Vol. I, No. 23 · San Francisco — WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 12, 2026 · Price: free northbound
BY INES CALLOWAY, TRANSIT DESK
Eastbound Market Street, at the point where it crosses Octavia Boulevard and the freeway ramp opens on the right, carries a sign forbidding a right turn and a camera pointed at the sign. The camera has been switched on since the first of November, 2013. Across the twenty-nine months from January 2024 through May of this year it issued five tickets.
San Francisco runs automated traffic cameras at thirteen intersections, covering nineteen approaches. Twelve of those intersections enforce red signals, and between them they wrote 25,462 citations over the same twenty-nine months, an average of 878 a month. The thirteenth enforces one banned turn at one corner, and wrote five: one in May 2024, one in July, one in October, two in June of last year, and nothing at all in the other twenty-five months. The corner it guards was the second worst intersection in the city for injury collisions in 2011, with fourteen in a single year, nine of them involving a bicycle. The banned turn has effectively stopped. The corner still produces about seven injury collisions a year, and nine injured people.
The turn is worth describing, because the whole apparatus was built for it. A driver heading east on Market who wants the Highway 101 on-ramp is meant to go around. Some of them cut right across the bike lane and the crosswalk instead. The city tried concrete barriers, extra signs and extra signals in 2011, then green-backed sharrows and ladder crosswalks in 2013, and drivers kept making the turn. Photo enforcement in California was written for red signals, so Assembly Member Tom Ammiano carried legislation clarifying that a camera could be used on an illegal turn. San Francisco got one camera out of it, at one corner, and switched it on with a thirty-day warning period and a $238 fine after that.
What prompted all of it is legible in the city’s own collision file, and it checks out against the record made at the time. Streetsblog reported in January 2013 that thirty people had been injured at the intersection between 2009 and 2011. The city’s injury-collision file, queried this week, records exactly thirty injured there across those three years. Two records kept by different people for different reasons agree to the person.
Split the corner’s record at the camera and the two halves say different things. In the nine years before it, 2005 through 2013, the intersection logged 72 injury collisions, eight a year, and 53 of them involved a bicycle. In the twelve years since, 86 collisions, 7.17 a year, and 43 involved a bicycle. Bicycle-involved collisions dropped 39 percent by annual rate. Everything else rose 70 percent, from 2.11 a year to 3.58. The bicycle share of the corner’s injuries went from 74 percent to exactly half.
The total barely moved. Eight injury collisions a year became 7.17, a fall of 10 percent, against a citywide fall of 1 percent over the same split. One specific way of getting hurt at Market and Octavia was engineered and legislated and photographed nearly out of existence, and the corner absorbed the difference in other ways. The one death in the file there, a pedestrian, came on 4 November 2013, three days after the camera went live.
Two cautions on the read, and they are real. The camera is not the only thing that changed at that corner: barriers, markings and crosswalks all came before it, and the city has been redrawing the four corners since. Nothing here separates the camera’s effect from the concrete’s. And the file cannot say whether drivers stopped making the turn or the system stopped catching them. What it can say is that the camera is not switched off in the record. It reports every month through May 2026, and it found two drivers in June of last year. A machine that issues five tickets in twenty-nine months is either watching a corner where almost nothing illegal happens, or it is a very poor machine, and the collision record leans toward the first.
The sign on eastbound Market still forbids the turn. The camera still watches the sign, and month after month finds nothing worth photographing. The ambulances come to the same corner as often as they ever did, for other reasons, and no state legislature has been asked about those.
The Bridge Was Dearer the Day It Opened
A round trip across the Golden Gate cost a dollar in 1937, which is $23.19 in this June’s money. The same round trip now costs $10.25 with a FasTrak tag, after twelve consecutive annual increases. A price written in dollars and then left alone is a discount nobody has to vote for.
BY EMMETT GRADY, ARCHIVES
On the twenty-eighth of May, 1937, a driver who crossed the new Golden Gate Bridge and came home again paid one dollar. Fifty cents in each direction, plus a nickel a head if the car was carrying more than three people.
Deflated to June 2026, that dollar is $23.19. The identical round trip this morning costs $10.50, or $10.25 for a driver with a FasTrak tag, and the bridge district has raised the price every July since 2015. Measured in what money will actually buy, crossing the Golden Gate and coming back costs 45 percent of what it cost on opening day. The reason has nothing to do with generosity, and nobody at the district ever announced it.
The district left it alone for long stretches. The toll went to a dollar southbound in November 1977 and stayed there, apart from a four-month experiment at $1.25 in 1981, until January 1989. Over those eleven years the unchanged dollar quietly lost 49 percent of its value. It went to three dollars in July 1991 and stayed there until September 2002, another eleven years, shedding 23 percent more. Nobody proposed either cut. Nobody had to. A board that declines to act on a toll is cutting it, at whatever rate the country happens to be inflating.
The floor is 1988. That year the round trip cost $2.82 in June-2026 dollars, 12 percent of what the first drivers paid. Everything since has been the district climbing back: to five dollars in 2002, six in 2008, seven in 2014, and then a raise every single July, twelve of them in a row, most recently the fifty cents added on the first of last month. Those twelve increases have been reported as twelve increases, which they are.
