SAN DIEGO, CA, UNITED STATES, July 28, 2026 / - The City of San Diego set a public goal in 2015 to eliminate traffic deaths by 2025 under its Vision Zero initiative. That deadline has now passed, and public data tells a difficult story: traffic fatalities have climbed rather than fallen, and pedestrians and cyclists are bearing much of the increase.
According to figures compiled from the California Office of Traffic Safety, UC Berkeley’s Transportation Injury Mapping System, and the City of San Diego’s open data, San Diego County records well over 12,000 reported traffic crashes in a typical year. Pedestrian and cyclist deaths, which sat near 25 a year a decade ago, have hovered closer to 35 in recent years. San Diego County continues to rank among the worst in California for motorcycle injuries and deaths.
For Ronald Laba, a personal injury attorney who has practiced in San Diego’s North County since 1984 and rides a motorcycle himself, the numbers are not abstract.
“The data has been pointing the same direction for years, and people in Vista and Oceanside feel it every day on the 78 and the 5,” Laba said. “When a city commits to zero deaths and the deaths go up instead, that’s not a headline. That’s a warning to every driver, rider, and pedestrian in the county.”
The public data points to concentrated risk rather than random misfortune. Speeding is tied to roughly a third of California crashes. Unsafe lane changes drive a large share of freeway collisions on corridors like Interstate 8. Motorcyclists, who make up a small fraction of registered vehicles, account for a far larger share of traffic deaths per mile traveled.
“As a rider, I pay attention to the left-turn crash, the driver who says he never saw the motorcycle,” Laba said. “Those cases are almost always about someone failing to yield, and they’re almost always preventable. The same is true for the pedestrian hit in a crosswalk downtown. Behind every one of these numbers is a family that didn’t see it coming.”
Laba said drivers heading into the higher-traffic summer months can lower their risk with a few habits grounded in the crash data: slowing down, since speed shows up in roughly a third of collisions; checking twice for motorcycles and cyclists before turning or changing lanes; and treating the evening commute and weekend nights, when impaired-driving crashes spike, as the highest-risk windows.
“If you’re in a crash, get medical attention even if you feel fine, document everything, and don’t give a recorded statement to the other side’s insurance company before you understand your rights,” Laba said. “That last one costs people more than almost anything else.”
About Ronald B. Laba
Ronald B. Laba is a personal injury and motor vehicle accident attorney based in Vista, California, serving clients throughout San Diego’s North County. Admitted to the California bar in 1984, he represents people injured in car, truck, and motorcycle collisions.
