Car Crashes

Ten days ago, a four-year-old boy near Houston was killed when a neighbor backed his pickup truck over him. At least 50 times a week, people back their cars over kids in the U.S. On average, two of those 50 incidents are fatal. But you won’t see them represented in official crash statistics.

The SFPD's Major Accident Investigation Team has been renamed the Traffic Collision Investigation Team, and the department's website has removed the term "accident" from its contact info page. The news follows a Streetsblog post on October 21, in which we pointed out that SFPD regularly violates its official policy of referring to car crashes as "collisions."

Anyone who keeps track of the daily reports that come out of the SFPD's press office might be surprised to learn that the department has a policy of using the term "collision" -- not "accident" -- when referring to traffic crashes. That's because, in practice, the SFPD's top brass and press officers use "accident" as their term of choice, while "collision" is used only occasionally.

A man riding a bike was killed by a Muni bus driver this morning at the intersection of Bryant, Division and 11th Streets on the southwest end of SoMa, according to media reports.

Last week, the Menlo Park City Council voted to extend its red light photo enforcement program for an additional five years and add a fifth red light camera at the intersection of Bayfront Expressway and Chilco Street, where 20 collisions have resulted in 14 injuries and one fatality since 2008. A temporary test camera installed at the intersection on March 11 recorded 217 red light violations by drivers in only 12 hours.

A new online platform called CommunityCam provides a crowdsourced map of surveillance cameras on the streets that could help investigators and the public find video footage that may prove useful after a traffic crash.

The woman killed on her bike by a truck driver at Sixth and Folsom Streets yesterday morning has been identified as 24-year-old Amelie Le Moullac, SF Weekly reported this morning. Le Moullac was run over by a truck driver making a right turn from Folsom on to Sixth at about 7:07 a.m., and although SFPD says it's still investigating the crash, officers have already said they have no plans to submit case to the district attorney to investigate the case for potential charges, according to KTVU.

An unidentified 24-year-old woman was killed while bicycling on Folsom at Sixth Street this morning when she was hit by a big rig truck driver, according to SFPD and media reports.

On an average day in San Francisco, three people are injured by drivers. But only a small portion of these crashes are reported in the media. Of those that do get ink, most reports are just a blurb of very basic information -- whether the person suffered "life-threatening" or "non-life threatening" injuries, whether the driver "cooperated" with police. Rarely are stories told about the victims whose lives were left shattered in the wake of the crash.