The campaign to put weekday cars back on San Francisco's Great Highway is selling itself as a street-safety fix. But the one independent look at Sunset District crash data found that after an early spike, injury collisions dropped below where they stood before the road became a park.

Proposition G — the "Great Highway for Everyone Act" on the Nov. 3 ballot — would reopen the two-mile Upper Great Highway to cars on weekdays while keeping Sunset Dunes park open on weekends. Its backers, led by District 4 Supervisor Alan Wong and small-business owner Albert Chow, frame reopening as a matter of traffic safety, pointing to a jump in injuries after the 2025 closure. The problem for that argument: the increase they cite was driven largely by a single outlier month, and a longer look at the same city data shows crashes falling. As the third citywide Great Highway vote in four years ramps up, the campaign's central safety claim rests on the shakiest stretch of the record.

San Francisco voters keep being handed the same question about a two-mile ribbon of oceanfront asphalt. In 2022 they chose to keep cars off the Upper Great Highway on weekends. In November 2024 they passed Proposition K by a 55-45 margin, making it a permanent park called Sunset Dunes. This November brings a third vote, on Proposition G, which Mission Local reports qualified for the ballot in July (external source, opens in a new tab) after organizers submitted more than 15,600 signatures. It would return cars on weekdays and shrink the park to a weekend-only amenity.

The reopen campaign has settled on traffic safety as a headline argument. At a January press conference covered by KQED, Supervisor Wong — who opposed Prop K — said injury collisions in his district had jumped to 67 across most of 2025, up from 37 during a shorter, five-month baseline the previous year. He cast the measure as protection for drivers: "I have to prioritize street safety ... over weekday recreation," Wong said, arguing that roughly 14,000 displaced daily drivers had been shunted onto neighborhood streets.

That framing is exactly what the reddit post promoting this story targeted — and the underlying numbers reward a closer read than a campaign slogan allows.

Political consultant Jim Ross told Mission Local the campaign faces "a really challenging path," having to persuade the wider city "to shut down a park."

The most thorough independent check came from the local outlet The Frisc, whose reporter Kristi Coale analyzed District 4 collision records from DataSF stretching back to 2019. Coale confirmed crashes rose in the first months after the closure — a 71 percent year-over-year bump, in the range of the jump Wong touts. But nearly all of it was one month: 28 injury crashes in May 2025, the highest total since January 2019. Across the rest of the year, from June through December, the monthly count averaged under 10 — below even the same span of 2020, at the depth of the pandemic. This past January logged five injury crashes district-wide. Fatalities matched 2019 and ran under the 2024 peak, a year when citywide road deaths hit a decade high.

Put simply, the safety case leans on the steepest part of a curve that soon bent back down. By Coale's account, when Wong laid out his numbers he already had October and November figures in hand but left them out. Timing is much of the game here: the SFMTA typically waits three to six months before grading a street change, because collision and travel patterns need time to settle before they mean much. Marcel Moran, a San José State University transportation researcher, told The Frisc that such shifts can take considerable time to reach a new equilibrium.

The congestion half of the pitch is murkier but no friendlier to the reopen side. Chow, who is running against Wong for the District 4 seat, claimed Sunset speeds had risen after the closure; The Frisc's segment-by-segment review found the opposite on most streets during commute hours, with slowdowns that were usually modest. An earlier SFMTA study similarly found minimal impact from the closure, KQED reported. Friends of Sunset Dunes, the nonprofit challenging Prop G in court, argues the data has undercut the traffic case.

None of this decides the election. The park is popular — Mission Local reports (external source, opens in a new tab) it draws about 4,900 people a day — and reopening carries its own bill: the Controller estimated roughly $9.8 million upfront (external source, opens in a new tab), including $750,000 just to pull out park elements. Political consultant Jim Ross told Mission Local the campaign faces "a really challenging path," having to persuade the wider city "to shut down a park." What the record undercuts is the premise that the road's return is demanded by a rising tide of crashes. On the numbers available, the tide went out.

One caveat belongs in plain view: the fullest crash figures here run only through early 2026, and neither the SFMTA nor an outside body has released a comprehensive multi-year evaluation. A fresh audit of the DataSF collision records — plus any updated SFMTA tally — could harden or complicate this picture before ballots drop in the fall.