue with that assessment when you see it happening in real time.

One Bay Area resident shared that they've started taking Lyft or Waymo instead of driving near the Tenderloin because "otherwise I'm going to end up hitting one of them eventually." Think about that for a second. People are literally changing how they move through their own city — not because of traffic congestion, but because they're terrified of accidentally killing someone.

And here's the part that should make your blood boil: the city continues to pour millions into Vision Zero, its ambitious plan to eliminate traffic deaths. Since launching in 2014, San Francisco has spent enormous sums on street redesigns, speed bumps, and enforcement campaigns. And yet pedestrian deaths remain stubbornly high. Maybe — just maybe — the problem isn't exclusively about road design. Maybe it's about the untreated mental health and addiction crises that put vulnerable people in harm's way every single day.

You can redesign every intersection in the city. You can lower every speed limit to 20 mph. But none of that matters when someone in crisis walks into six lanes of traffic at 2 AM.

The honest conversation we need to have isn't about more infrastructure spending. It's about why we've allowed a humanitarian crisis on our streets to become a permanent, taxpayer-funded feature of life in San Francisco — dangerous for everyone involved and addressed by no one with the power to fix it.