Traffic tickets are up 50% in San Francisco. These are the most common violations

San Francisco Chronicle​

5 days ago

The number of traffic tickets issued by San Francisco police continued climbing upward in the first four months of 2025, according to police data — though SFPD still issues only a fraction of the tickets they did before 2020.
Compared to the same period last year, tickets were up nearly 50% in the first four months of 2025, a Chronicle analysis found, building on increases in early 2024.
Just under half of the violations this year were in the 'Focus on Five' category, which includes the infractions most likely to cause a collision: speeding, running red lights and stop signs, failing to yield while turning and failing to yield to pedestrians in the crosswalk.
Despite the increase, traffic tickets are still a long way from what they were in years past. Traffic enforcement plummeted with the onset of the pandemic shutdowns in 2020 and stayed low the next three years — hitting a low of less than 200 tickets in June of 2022.
By contrast, police issued more than 3,000 tickets in June of 2019. In June of 2015, they issued more than 10,000.

The stunning and sustained drop prompted outcry from safety advocates and citizens worried that police had begun to ignore a key responsibility, especially as the city struggled to meet its Vision Zero goal of eliminating traffic deaths on its streets.
Concerned about the enforcement decline and increasing street fatalities, Supervisor Rafael Mandelman called for police to increase enforcement once more, holding four hearings on the issue between October 2022 and December 2024.
In those hearings, police pointed to a number of interconnected reasons behind the drop, including a lack of staff in the traffic division and a 2015 state law that requires officers to carefully document whom they stop to guard against racial profiling, which makes each stop take longer.
But police traffic commander Nicole Jones acknowledged in a hearing in December that these changes could not fully explain the precipitous decline. She noted that the pandemic had shifted the department's priorities away from traffic enforcement.
While traffic citations had been increasing in the first half of 2024, they dipped again in the second half. Jones said in the hearing that she was hopeful that a bevy of new strategies rolled out over the last year would help. Since then, the numbers have fluctuated monthly but trended back up.

Those new strategies include targeted enforcement in problem areas, including having high-visibility officers at intersections to deter bad behavior, training officers not assigned to the traffic unit to use lidar for speed detection and flooding resources to certain areas at different times.
Evan Sernoffsky, a spokesperson for the department, said that such strategies enable the department to 'maximize' its resources, even amid a yearslong staffing shortage. He said that traffic safety was a 'top priority' for the department.
'We are taking a very rigorous and data-driven approach to have the maximum impact,' Sernoffsky said. 'At the end of the day, we just want to make sure that our streets are safe for everybody.'
Asked whether it was possible for citations to reach pre-pandemic levels, Sernoffsky said that the department's goal is to continue increasing enforcement through citations as well as by having officers visible on the street and issuing warnings for deterrence.

In the December hearing, Jones noted another factor that would help bolster street safety, and one not captured in police data: automated enforcement.
The city's 19 red light cameras already issue thousands of tickets a year, and its 33 new speed cameras will also begin issuing citations as early as August. The cameras have already begun issuing warnings, and, in April, logged almost 32,000 speeders