Connected by tragedy, banding together for support and to speak out for safe streets
Fourteen years ago, my mother was crossing the street in San Francisco when a speeding driver hit her.
She was just crossing the street. And then everything that defined her daily life and happiness ended.
The speeding driver left my vibrant, 62-year-old mom severely injured, including brain injuries she still suffers from today, requiring 24-hour care from me and my siblings.
For a while, as my family navigated so many challenges, it felt impossible to make sense of anything.
Then I started to realize something. It wasn’t just my family that had experienced this kind of tragedy. In fact, this was happening all the time.
Every day, people like my mom were collateral damage for systems and streets designed to prioritize cars over our safety, to prioritize convenience over human life.
It was a difficult realization. But it also meant that there was an opportunity to change things.
Miraculously, during such a dark time, I somehow found others who were having the same realization: Jorge and Liz Chavez, who had lost their daughter Aileen; Julie Mitchell, who had lost her son Dylan; Alvin Lester, who had lost his son; and John Alex Lowell, a crash survivor.
We were connected by tragedy. Norman Yee, a crash survivor who was on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors at the time, wanted to help us.
Together, we founded the Bay Area chapter of Families for Safe Streets to bring voice to victims and to find support in one another. Walk SF became our home.
And the first thing we did as Families for Safe Streets was to hold World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims here in San Francisco, together with Walk SF.
We’ve since found champions, like former Assemblymember David Chiu and State Senator Scott Wiener, who saw us and how we wanted to channel our pain into winning change.
And in these ten years, Families for Safe Streets have been part of winning campaigns for state speed cameras, Complete Streets, and lower speed limit laws. We’ve shown up for and supported fellow victims, and we’ve kept the pressure on the essential goal of Vision Zero.
Telling our stories again and again – at City Hall and in Sacramento and to the media — is not easy. But we need decisionmakers to see the human lives behind their decisions.
I can’t imagine these past ten years without the Families for Safe Streets community. We understand each other. We lean on one another. And we are determined to win change so that others don’t have to experience the heartbreaking reality of traffic violence.
Jenny Yu is a founding member of the Bay Area chapter of Families for Safe Streets. If you are someone who has been directly affected by a traffic crash, whether a loved one has been hurt or killed, or you are a survivor yourself, please reach out to Blair at blair@walksf.org.
Banner image by Emily Huston
