Did they _really_ need to call out that the man (victim) was homeless? Is that a significant identifier important to the story?
(Which is a bit sarcastic, perhaps, but people generally value the homeless less on various axis, whether they want to admit it or not, because when you hear "bad thing happened to man" you immediately want to know if that man could have been you, once you learn he was homeless the panic reaction subsides.)
I'm not saying anyone deserved to die; the homeless in SF are basically not autonomous agents anymore. Right or wrong, it shifts it in my mind from "bus driver is at fault" to "nobody is at fault" (except the city that encourages themn to them stay drugged and on the streets).
For additional context, Harrison and 7th isn't located in the best neighborhood, which is to say there are numerous tent cities in that vicinity.
checks location
~$10b unicorn Plaid's headquarters. SF is truly an enigma
This sounds like this makes it, "in some way", okay to people here. No need for investigation, it must be the dirty homeless.
It's about as true as looking at the ballot returns of any single state and then declaring all people within that state as party affiliates for the elected party -- it's not true but it's useful for painting the people involved into hateful and simplified stereotypes that do nothing but provide bigots with an easy to understand mental model, however false or imprecise it might be.
One thing that can be said for sure : If any of us were homeless traffic victims I doubt that we'd want "they're homeless" as the de-facto explanation as to why a vehicle ran us down -- it's not that easy to explain away.