Unhoused Traffic Fatalities in San José

Before and during the pandemic the San José Vision Zero program noticed an increase in unhoused people dying as pedestrians in traffic fatalities. The San José Vision Zero program in the City's Department of Transportation relies heavily on data analysis to work to reduce traffic fatalities and severe injuries. This data analysis, conducted in Spring 2023, is a collaboration between San José Department of Transportation's Vision Zero program and the San José Information Technology Department's Data Equity Fellow program. It represents the first step toward a better understanding of these traffic fatalities. This analysis forms a foundational knowledge that San José Vision Zero will use to design and pilot road safety improvements customized to this emerging kind of vulnerable road user.

This study evaluates the 51 traffic fatalities in the last 5 data years (2018-2022) in San José in which an unhoused person has been a victim, primarily using autopsy data from the Santa Clara County Medical Examiner Coroner. The Medical Examiner Coroner has a  data dashboard  showing public data since 2018.

The Santa Clara County Medical Examiner Coroner's 2017 study, " Homeless Deaths in Santa Clara County, CA: A Retrospective Study 2011-2016 ," shows an upswing in vehicle accidents as a cause of death of unhoused people beginning in 2014. This prompted the San José Department of Transportation to reach out to the County Medical Examiner-Coroner's Office to begin data sharing in 2019. In September 2020, the Medical Examiner Coroner became a founding member of the San José Vision Zero Task Force. Until that point, most of the City's data about crashes and traffic injuries had come from the San José Police Department. SJPD uses the California Highway Patrol Form 555 to report traffic incidents, but the form does not have a box to indicate a victim is unhoused, nor a definition of how to determine whether a road user is unhoused. In contrast, the Santa Clara County Medical Examiner Coroner does have definition for determining whether a decedent was unhoused at the time of their death. 

Seeing that unhoused traffic fatalities are a rising trend in San José—unhoused traffic fatalities more than tripled from 5 in 2018 to 17 in 2021—this greater analysis began in order to learn more.

In addition to exploring general descriptive statistics about unhoused residents, the analysis also explores the hypothesis that specific roadway geometry, land use, and infrastructure setups may correlate with higher likelihood of traffic fatalities among unhoused people in the San José context.   

In contrast to more well-known Bay Area unhoused populations in densely populated city centers like Downtown San Francisco, which is known for encampments on sidewalks, some of the unhoused unsheltered communities present differently in San José. In San José there are growing encampments along creeks and rivers outside downtown, as well as along large, landscaped areas that line physically larger roadways like County Expressways and Freeways. 

Cities across the United States are becoming more aware of the alarming growth of unhoused people in their pedestrian death statistics, including  Portland ,  Colorado Springs , and  San Francisco . A San Francisco article noted "homeless people make up less than 1 percent of the city's population, yet account for 22 percent of recent traffic deaths."  Streetsblog  wrote of Las Vegas' data that "An analysis of three years of pedestrian deaths in the county surrounding Las Vegas, meanwhile, found that unhoused pedestrians were  21 times  more likely to die in crash than residents with a stable roof over their head, and 27 times more likely to be killed than a Sin City visitor."

In Spring 2022, graduate student researchers at Portland State University conducted a novel analysis of how 2021's historic traffic violence impacted the unhoused community in Portland, with a specific eye towards "conflict zones" that were suspected to be especially dangerous for unhoused people.  

Few cities have written about how to address the rise. For most municipalities it is a sensitive topic. The issue presents differently in different places, and data about it is limited. To situate the data San José does have about the issue of unhoused people in traffic fatalities, it is useful to know: how large the city's unhoused population is, how it has grown, and how deaths of unhoused people have grown in recent years.  

The County of Santa Clara's Office of Supportive Housing conducts a Point-in-Time Count every year of the County and of the City of San José. In 2022 there were 10,028 unhoused people in the County, of which 6,650 were in the City of San José. 

There has been 11% growth in the City's unhoused population (2019-2022):   As of 2022's Point-in-Time Count, there were 6,650 unhoused people in San José, an 11% increase from 2019 (Santa Clara County). Of them, 1,675 (25%) were sheltered, and 4,975 (75%) were unsheltered.  

There has been over 100% growth in deaths of the County's unhoused people (2019-2022):  In 2022, there were 356 deaths of unhoused people compared to 172 in 2019 (Santa Clara County). These years include the pandemic.  

This project seeks to provide a better understanding of unhoused traffic fatalities in San José.

This project uses data from the Santa Clara County Medical Examiner-Coroner's Office, the San José Police Department, and the San José Open Data Portal. 

This data analysis is a first step toward building a program that will pilot new kinds of pedestrian safety improvements and add unhoused pedestrians to known types of Vulnerable Road Users (alongside more well-known types like school aged children, older adults, and people with mobility impairments).

The next steps following this analysis for the San José Vision Zero program are:

1. Do in-person engagement with unhoused people and find out if the findings in this analysis match unhoused peoples' lived experience.
2. Work with DOT engineers to design and test pedestrian safety improvements in top unhoused traffic fatality locations.