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A nearly empty I-580 is seen near Harrison Street in Oakland, Calif. Monday, April 26, 2021. CalTrans data for the Bay Area's nine counties shows that while traffic volume has definitely rebounded to near pre-pandemic levels, actual congestion on freeways still remains lower than what it was before the pandemic.
Jessica Christian / The Chronicle
The Bay Area’s streets and highways emptied to precipitous lows last year amid shelter-in-place orders during the pandemic that thinned out the region’s notorious traffic. But fewer motorists didn’t lead to safer roads as fatalities held steady and, in some counties, rose above pre-pandemic figures.
In a two-pronged trend that unfolded following dramatic reductions in driving, traffic deaths persisted even as the overall number of crashes across the Bay Area dropped considerably, according to fatal crash data gathered by UC Berkeley’s Transportation Injury Mapping System and analyzed by The Chronicle.
The region’s nine counties totaled 462 traffic fatalities in 2020, just 30 fewer deaths than in 2019, while total crashes during this span dropped by 30%.
“The big finding that we saw here is that since the pandemic, the rate of minor injury crashes went down, but the rate of fatal and severe crashes not only did not go down, it also went up a little bit,” said Offer Grembek, co-director of UC Berkeley’s Safe Transportation Research and Education Center.
Though experts are still studying the root causes of the jump in roadway fatalities, they point to increased risky behaviors such as speeding and driving while impaired as potential factors.
The national trend mirrored the Bay Area’s, with fatal crashes rising during the pandemic, particularly those involving pedestrians, after years of steady declines. In 2020, an estimated 38,680 people died in traffic crashes, a record high since 2007, according to the federal National Highway Safety Administration. That represented a 7% increase in nationwide fatalities at a time when driving activity, overall, decreased by 13%.
The Bay Area’s nine counties experienced varying declines and spikes in fatal crashes.
Traffic deaths in Contra Costa County, for example, surged from 77 in 2019 to 102 during 2020 while overall crashes in the county dropped by nearly one-third.
Alameda and Napa counties also set records last year for fatal crashes even as the total number of crashes in both counties dropped by about 25%.
Two counties, Marin and Santa Clara, were among the region’s outliers and experienced notable drops in traffic deaths. In Santa Clara, traffic deaths dropped last year to 91, from 131 in 2019. Marin’s nine traffic deaths in 2020 represented nearly a 60% decline from 2019, when the county experienced a decade-high 21 fatalities.
Bay Area traffic congestion during the pandemic no longer was defined by the traditional 9-to-5 work commutes that snarled streets and highways, and the region’s changing traffic patterns could help explain why the number of total crashes — fatal, severe and minor — fell by more than one-third. Many of the minor crashes, such as fender benders, are byproducts of traffic congestion and density, Grembek said.
The sharp morning and afternoon peaks in weekday traffic congestion flattened considerably during the height of the pandemic as wide swaths of the region’s white-collar workers ditched office commutes in lieu of working remotely.
While that change in traffic congestion lessened the likelihood of minor crashes occuring, it also opened up roadways and allowed drivers to speed, a key indicator of fatal crashes.
Speeding is the “primary reason” why traffic deaths jumped in Contra Costa County during the pandemic, said Timothy Haile, executive director of the county’s transportation authority. Law enforcement in the county issued about 2,500 more speeding citations to motorists in 2020 than they did in 2019.
Preliminary research from the National Highway Safety Administration showed that drivers engaged in more risky behavior, such as driving under the influence and not wearing a seatbelt as average traffic speeds increased nationwide throughout 2020, according to a report.
“Under pandemic conditions, people are probably more stressed, maybe more likely to take risks,” Grembek said.
The rise in fatal crash rates doesn’t boil down to one single factor, he said, “but probably a combination of changing behavior with more free-flow opportunities that, just by physics, end up being more severe.”
The jump in fatality rates is happening at a time when San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland and other Bay Area cities are struggling to meet their Vision Zero goals of ending traffic deaths.
San Francisco, which set a 2024 Vision Zero deadline, made little progress on its goals during the pandemic. And while overall crashes dropped 30% last year, 33 people died on the city’s roadways last year, just six fewer deaths than in 2019.
In most Bay Area counties, fatal crashes have increased steadily over the past decade. That trend largely remained unchanged during the pandemic despite dwindled traffic.
“The clear takeaway I have from this data is that the threat of dangerous streets in the entire Bay Area is significant, and clearly worse than a decade ago,” said Marta Lindsay, spokesperson for the Walk San Francisco advocacy group.
Ricardo Cano is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email:ricardo.cano@sfchronicle.com
