Pedestrian on Valencia Street fatally hit by driver

A pedestrian was killed on San Francisco’s Valencia Street on Wednesday by a left-turning driver, the second pedestrian death on that section of Valencia Street this year, and the recent death is sparking new conversation about the traffic flow on one of the city’s busiest commercial corridors. 

Jian Huang, an 80-year-old San Francisco resident, was crossing Valencia Street at 18th Street when he was struck by the driver of an SUV. The driver was turning left from 18th Street onto Valencia going south, according to Erica Kato, a spokesperson for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. 

Huang was taken by medics to Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital with life-threatening injuries and died that evening, Kato wrote in an emailed statement to SFGATE. The driver remained on scene and cooperated with law enforcement, San Francisco Police Department spokesperson Eve Laokwansathitaya told SFGATE.

Huang’s death marked the 14th pedestrian fatality in the city since the start of the year, according to Walk San Francisco, an advocacy group promoting pedestrian safety in the city. (Last year, 20 pedestrians were killed in the city.) Only nine months ago, a 64-year-old woman, Wan Mei Tan, was struck and killed by a driver turning left at 16th and Valencia streets.   

Valencia is a buzzing street lined with shops and restaurants that’s highly trafficked by cars, pedestrians and cyclists. It’s part of the city’s “high-injury network,” which encompasses “the 12% of San Francisco streets where 68% of severe and fatal crashes occur,” Walk SF said in a press release issued Thursday.

The street was redesigned this summer, with its curbside bike lanes replaced with a single bike lane down the center of the road. The new design stretches between 15th and 23rd streets. SFMTA spokesperson Stephen Chun previously told SFGATE that the design provided a “balanced approach” that “separates people on bikes from vehicle traffic and vehicle loading and allows the curb space to be retained for commercial and passenger loading activities.”

But the bike lane has sparked controversy, with many people criticizing its design and saying it creates confusion and the plastic posts lining the bike lane don’t do enough to protect cyclists from motorists.

“It’s a failure and it’s fundamentally flawed,” he said. “Drivers turning on and off Valencia, they’re confused. They’ve never seen anything like it before. … I have talked to countless drivers who have said, ‘Yes this is confusing.’”

Under the new design, left turns are no longer allowed from Valencia, but drivers can still turn left from other streets onto Valencia. That turn would require them to pass not only the oncoming lane of traffic, but also the center bike lane.

Jodie Medeiros, executive director of Walk SF, said banning left turns onto Valencia is one solution to preventing pedestrian deaths. 

“We know that a car taking a left turn is often a conflict point,” Medeiros told SFGATE. “The data shows that. In 2019, 40% of the pedestrian fatalities in the city were cars taking left turns.”

Since 2014, there have been three pedestrian fatalities on Valencia, and the collisions have all involved a car turning left, she added.

In response to the recent fatality, SFMTA said it will make safety improvements to Valencia in the next few days, including “additional rubber speed humps within intersections to slow left-turning vehicles and new signs reminding drivers of their legal obligation to yield to pedestrians” in the next few days. 

“We need streets that move people, and we need cars to slow down to save lives,” Kato wrote.