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.