Despite California’s latest data-driven road safety initiatives to reduce crosswalk accidents, pedestrian fatalities have increased by 19% since 2016. This article examines how California’s Vision Zero framework, specifically AB 413’s effect on reallocating responsibility among drivers, municipalities, and pedestrians, shifts liability standards, evidentiary structures, and municipal exposure and how evidence-based regulations are increasingly driving the personal injury landscape under the umbrella of safety policy.
Inconsistent Legal Interpretation, Implementation, and Enforcement of AB 413 Across California Jurisdictions
Vision Zero (VZ) is a local and national road safety strategy to combat rising pedestrian fatalities through data-driven prevention and collective responsibility. Individual cities, like New York City, first adopted initiatives to improve road safety in 2014. Two years later, the federal Department of Transportation’s Road to Zero initiative announced its vision to reduce traffic accidents to zero by 2050.
The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) reports that parking restrictions near intersections, including crosswalks, reduce pedestrian-involved accidents by a third. To reduce pedestrian accident risk by improving visibility, California implemented AB 413—commonly referred to as the “daylighting law”—which bans vehicle parking within 20 feet of the approach to a crosswalk or within 15 feet of a curb extension to improve pedestrian visibility.
The law became effective in 2025, but municipalities are taking differing approaches to enforcement. Some, like San Francisco, gave a grace period of warnings before actual citations. Other cities cited parked cars along marked curbs or crosswalks only.
Additionally, each city approaches implementation differently. For example, the city of Petaluma marks parking red zones throughout the city, while San Francisco removes parking spaces altogether.
Opponents of the law cite the added costs of city adaptations for compliance. However, another cost may be confusion and indiscriminate enforcement when drivers moving from city to city must determine how far to park from a crosswalk. Thus, enforcement issues arise as drivers contest citations.
Impact of the ‘Daylighting’ Law on Negligence Per Se and Burden of Proof in Injury Litigation
Daylighting law violations may trigger negligence per se. The driver whose illegally parked car contributed to a pedestrian fatality will likely be adjudicated negligent. Since the daylighting law targets the specific conditions of the accident, the statutory violation may establish causation for negligence per se—for the parked vehicle owner and perhaps the city.
However, other contributory factors triggering comparative negligence or exclusive liability may rebut the negligence presumption. A pedestrian who runs incautiously into a crosswalk is likely responsible for an accident if the pedestrian’s and driver’s views play little to no part in causing the accident.
The city may also be contributorily negligent in failing to warn drivers of unmarked parking restrictions near crosswalks statistically known for numerous pedestrian accidents, especially if the city marks less dangerous intersections.
Vision Zero Data and the Erosion of Design Immunity
Municipalities across California began adopting road safety policies in 2014, with San Francisco becoming the first to commit to VZ safety adoptions. Most VZ-committed cities have recently begun enacting new regulations informed by data demonstrating the statistical foreseeability of negligence and dangerous design.
In 2024, the city of Los Angeles agreed to pay Jean Yuna Horihata $9.5 million to settle a 2021 lawsuit alleging the city’s poorly-designed intersection contributed to a car accident that severely injured her. A temporary traffic light replacing one previously damaged in an accident was placed on the side of the road, hidden from a driver who ran the red light and hit the plaintiff.
Municipalities with actual knowledge of dangerous intersections may pay more multimillion-dollar awards. Government design immunity is open to challenge when there is an absence of sufficient notice of changes in road design or addressing design errors when they arise or are known.
Evidentiary Use of Traffic and Crash Data in Establishing Foreseeability and Causation
The Los Angeles Department of Transportation’s (LDOT) Vision Zero safety study uses data-driven analysis to identify systemwide strategies for reducing traffic accidents, examining factors such as engineering design, road maintenance, driver behavior, and hazardous locations across the city. Public traffic data of community demographics, enforcement history, and medical injury documentation also inform recommendations, policies, and laws.
Similar strategy plans from other cities, along with the California Highway Patrol’s Statewide Integrated Traffic Records System (SWITRS), provide ample data to quantify where fatalities and injuries occur. The availability of this data may establish foreseeability, constructive notice, and unreasonable delay in remedying safety issues. The data also provides the nexus between reasonable public entity actions and timeframes for safety remediation in governmental immunity challenges.
The state of New York, as an earlier adopter of VZ policy, has a history of implementing daylighting modifications in its cities. NYC DOT found that putting in hard obstructions, like granite blocks, planters, and bike corrals, rather than merely clearing the parking zone 20 feet before a crosswalk, significantly reduced accidents. Such data-proven solutions put other municipalities on notice of effective remedial measures that are readily available, reinforcing unreasonable inaction arguments regarding dangerous design or conditions.
California’s Government Claims Act provides immunity for public entities when roadway designs were reasonably approved in advance.1 But design immunity is not permanent. Courts recognize that a public entity may lose that immunity when changed conditions, evidenced by repeated accidents or new safety standards, have rendered the original design dangerous and placed the entity on notice, and despite notice and a reasonable opportunity to act, the entity fails to implement corrective measures.2
Importantly, immunity does not protect cities that delay correcting known hazards or fail to warn the public of concealed dangers. In the recent California Supreme Court case, Tansavatdi v. City of Rancho Palos Verdes (2023), the court ruled “that design immunity does not categorically preclude failure to warn claims that involve a discretionarily approved element of a roadway.”3 When data demonstrates a known design flaw that generates a danger—and cities have access to ample VZ and SWIRTS data—municipalities cannot rely on immunity alone if they stall corrective action. If an approved design presents a known danger, the city has a duty to warn.
Shifting Liability Standards: The Interaction of Vision Zero Policy, Driver Duties, and Pedestrian Rights
AB 413 and California comparative negligence laws promote safety as a shared governmental responsibility. Now, municipal records requests, internal engineering reports, redesign proposals, budget allocations, and public records establish baseline conditions about sight lines, signal timing, or pavement markings to gauge changed conditions, notice, and city inaction.
VZ-inspired California laws and datasets that convert accidents into foreseeable design-risk patterns transform governmental immunity arguments into knowledge-based data debates. Moreover, the liability implications for city engineers and insurers significantly impact these industries financially, as protracted litigation and reforms favoring plaintiffs may result in higher insurance costs for drivers and cities.
AB 413 demonstrates California’s pedestrian safety commitment, but its uneven implementation may subject municipalities to increased litigation. As more data-driven design mandates are enacted, courts will scrutinize not only roadway conditions but the reasonableness of delayed or inconsistent compliance. Uniform enforcement and proactive infrastructure changes may be the keys to VZ fulfilling its promise—or further converting regulatory standards into evidentiary tools that redefine municipal liability in pedestrian personal injury litigation.
1. See Gov. Code, § 830.6.
2. See Cornette v. Dept. of Transportation (2001) 26 Cal.4th 63; Constantinescu v. Conejo Valley Unified School Dist. (1993) 16 Cal.App.4th 1466.
3. Tansavatdi v. City of Rancho Palos Verdes 14 Cal. 5th 639, 527 P.3d 873, 307 Cal. Rptr. 3d 346 (2023).