At least 20 people have now died in Sacramento car crashes in 2026
At least 20 people have died in Sacramento vehicle crashes this year — the final year before the City Council reaches its deadline for its decade-old “Vision Zero” goal.
On Monday, Trevon Hayes was riding a motorcycle on Northgate Boulevard and Bridgeford Drive, a few blocks north of West El Camino Avenue, when he was involved in a collision with another vehicle. Hayes was severely injured, and a spokesperson for the Sacramento Police Department said he died at the hospital. He was 31.
“I’m pissed. This is terrible,” said Isaac Gonzalez, the founder of Slow Down Sacramento and the chair of the Active Transportation Commission. The fact that the city has seen 20 traffic deaths before June, he said, was incredibly disheartening.
“Proven practices” have greatly reduced or even eliminated traffic deaths in other cities, he said. But in Sacramento, “people are dying needlessly.”
Since Jan. 1, crashes on city streets have killed Reema Ram, 37; Maria Aurora Victoria Titman, 29; Christian David Garcia Flores, 31; Eunice La Vonne Queener, 67; Paris Lamar Johnson, 34; Ronald Howard, 68; Kalia Giselle Cabello Fernandez, 22; Josefina D. Guzman, 45; Dwayne Andrew Henderson, 44; Domonik Frederick Gross, 33; Habiba Safi, 33; Miguel Ramirez Padilla, 23; William Douglas Wradge, 27; Rule Allah Yahya Smith, 32; David Mordecai Meyer, 38; Forrest Murray Coss, 70; Lue Lawrence Powell, 53; Ariana Yaretzi Ayala Muñoz, 19; Hayes; and one man whose name has not yet been released by the Sacramento County Coroner’s Office.
In 2017, the City Council made a Vision Zero pledge to eliminate all traffic fatalities and serious injuries by 2027 – an acknowledgment vast majority of traffic deaths and serious injuries are preventable with changes to infrastructure and policy. New York City made the same pledge, and while it has not yet reached the goal of ending new deaths, the city has reduced the number of people dying by 31%; Hoboken, New Jersey, a much smaller municipality, has fully eliminated deaths.
In Sacramento, however, the annual number of traffic deaths in Sacramento has increased since 2017.
Little money to stop deaths in Sacramento
“This is an urgent need in our community because look at what’s happening on our streets,” said Councilmember Caity Maple said.
But, she added, with the city facing another budget deficit this year, she does not see a path to increase the funding for street safety measures; she added that she and her colleagues had already debated whether to cut money for youth violence prevention and other critical programs.
Maple said she expects a proposal to declare a state of emergency over road deaths — which she first brought before the council in 2024 — will be revived in the coming months. That declaration, however, did not come with money attached.
Gonzalez said that for the last three years, the Active Transportation Commission has made funding recommendations early enough for the City Council to consider including those recommendations in the budget cycle. Last March, the City Council approved a $4.6 million “quick-build” road safety team to fast-track lower-cost projects, which addressed some of the advisory body’s concerns.
Otherwise, though, “none of it’s ever been funded,” Gonzalez said.
“I know it’s a tough budget year,” he said, referencing Sacramento’s $66 million projected deficit. “But we are never gonna see a change to this trend until we make investments to address this systemic issue.”
The city’s Active Transportation Commission submitted eight proposals that would cost about $8.2 million in the coming fiscal year. Gonzalez said he was frustrated that the council put the report on the consent calendar, meaning that elected representatives did not have to explain to the public why they weren’t going to fund the commission’s proposals this year.
Some residents have attempted to take the funding issue into their own hands. A half-cent local sales tax measure may appear on the November ballot, with virtually all money proposed going to transit and safer streets. Maple said she was hopeful that the measure, which has been championed in part by her husband, transportation advocate Sam Rice, “could be the very thing that we need to move forward these really important projects to save lives.”
According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, the valuation of a statistical life — the cost that one might assign to the value of preventing a death — was $14.2 million last year. With at least 32 traffic deaths in 2025, the number in Sacramento would have been more than $450 million. This year, it’s already approaching $300 million.
In 2024, local housing and transportation advocate Ben Raderstorf raised that figure at a meeting of the Law and Legislation Committee.
“We live in tough, austere times,” Raderstorf told the committee as it debated road safety priorities. “But the reality is, we are already paying for this problem.”
