This morning San Francisco streets played host to another driver-related pedestrian death. At Van Ness and Pacific around 1 a.m., a man driving a a silver 2009 Toyota allegedly struck and killed an unidentified man crossing the street.

The driver then tried to flee the scene by foot. According to the Chron, "Officers saw a man who witnesses identified as the driver walking away west on Pacific and arrested him on suspicion of vehicular manslaughter and felony hit and run, police said. His name has not been released."

Pedestrian death numbers have jumped over the last few years. As the Chron goes on to point out, "21 pedestrians were killed, with six in December alone, making it the deadliest year since 2007." Why is this happening? According to former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, it's due to the city's lack of freeways.

We have only ourselves to blame for San Francisco’s increasingly unsafe streets. We tore down the Central and Embarcadero freeways and in the process dumped thousands of additional cars onto the already crowded streets, many driving at nearly the same speed they did on the freeways. We encouraged more people to ride bicycles, then all but exempted them from following traffic rules. We brought thousands of pedestrians into downtown, then allowed them to jaywalk at will, often with their heads buried in their latest mobile devices. We tell the cops to write more tickets, then when they do, some supervisor accuses them of racial profiling or picking on the poor. And now, in the name of tech, we’re allowing hundreds of ride-share gypsy cabs onto the streets without commercial driver’s licenses.

Also, because this should be pointed out, Brown has taken up getting into cabs and (dangerously) chasing after cyclists. (Read all about it.)

Streetsblog, however, notes that reckless driving is also to blame. In fact, it takes most of the blame.

Ten years after Brown left office, even the SFPD is re-shaping its policies around what its data shows — that the vast majority of pedestrian injuries are caused by reckless driving. Not that we should expect data to be relevant to a man who seems to base his transportation and street safety views on no data or empirical evidence whatsoever.