Every day across the city — but especially in high-traffic corridors near the Castro, the Mission, and SoMa — unlicensed electric scooters and mopeds blow through red lights, ride on sidewalks, barrel down bike lanes the wrong way, and generally treat traffic laws like polite suggestions. Pedestrians have learned to adapt the hard way. As one SF resident put it, "I look 10x before making any turn in SF because of this."

The frustrating part? None of this is particularly hard to address. These vehicles operate on public roads with zero registration, zero accountability, and zero enforcement. As one local pointed out, "It's crazy to me that these scooters don't need a license plate." And they're right — it is crazy. If you drove your car the way these scooters operate, you'd be ticketed, towed, and possibly arrested. But because e-scooters and mopeds exist in a regulatory gray zone that City Hall has been too slow (or too scared of the gig economy lobby) to close, riders operate with near-total impunity.

Let's be clear: this isn't an anti-immigrant issue, and it isn't an anti-delivery-worker issue. It's an enforcement and accountability issue. People doing dangerous things on public roads need to be held to the same standards as everyone else. That means license plates or visible registration for commercial delivery vehicles, actual traffic enforcement by SFPD, and penalties for the platforms — DoorDash, Uber Eats, and others — whose business model depends on drivers cutting every corner, literally.

Some residents have already started voting with their wallets. "The most powerful thing we can do is stop supporting these companies," one San Franciscan argued. That's not wrong. But it shouldn't be on consumers to fix what is fundamentally a governance failure.

San Francisco loves to talk about Vision Zero and safe streets. But until the city musters the political will to actually regulate and enforce the rules for all vehicles, those are just words on a website — and pedestrians will keep dodging scooters on the sidewalk.