Spend an evening strolling through any neighborhood in the city and you'll collect a highlight reel of close calls, aggressive drivers, and infrastructure that seems designed more for bureaucratic box-checking than actual human safety. The city has poured millions into Vision Zero — its ambitious plan to eliminate traffic deaths — since 2014. A decade and tens of millions of dollars later, pedestrians are still getting honked at for having the audacity to use a crosswalk.

One SF resident put it perfectly: "I got honked and yelled at by a taxi driver who couldn't believe I wanted to cross my own street and that I was making him stop at a stop sign. After he sped off, he probably rolled through the next stop sign." That's not an outlier. Another local shared a similar experience: "A driver turned into the crosswalk as I walked through it on my green light, slowed down in front of me, rolled down the window, and told me to 'watch the fuck out.'" Charming.

Here's the uncomfortable irony that no one at City Hall wants to talk about: the self-driving Waymos cruising around town are arguably better at respecting pedestrian right-of-way than a significant chunk of human drivers. They actually stop at stop signs. They don't roll down windows to scream profanities at you. The robots, it turns out, have better manners than the humans — and they didn't cost taxpayers a dime in behavior-modification campaigns.

San Francisco has spent lavishly on painted bike lanes, bollard installations, and public awareness campaigns. As one local dryly observed: "Imagine spending money on this." And that's the core question, isn't it? At what point do we acknowledge that the city's approach to street safety is heavy on spending and light on results?

Enforcement is the unsexy answer nobody wants to fund properly. You can redesign every intersection in the city, but if there's zero consequence for blowing through a stop sign or threatening a pedestrian, drivers will keep doing it. Individual accountability — for drivers, for the city, for everyone — is the only thing that actually changes behavior. Not another painted curb.