The latest reminder of our city's casual relationship with pedestrian safety comes from a scene playing out across SF intersections every single day: a driver too impatient to wait for Muni to unload a disabled passenger cut around the bus, nearly clipped someone in a crosswalk, and then — in a move that takes genuine audacity — flipped the pedestrian off.

Read that again. The person piloting two tons of metal through a crosswalk got angry at the person made of flesh and bone who had the nerve to exist in their path.

This isn't just one bad driver. It's a culture. And it extends well beyond cars. Scooters and bikes tearing down sidewalks have become their own menace. As one SF resident put it bluntly: "The only people who should be biking on sidewalks are children." Another local noted they've been hit by a sidewalk cyclist who then told them to "go fuck myself" when they pointed out the empty bike lane ten feet away.

The common thread? A total absence of accountability. San Francisco has spent enormous sums on Vision Zero — the city's plan to eliminate traffic deaths — since launching it in 2014. And yet pedestrian fatalities remain stubbornly persistent. We've gotten new paint on roads, new signs, new protected bike lanes. What we haven't gotten is meaningful enforcement.

That's the part nobody in City Hall wants to talk about. Infrastructure is necessary, but it's not sufficient when there are zero consequences for blowing through crosswalks, riding scooters on sidewalks, or treating red lights as suggestions. As one local put it: "Be practical. Never trust a random car to prioritize your safety over their own convenience."

That's darkly wise advice. It's also a damning indictment of a city that keeps writing checks for safety programs while refusing to actually enforce the laws already on the books. You can't engineer your way out of a problem you won't police. Vision Zero's budget keeps growing, but so does the body count — and at some point, residents deserve to ask what exactly they're paying for.

Every pedestrian in this city is making a daily act of faith that the person behind the wheel has one iota of empathy. That faith is running thin.