They have also, taken together, done almost nothing. In real money the round trip cost $10.22 in 2015, peaked at $10.84 in 2020, and costs $10.50 today. That is a band of sixty-two cents, eleven annual increases later. The district is no longer raising the price of crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. It is running up an escalator to stay in the same spot, and the schedule of small July increases is the machinery for standing still.
Three things this comparison does not do. It uses the national CPI, because no San Francisco price index reaches back to 1937, and Bay Area inflation has run hotter than the country’s in recent decades, which if anything understates the fall. It measures a round trip throughout, since the bridge charged in both directions until October 1968 and southbound only since. And it uses the standard rate, ignoring the ticket books, commuter discounts and carpool rates that have made the real price lower still for regular users in most eras. The direction survives all three.
Some 17.1 million vehicles crossed southbound in the fiscal year that ended on the thirtieth of June, 42 percent above the pandemic floor of 2020/21. The district publishes only those six years, every one of them after the floor, so that is a recovery and not a record. Every one of them paid a price the opening-day drivers would have taken gladly, and every one of them paid it in a summer when the district was explaining, again, why fifty cents had to go on. The nickel for the fourth passenger came off the books in December 1950 and never came back. It is close to the last thing about this toll that was cut on purpose.
SOURCES & RECEIPTS
1. SFMTA, Red Light Camera Citations, DataSF uzmr-g2uc, pulled 12 Aug. 2026: 646 rows, 19 enforced approaches at 13 intersections, Jan. 2024–May 2026, 25,467 citations. By code: CVC 21453 (red signal) 25,462; CVC 22101(d) (posted turn restriction) 5. Busiest approach set, 19th Ave. at Sloat Blvd., 5,271. Ninety-five rows, one per series for Aug.–Dec. 2025, carry no count and are excluded; they add nothing to any total. Intersection and approach counts confirmed against SFMTA’s own program page, same day. 2. Same file, intersection=Market St at Octavia Blvd: 34 monthly rows, all “eastbound illegal right turns.” Non-zero months May 2024 (1), July 2024 (1), Oct. 2024 (1), June 2025 (2). 3. SF Traffic Crashes Resulting in Injury, DataSF ubvf-ztfx, intersection node 30756000, pulled 12 Aug. 2026: 160 records 2005 to 2 Mar. 2026; 97 involved a bicycle; 12 severe, one fatal (4 Nov. 2013, pedestrian). Injured in 2009, 2010 and 2011: 6, 10 and 14, summing to 30, against the figure of thirty reported by Streetsblog SF, 7 Jan. 2013. 2011 citywide ranking by node: 19 at the top, 14 at Market/Octavia, second. A few collisions naming these streets geocode to adjacent nodes and are not counted here. 4. SFMTA press release, “SFMTA Introduces Photo Enforcement Measure at Market Street and Octavia Boulevard to Increase Safety”: live 1 Nov. 2013, 30-day warning period, $238 fine and one point; legislation sponsored by Assembly Member Tom Ammiano; concrete barriers, signage and signals in 2011, sharrows and ladder crosswalks in 2013. 5. ubvf-ztfx citywide by year, same pull: 2005–2013 average 3,075.9 injury collisions a year; 2014–2025 average 3,045.9. Partial 2026 excluded from both windows. Raw queries in receipts.json.
2. Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, toll chronology for two-axle vehicles, goldengate.org Statistics & Data, retrieved 12 Aug. 2026: 28 May 1937, 50c each way, $1 round trip, 5c per passenger above three; 1 Dec. 1950, passenger charge dropped; 19 Oct. 1968, one-way southbound collection begins; 1 Nov. 1977, $1; 1 Mar. 1981, $1.25; 20 July 1981, back to $1; 1 Jan. 1989, $2; 1 July 1991, $3; 1 Sep. 2002, $5; 2 Sep. 2008, $6; 7 Apr. 2014, $7 Pay-by-Plate; annual July rises thereafter. 7. Deflated with BLS CPI-U, U.S. city average, all items, NSA, series CUUR0000SA0: 1937 annual average 14.4; 1977 60.6; 1988 118.3; 1991 136.2; 2001 177.1; 2015 237.017; 2020 258.811; June 2026 333.952. Round trip in June-2026 dollars: 1937 $23.19; 1955 $6.23; 1968 $4.80; 1977 $5.51; 1988 $2.82; 1991 $7.36; 2001 $5.66; 2002 $9.28; 2014 $9.87; 2015 $10.22; 2020 $10.84; 2026 $10.50. Today is 45.3 percent of 1937. 8. District rates effective 1 July 2026: FasTrak $10.25, License Plate Account and one-time payment $10.50, toll invoice $11.25, carpool $8.25. Note for the record: the district’s own toll-history table transposes its two 2026 rates, printing Pay-by-Plate below FasTrak, which reverses the order every prior year runs and the order the district’s current rates page gives. The rates page is used here. 9. District monthly traffic crossings, southbound: FY2020/21 12,083,995; FY2021/22 15,929,019; FY2022/23 16,345,972; FY2023/24 16,734,648; FY2024/25 16,887,881; FY2025/26 17,146,500. Raw queries and responses in receipts.json.
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