I agree with Charles that Aborn got it and after fighting the idea, finally said "I will treat crashes like crime scenes".

This was a complete eye opener for them.

This was a huge day for traffic justice.

gecko -- Your "Ghost Walker" idea was done by Right Of Way roughly a decade ago. In conjunction with our Killed By Automobile book, which Brad kindly linked to in his post, we created some 250 street memorials, the vast majority to dead pedestrians, in every borough but Staten Island. It would be great for someone to do more.

greensT -- I'm surprised you saw little difference between candidates Vance and Aborn. I was very favorably impressed by the latter.

JK -- I second your congratulations to T.A. for conceiving and convening this forum. I regard it as a major step toward creating a traffic justice movement.

Thank you for elucidating the matter. I wonder if once upon a time drunk driving ever fell under the "rule of two" umberella -- ie, whether drunk driving alone was not prosecutable, but a drunk driver simultaneously had to be speeding or running a red light.

I hope that judges start to chip away at this precedent. But if the precedent does stay, couldn't law enforcement officials still exercise more fact-finding discretion in determining whether or not to press charges under the rule of two? The "black box" (which I had no idea exists in cars) was mentioned in the article above. Also, couldn't it be a matter of procedure in automobile incidents to determine whether or not the driver was using a cell phone at the time of the collision and thus violating the law?

Hope this is helpful.

"...if one who was driving an automobile should become so interested in the landscape that he forgot to look as he turned a corner, he would be guilty of negligence. Negligence often, therefore, involves inadvertence or inattention to the duty to use due care."

Here is a link to the passage: http://tinyurl.com/p3rmzd

Should also add that at the end of the event, TA's Peter Goldwasser politely reminded the candidates that they were now on the record on ped-cyclist safety, and that their remarks won't be forgotten.

David_K: the impression I got from the debate's moderator was that the "rule of two" is something that has become established by courts over the years, and recently even more established in a particular (shitty) appeals decision known as "Cabrera." Sure enough, a Google search took me right back to Streetsblog, and its interview with Maureen McCormick:

"as recently as May 2008, New York’s highest court held that a 17-year-old driver who violated his junior license by driving with four unrelated passengers, without seatbelts, and who also was speeding at 70-72 mph through a curve with a posted caution speed of 40 mph, and who lost control sending the car over an embankment and killing three of his passengers, could not be held criminally liable (People v. Cabrera, 10 NY3d 370 [2008]). This decision alone has resulted in numerous defense motions to have cases dismissed claiming that "speed alone" or any traffic infraction "alone" is not sufficient to sustain criminal negligence. Our position is that this is nonsense. A person driving 100 mph in front of the court on Centre Street in Manhattan at lunch time when the streets are flooded with pedestrians MUST be chargeable with a crime. Conversely, a person driving the same speed at 3 a.m. by the Gowanus warehouses in Brooklyn, while no other person was in the area, would be subject to much lesser violations."

http://www.streetsblog.org/2009/03/31/maureen-mccormick-on-the-cutting-edge-of-traffic-justice/

"Throughout my tenure as a prosecutor, I have heard police officers, judges, prosecutors and the news media refer to a "rule of two." It is believed that if a defendant commits two simultaneous traffic violations in the course of a collision, that automatically allows for a criminal charge because one violation would be considered "ordinary" or civil negligence."

THAT attitude needs to be lobotomized from the criminal justice system's brain. It's moronic, and it has deadly real-life consequences.

Sadly, operating a motor vehicle has become such an ordinary everyday activity that the grave responsibility of driving on the public way is forgotten.

Hopefully, leading toward significant political will and action creating safe streets.

descend on future auto accidents like vultures

No, they will be strictly required to descend like petals from a ripening cherry tree in May.

Do they take my whole car, too? Impound it for a few days while scheduling the union tech to plug into my OBD-II? Or will Bloomberg ensure that dudes with handhelds and jackets reading CRASHSTAT descend on future auto accidents like vultures?

All in all, it does sound like an improvement.

His name was Ernesto Torres, and he had 3 kids, including a new baby girl. I still miss him.