$35 MILLION NEEDED FOR PEDESTRIAN SAFETY
Recent Deaths Push Pedestrian Advocates To Demand Safer Streets

With the deaths this week of 27 year-old Ashlyn dyer and 89 year-old Chak Kai Lau, pedestrian advocates at Walk San Francisco are left questioning the City's commitment to preventing future pedestrian injuries and deaths in the City. They want San Francisco to spend $25 million of its current-year budget surplus on pedestrian safety, in addition to allocating $10 million for pedestrian safety to the 2006-07 MTA budget.

“The Mayor has said that pedestrian safety is important to him, but the current MTA budget does not reflect that commitment”, said Emily Drennen, Executive Director of Walk San Francisco and Finance Committee member of the MTA Citizen's Advisory Committee.

“While we are happy to hear that the Mayor has worked with the GGNRA to offer a $20,000 reward for information about the collision that killed Ashlyn Dyer, we wonder why he hasn't offered any kind of reward for the three other people killed by unsolved hit-and-runs in San Francisco in 2006.

Beside the Dyer case, three other unsolved hit-and-run deaths have occurred so far this year, including an unidentified male pedestrian killed in SoMa on February 18th, and 26 year-old bicyclist Sarah Ellen Tucker killed in the Tenderloin on January 13th.

Several other hit-and-run cases from previous years remain unsolved, including the serious injury of pedestrian Francesa Simone on October 3rd, 2005; the death of 26 year-old pedestrian Tu-Chuong Tran on August 25th, 2004; and the death of SFSU student Srijaya Dalton on Memorial Day 2003.