Introduction
The safety performance of autonomous vehicles (AVs) is fundamental to protecting all road users, but public perception of their safety is equally important, as it shapes trust, acceptance, and willingness to share the road with this technology. The city of San Francisco provides a unique environment to study safety perceptions of AVs for different road users given that they have operated on city streets for years, allowing residents to experience substantial amounts of interactions with this technology. The UC Berkeley Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (SafeTREC) has designed and compiled a survey conducted by Ewald & Wasserman from May to June 2025 to better understand the perception of AVs in San Francisco across various user groups including drivers, passengers, pedestrians, and bicyclists. Because the study focused on people with firsthand experience, respondents who had not interacted with an AV at least once were excluded, so the results cannot be used to estimate how many San Franciscans encounter AVs in general.