The advocacy and research group Transportation Alternatives this week released a report tallying city data on traffic fatalities in NYC. The numbers are not encouraging; pedestrian fatalities as a whole climbed from 100 in 2023 to 121 last year, with child fatalities in particular hitting 16, tied for highest since data has been kept. The analysis found that people killed or seriously injured were on bikes — rising to 444 such incidents by 2023 — and that fatalities were increasing in low-income neighborhoods.
That’s all despite the fact that wider adoption of speed cameras has cut speeding violations, and programs like congestion pricing have taken some cars off the street. While it’s a bit too early to really say anything conclusive about the toll’s impact on street safety specifically, some preliminary data and observations point to a diminished concentration of cars in the congestion zone. In the month or so that it’s been active, the authorities reported a 51% drop in injuries from traffic crashes in the zone compared to the same period last year, which seems very promising (albeit a bit premature to call it a victory).
So why are deaths climbing? One of the most striking data points here is not around deaths but recorded speeding violations, with Transportation Alternatives noting that 132 vehicles received 100 or more speed camera tickets in 2024, including the top violator, which was the subject of an eye-watering 562 speeding violations over the course of the year, or roughly one every 16 hours. I am kind of at a loss as to how this is even physically possible, at least without significant effort like making sure to floor it past a speed camera on something like a schedule.
I think this is a perfect entry point to what a lot of street safety advocates see as the underlying political and cultural issue, which is at some level only tangentially about cars themselves. There are certainly advocates who would like to see something close to a car-free city, but for myriad reasons that’s infeasible — there are people who need cars due to mobility concerns, people who live in relative transit deserts around the city, and people who need vehicles for work, not to mention our reliance on delivery and the need for service vehicles like ambulances.
What most people really have a problem with is what seems like an entirely separate accountability structure for both policymaking around safe streets and for individual drivers. If assaults or other index crimes tick up a little, or even if there are particularly egregious individual cases, we often don’t hear the end of it in local news and among local officials, whereas traffic deaths and statistics get markedly less attention despite being, writ large, something we much better understand how to prevent.
At the incident level, it’s hard for me to understand how someone can rack up 50 speeding violations, let alone 100, let alone 562, while retaining the ability to operate a multi-ton machine that has the capability, at any time, to kill and maim New Yorkers. I was trying to think of a parallel and it’s hard to come up with one, but imagine someone who accidentally drops something from their fourth-floor walk-up window. I think we could all agree that it’s an understandable error for someone to bump a lighter off their fire escape once or twice, but if someone was up there idly chucking objects we’d probably understand both that they were eventually going to hurt or kill someone and that they probably should be prevented from doing so.
There actually was a specific initiative intended to get provably dangerous vehicles off the streets, called the Dangerous Vehicle Abatement Program. The idea as first proposed by then-councilmember Brad Lander — now the city comptroller and one of the credible candidates challenging Eric Adams in the mayoral Democratic primary this year — would have allowed the city to impound vehicles that had been caught running red lights or speeding five or more times in the span of a year. The de Blasio administration at the time negotiated this down to a completely defanged version of potentially requiring drivers who had received 15 speed tickets or five red-light tickets to receive a 90-minute safety course; only if they failed to do so or reoffended could the city move to take their vehicles.
Even this frankly laughable set of consequences for plainly hazardous misconduct was inconsistently enforced, with only about half of the over 1,600 drivers mailed notices over the lifespan of the program ever taking the course, and the city seizing a whopping 12 vehicles altogether. I say the lifespan of the program because it sunsetted almost two years ago with no replacement, a badly watered down version of a good idea that was never executed to its maximum extent and then expired. All this to say, I think the problem here is partly one of circumstance — cars are getting larger, heavier, and deadlier — but also one of behavior and the failure to reckon with that behavior, which seems to have accelerated along with a general coarsening of social bonds post-pandemic.
Things like the congestion zone and an expansion of speeding cameras — which, despite showing clear results in reducing speeding and associated dangers, are also set to sunset by July 1 unless Albany acts — are good and tangible, but their benefits are blunted by the drivers that just don’t seem to care and are allowed to operate with some level of impunity until they seriously hurt or kill someone.
Longtime readers will be well aware that I am far from a punitive enforcement person, and in fact I am most often on the side of exploring options to reflexive punishment, but constantly running lights or blowing 10 miles past the speed limit is a much simpler situation than the complexity of something like, say, street crime. I don’t really think anyone is doing 35 in a 20 zone because they have unmet social needs or have been failed by our mental health system; this is a choice not to care about the externalities of fundamentally antisocial behavior, and I think that choice should probably carry consequences.
Transportation Alternatives does not mention the abatement program in their report, but does include several other policy proposals, including a broader rollout of the 20 mph speed limits allowed by Sammy’s Law last year and mandated so-called intelligent speed assistance for some offenders, which could either alert drivers when they’re going over the speed limit or physically limit how fast a car can go by using GPS to enforce local limits. Unless we want these numbers to keep climbing, it’s probably sensible to not let this continue to be a behavior without much in the way of concrete repercussions.
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