The city said it would take three years to install a speed bump. So I bought my own on the Internet.

I tried to get one of the richest and most influential cities on earth to fix a street they already know to be dangerous.

A few months after my wife and I married, we moved from NYC to SF and bought our first house together. My parents came to visit, and we were celebrating in the backyard when we heard a crash and the horrific sound of grinding metal. My dad ran towards the intersection in front of the house and found a cyclist lying in the road with a bleeding head injury. The cyclist was T-boned by a driver who blew the stop sign. Dad kneeled by his side until the ambulance came.

In the decade since, we discovered that this accident wasn’t uncommon. In fact, the city labeled our block as a High Injury Corridor, a term it created as part of its Vision Zero initiative to eliminate traffic fatalities and severe injuries by the year 2024.

San Francisco’s map of High Injury Corridors. Our block is marked red.

Despite the city’s efforts to make streets safer for pedestrians, we continued to witness all kinds of collisions outside our front door, most involving a speeding driver. Hit-and-run victims and police would knock on our door to ask if we had any video footage of an earlier accident. We didn’t have a camera, but it became such a usual request that we decided to install one.

We’ve captured the routine fender bender, a fleeing felon bowling over a FedEx truck at high speed, and even a car dragging a person before eventually running over them and breaking their leg.

All of this was alarming and frustrating, but it reached a level of urgency when we had kids of our own, and we needed to start using the crosswalk to make our way to school.

I did some research and discovered the city’s Residential Traffic Calming Program. Basically, it allows an industrious neighbor like me to gather signatures and apply to have a calming measure—a speed bump or something else like it—installed on their block.

I completed all of the paperwork and submitted the application in April 2021. I assumed we were a shoo-in. Not only had our street already been singled out by the city’s own research, but our block also hosts an elementary school, a preschool, a community center, and a Boys & Girls Club. Yet 13 months went by, and I didn’t hear anything. So I started making a fuss on Twitter, and I wrote the SFMTA again, and I finally got a response:

City official explains that it would take two years just to process my application.

In summary, they budgeted 24 months just to process applications. If the paperwork takes two years, who knows how much longer it would take them to install anything? To put this in context, this program was intended as a Quick Build solution to help meet the Vision Zero goal (and at that point they were only two years from the deadline, and traffic deaths had actually increased).

Despite setting a goal to end pedestrian traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2024, the numbers have continued to rise.

This was frustrating news. San Francisco is one of the world’s richest and most influential cities. Plus, its budget per capita is enormous: over $17,000 per resident—more than twice that of New York or Los Angeles. People talk about California’s GDP being fourth or fifth globally, and a big chunk of that is generated in the Bay Area. The Bay Area’s GDP is equivalent to Netherlands, just shy of Australia, South Korea, and Mexico. And we can’t rapidly build a speed bump? On a street we already know is dangerous? When we’ve made a commitment to end pedestrian fatalities in just two more years?

Surprising for a city that attracts so many builders and innovators.

So I did what every dad who lives on a dangerous crosswalk would do. I bought a speed bump on Amazon for $98. It was delivered the next day, and I installed it.

Yes, you can Amazon Prime a 6-ft speed bump.

I wanted to make a point. So I laid this thing out on the road and sat there for an hour recording car after car taking notice and slowing down.

Look, this isn’t ideal. I don’t want neighbors to have to band together and install their own bumps and chance the liability. I prefer that the city sincerely pursue its own goal of zero pedestrian deaths by enforcing existing traffic laws and improving roadway engineering. At a minimum, permit neighbors to install bumps safely and legally at their own expense.

There must be a better solution, something in-between an Amazon Prime Bump and a Bureaucratic Bump. People are getting hurt while we’re waiting around for a solution.

Unfortunately that’s what this story is really about: waiting. Waiting for the obvious. Waiting for the already permitted and approved.

So I couldn’t keep my bump out there; it was just an experiment, and without proper signage and markings, it could lead to accidents. But I did get the SFMTA’s attention; they let me know a month later that my application was approved. That was 35 months ago, and we still don’t have an official bump.

Since then the Vision Zero deadline came and went, pedestrian fatalities and injuries have continued to rise. Fatalities were actually 40% higher in 2024 than in 2014, the year they set the goal.

It’s been four years since I submitted my application and three since it was accepted. Every year on the anniversary of my application’s approval, I write to ask for an update. Last year I received a generic response that the address I had been corresponding with had been deactivated.

Fingers crossed that this year will be the year. Otherwise I will have to proceed to Phase 2 and this is my moodboard: